Fix First, Report Later: Why Property Managers Need to Stop Asking for Permission
Begging for repair approvals is killing your business, your tenant experience, and your sanity. It’s time to manage like a pro—not a personal assistant.
Why do so many property managers feel miserable at work? Because of repairs. Let’s just be honest. That’s it. And it’s not because the repairs themselves are so hard to manage. It’s just because dealing with owner clients regarding repairs is slowly killing them. But it doesn’t have to be this way. You’re doing this to yourself, and you can change it. Chasing owners down for repair approvals is outdated, inefficient, and damaging both your business and the landlord’s returns. So let’s talk about the alternative.
Being a Real Fiduciary
Pretty much every property manager understands that we have a fiduciary obligation to our clients, but very few of those PMs can actually define what that is supposed to mean. So let’s ask ChatGPT:
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“Being a fiduciary means being legally and ethically obligated to act in the best interests of another party, placing their needs above your own…Fiduciary relationships are built on trust and exist in many fields…where one person or entity holds assets or makes decisions on behalf of another.” (bold emphasis added)
I added that bold emphasis to the most important part of this definition. As a fiduciary, your job isn’t to run back to the principal and ask for permission every time a decision needs to be made. It is literally your job to make the decision for them. You’re just supposed to make the decision that is in the best interest of the principal rather than the decision that is in your own best interests.
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Let’s look at some other examples of fiduciaries and how they do their jobs:
Mutual Fund Manager - Do you have a 401k or an IRA? If so, do any of the fund managers who manage the funds you own reach out to you to ask your permission before buying or selling any holdings in the fund? Of course not. They do their damned job and you don’t second-guess it.
Lawyers - Does your lawyer come to you and ask you what you want written in the legal brief, or what you want included in the opening or closing statements? Of course not, because you don’t know a damned thing about being a lawyer. They act on your behalf.
Conservators - This got a lot of attention in recent years with the Britney Spears case. Conservators are considered fiduciaries. And it’s important to note, someone in a conservatorship is literally there because a court has decided that they aren’t capable of making their own decisions. The fiduciary makes those decisions for them. As all fiduciaries are supposed to do.
Doctors - Your doctor doesn’t ask you what medicine you want to take. Not only would that be a terrible medical practice, but it would literally be illegal. Doctors aren’t on-demand pill dispensers, they’re experts who are expected to make the best decisions on your behalf. They decide the treatment plan, you don’t.
Now, some of you are probably screaming “but I don’t have to listen to my doctor!” And yes, that’s true. You can always go to a different doctor, or not go to one at all. But if you want to use THAT doctor, you’re going to do what he says you need to do. Because no self-respecting doctor is going to let a patient tell him how to practice medicine. Same with attorneys, fund managers, etc.
We are in the same position. We are the experts. The client is not. Our job is to make the best decisions on their behalf. It’s time to start acting like a real fiduciary and not like a personal assistant.
Asking Permission Hurts the Client
So we’ve established that our job is to do what is in the client’s best interests. What does that mean when it comes to repairs?
Regardless of what state that you’re in, your state has something resembling a “warranty of habitability and repair,” because every state does (Arkansas was the final holdout and caved a couple of years ago). It is literally illegal, in every state in the union, for a landlord not to get repairs done. This isn’t optional. Ever. If something breaks, you’re required to fix it. Asking for permission to get a repair done is like a truck driver asking his employer for permission not to speed. You don’t need to ask for permission to follow the law. It’s already required.
By getting the repairs done, you are doing what is in the best interests of the landlord, even if we only look at it from a legal compliance perspective. But let’s look beyond that. What is the number one driver of tenants not renewing their lease? We’ve talked about this before: it’s repairs. It’s not rent increases like everyone thinks it is. The polling data on this is widespread and abundantly clear. Tenants hate renting from landlords who don’t get repairs done quickly. And data from Property Meld shows that “quickly” generally means it needs to be done in a few days. Not approved in a few days. DONE in a few days. Failure to accomplish that is risking a tenant not renewing their lease, which will literally cost your client thousands of dollars in lost rent, turnover costs, re-letting costs, etc. All for something that is required by law. Friends, this is idiotic.
Property Management, Not Landlord Babysitting
Your job title tells you exactly what you should be doing: managing. Managers are responsible for making decisions, not asking other people to make decisions for them. That’s what employees do, and you are not a client’s employee. If they want an employee, they can hire one. You are a professional offering a service, and that service is management of the property.
You are not a middleman constantly needing green lights every decision. Professionals act with judgment and authority. Start to get used to viewing yourself this way. I know it takes some adjustment, especially if you came from the world of real estate sales where agency agreements are written in a way to require permission for everything, but this isn’t real estate sales. You are hired to actively manage this property with the judgment of a true professional. Act like it.
Systems & Policies, Not Sign-Offs
Instead of asking owners to sign off on every decision that you want to make, you should instead have systems and policies in place that govern how you operate. Those systems and policies should be fully transparent, so landlords know up front how you are going to make your decisions, but the decisions are still yours to make within that framework.
Set clear expectations in the PMA. It should not have any sort of dollar cap above which you can’t move forward, except for non-mandatory cosmetic repairs. If it’s a repair required by the law or the lease, you can act without permission.
Even for non-mandatory cosmetic items, your PMA should give you the authority to move forward if you don’t get a prompt response from the owner. Our PMA gives the owner 48 hours to respond. If they don’t, we make the decision that we would make if it was our own property. Yes, even for cosmetic items.
Whether to get multiple quotes should be up to you, not the owner. They are justified for large and unusual jobs, but you know as well as I do that you don’t need multiple quotes to know which vendor is going to provide the best work for the best price on 90% of jobs. Just choose that vendor and get the work done.
Do not send notifications to owners of service requests. For one thing, every service request doesn’t become a work order. Sometimes you are able to troubleshoot and avoid even sending a vendor out. There is no reason to get the landlord’s blood pressure up because of something that won’t even end up costing them anything. But for another thing, you don’t need owners getting a notification of a repair request and then blowing up your phone or email with a bunch of demands and questions. Just do your job, then notify the owner AFTER the work has been completed.
“But what if the owner gets mad?”
To be blunt, if an owner gets mad because you did what you are legally obligated to do and took good care of his property, then that is a terrible owner that you need to get rid of anyway.
But let’s look at this a little more deeply. An owner may get temporarily upset that he had to spend $7k on an HVAC system replacement, but when he’s actually going to terminate your contract is when a tenant doesn’t renew the lease and it creates a vacancy. Failure to get repairs done is what causes vacancies. Vacancies are what lead to owner churn. You are creating churn by being scared of your own shadow.
Remember, the HVAC replacement isn’t optional. You have to get it done anyway. You can either get it done right now and make the tenant happy, or you can wait and let that tenant get progressively more and more angry over the next two weeks as that cheapskate owner refuses to approve the repair and like a little lemming you send vendor after vendor out for more and more quotes. You aren’t solving an angry owner problem, you’re creating a bigger one when that tenant turns in their notice of non-renewal.
Making the Change
Some of you are already doing this. I recently saw Josh Cissell post on a Rentvine user group that this is how he does business. I learned it years ago from a now-retired PM in Texas named Steve Crossland. Robert Locke has been teaching PMs for years to be a “Big ‘A’ Agent,” which includes this sort of decision making. So this is certainly not a new concept. It just isn’t widely enough adopted throughout the industry. So here’s how you change it:
Your PMA likely already has pretty broad authority in it for this sort of thing. Take a look at the language. Most PMs don’t even realize that the existing language in their PMA gives them the power to make decisions on legally required repairs. If you’re a PMAssist Insider (a paid subscriber), then you have access to my PMA template that includes language for this. It’s worth being a paid subscriber just to get access to that, to be honest. An attorney would charge you thousands of dollars to write that contract, and you can get access to it for a mere $99/mo along with all of our other paid content.
If your existing PMA doesn’t have language for this and you need to update it, hopefully your PMA has an amendment clause that allows you to update it with notice. If so, send out notice and get that process moving. Frame it as a benefit to the owner (less hassles, happier tenants, less turnover, etc.).
Worst comes to worst and your state requires you to get new PMAs signed, just implement this as a change for new clients and start slowly getting old owners signed up on the new contract. Use this opportunity to take other ideas from our template also and get other stuff improved in your PMA.
Fix First, Report Later
In conclusion, you’re a professional, and it’s about time that you start acting like it. Professionals don’t beg clients for permission to get a $175 plumbing repair approved. If you want to be someone’s employee, then just go do that and stop pretending that you own and run a business. Property managers exist to be decision makers. You have the experience that landlords don’t have. Use it. In the long run, it will lead to happier tenants, happier clients, and a happier you.
Open to Work
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Debate Me
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