How much to you spend on your property manager?

I would like to get an idea how much we should be spending on property management. We currently have about 125 townhome units and 425 single family homes. We have a clubhouse and pool, with a small office in the clubhouse for an on-site property manager who is here daily from 9am to 4pm. I'm curious to see how much similar communities pay for property management.

TIA

We pay $110 per door for our community of around 250 - 300 doors, single family homes. This six on site drive through inspections a year and meeting attendance at six evening meetings per year. Other tasks the offsite property manager handles includes send out deliquency notice for homeowners not paying dues, homeowner communication, administrative for the Board, vendor paperwork collection (license, bonding, insurance).

As our PM is offsite, the services provided by the PM company are limited in scope and primary administrative in nature. Anything complex, site specific, etc, requires a Board member to handle.

No clubhouse or pool, thank goodness.

Property manager does all financial stuff.

Property manager advertises that they handle vendor coordination. In reality, they pass e-mails between Board and vendor and adds unnecessary bureaucracy, so I do vendor coordination myself.

That depends on what you want your property manager to do. I also live in a townhouse community, which is a little larger than yours and we pay over $100 a month (can't remember the exact amount, but I'm thinking it's north of $125 at this point). Our property manager is part of one of the largest companies in the county (won't mention names, but some of you can guess).

We get a number of services like bookkeeping, records retention, handyman services(ok, but I miss our last one that the board hired independently) and they send out the RFPs. We had to insist our property manager do this personally after one of our former presidents found out the company's maintenance department would look at the faxed RFPs and then underbid to get the work.

If you really want to compare, you're better off asking around in your area because most people here are from different cities and states and all have a different level of services and inflation. Even then you can only consider price up to a point. If you like what your property manager is doing, it may be better to hang on to him or her, because finding a new one takes more time than you may think and you'd have to prepare a transition plan to give you and both companies/managers to exchange your records, open and close accounts and so on.

If you want to save money, take a look at the contract and see if you have services you seldom use that could be dropped. Maybe some work can be subcontracted out, like hire a separate record retention/destruction company to revitalize records and destroy them securely. A good webmaster could set up your website to do a number of things, like set up online maintenance requests, exterior change requests, etc., which may save time and ultimately money.

112 small, private patio homes. Our MC handles all money collection, bill paying, delinquency notices/tracking, advice to BOD, help selecting vendors, no on site visits, attend and aid in Annual Meerting, etc. More of a glorified book keeper at $55 per year, per home.

Bill,

What you describe is a community association manager (CAM), not a "property manager." The model you've described is called portfolio management where one person handles multiple property accounts.