PlumbingBossPro Blog — Property Managers & Commercial

Plumbing for a Rental-Home Portfolio: Twenty Houses, One Customer

Twenty single-family rentals spread across town are a different job from one apartment building with twenty units. Each house has its own water heater, its own main shut-off, its own sewer line and its own tenant. They might be thirty minutes apart. The owner or manager wants them all handled like one account. Doing that well takes a bit of setup and a lot of good notes.

One Customer, Many Driveways

Whether the portfolio belongs to an independent owner, as covered in Landlord Plumbing Accounts: Turning One Rental Owner Into Steady Work, or to a management company, the structure is the same. One client, twenty addresses.

In PlumbingBossPro, the client holds the contact information, billing method and tags. Each address holds what is specific to that house: equipment, access notes and job history. When the tenant at 2208 Cedar calls about a backed-up tub, the office opens that address and sees the last three calls there, the age of the water heater and the lockbox code, all without scrolling past the other nineteen houses.

Getting Twenty Houses Into the System

Typing twenty addresses by hand is an hour of work and a chance to misspell half of them. If the owner has a spreadsheet, CSV import brings the list in under one client and places every address on the map automatically. The steps are in Importing a Property Manager's Address List Into Your Plumbing Software.

Once they are on the map, the spread of the portfolio is obvious. You can see which houses cluster near your shop and which sit on the far edge of your area, which matters when you start scheduling recurring work.

Learn Each House Once

The value of a rental portfolio grows with what you know about it. The first time a tech is in each house, it is worth five extra minutes to record:

• The water heater: tank or tankless, gas or electric, brand, model, serial, size and the year on the label.
• Where the main water shut-off is, and whether it actually turns.
• Where the sewer cleanout is, if there is one you can reach.
• Any sump pump, softener, disposal or filtration system.
• How to get in: lockbox, key from the office, tenant only.

All of that is saved on the address in PlumbingBossPro and shown on the job card next time. The From House picker fills a new job from the saved equipment, and changes made on a job flow back to the house. After a few months, any tech can walk into any rental knowing what to expect.

Turning Calls Into a Schedule

Rental portfolios generate two kinds of work. Reactive calls — clogs, leaks, running toilets — come whenever tenants have problems. Planned work — water heater flushes, inspections, drain maintenance on the house with the old cast-iron line — can be scheduled.

Recurring visits in PlumbingBossPro are set by minimum days between visits. Put a yearly flush on each house at 365 days, and the Waiting List shows them coming due on a live map. Pins are colored not due yet, due now, and overdue past a 7-day grace. Because the houses are spread out, the office can wait until several in one part of town are due and send a van through them in one morning.

Billing a Portfolio

Owners of rental portfolios almost always want costs split by property. Some track each house as its own little business. Some have different investors behind different houses.

With the account set to Monthly, every job across all twenty houses goes on one statement, and each line is labeled with its address. The owner gets one bill and can still see exactly what each house cost that month. If they would rather pay as they go, card on file works too, with an invoice per job charged at completion.

Keeping the Owner Informed Without the Phone Tag

Portfolio owners do not want to drive to a rental to see a repair. Before-and-after photos from the tech's phone stay with each job. Two-way texting from the office lets you send the owner a quick update and a photo, and their reply comes back to the same thread.

For anything beyond a routine fix, send an estimate. The owner approves it online, and the approved estimate becomes the job. No one is surprised by the invoice.

Twenty houses for one owner can be the steadiest work a small plumbing company has, as long as each house is known and each bill is clear. For more on running commercial and rental accounts, visit the PlumbingBossPro commercial plumbing software page.