Real Estate For Ideas 2013 Part Two
What can be done collectively to improve our businesses, save costs or generate additional revenue?
On January 1st I posted a list of ideas that I had that some of us could consider to collaboratively work on. I intend to pursue one or two of the ideas presented and may entertain partnering with the right person or persons.
This post is the second of my more in depth notes on the ideas. I will post others over the next week or so as time permits me to clean my notes into coherent sentences. If any of the topics interest you comment either on the list or directly to me at:Tim@ApartmentsMilwaukee.com
Part Two:
More Effective Maintenance Labor/Contractors/Service Providers
As mentioned in part one, maintenance, replacements and improvements to rental housing represents nearly $100 million per year in the city of Milwaukee alone. A savings of even 1% is a lot of money
More Effective Maintenance Labor/Contractors/Service Providers
The ability to have skilled, cost effective maintenance available on demand is typically a missing element for small owners.
If all of your unit preps are done two days after move out you will have far less vacancy income loss. If you can respond quickly to emergency repairs less tenants will move.
Even larger owners such as our company can’t do this efficiently with typical staffing. Either you have too few workers the first week of the month or too many the rest of the month.
The million dollar question is ‘How do can you have an on demand workforce without the risk of uninsured “contractors” who may later be deemed employees by taxing authorities or injured and not covered by your property insurance?’
A couple of years ago Affordable Rentals rolled out Rental A Worker, where we ‘rent’ other owners our maintenance people by the hour for small or large jobs. We benefit as we can have a larger workforce to meet the up and down demands of maintenance, while being able to share them when our workload is lighter. We can also justify having highly skilled people on staff full time, such as certified heating techs.
The big advantage this offers other owners over hiring Joe off the street is our people are insured and have taxes withheld. There is a real danger and expensive otherwise. For the longer version read: Your Handyman-Cheap Contractor or $60000 Mistake?
The real vision for Rent-A-Worker is to expand it to a temp like service where there is an on demand workforce that can ramp up when there are a lot of preps etc and then can work for another temp agency on slow times. This would hold an advantage for our company as well as other owners who participate.
Such a system would have a worker rating system, whereby the owners would grade them and their opportunity to work and future pay rate would be based on those grades. So the best workers would achieve full time employment at a decent wage.
All the workers, whether they are laborers or small uninsured contractors would be treated as employees with the temp agency withholding taxes, maintaining worker’s comp etc., thereby eliminating a potential career ending risk for owners who were hiring “handymen” for cash. The guy in the Cheap Contractor or $60,000 mistake went under. I assume this was the cause
I pursued the temp angle a bit a year a half ago. We hired a college grad who was formerly a manager a temp agency that moved out of the area. Excellent resume and references. I held a lot of hope for him to do well at this, but in the end it did not work out. By that time I was distracted with the purchase of a commercial property in Hollywood FL to house my wife’s businesses. The basic software framework exits as well as some operating procedures.
I still believe an available, flexible workforce is the brass ring for our industry; seeing so much benefit for my company as well as many other owners. This may be the top new project to aggressively pursue this in 2013. The open question on this is does Obamacare make this in anyway less practical today if the number of temps exceeds 50.
If a temp “rent a worker” business becomes successful enough to get to 50 employees, start another entity (llc). Maybe start the business with two llc entities to begin with; the “management” entity manages the Client (owners who rent the workers) and one or more, separate Worker staffing entities who manage the workers and contract the workers to the Management entity. No entity would employ more then a predetermined number of employees, say 49 (or 29 whatever the bean counter suggests). There could be several (part time) employees who are employed by both the Management llc and the staffing llc(s). Let’s pursue this further….
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