Rental Property Maintenance Procedures and Processes | Las Vegas, NV

How do you accept payment for rental property maintenance?

Electronically. 95% of maintenance events will be covered by your tenant’s rent. Rarely do you have to come out of pocket. Our electronic payment system goes through an online property management software system. It’s the only method of payment we use. That system allows you to pay via credit cards or directly from your checking account. We do not accept checks in the mail. It’s hard enough chasing tenants down for money.

By the way, we don’t make you pay a reserve up front, we trust that you will pay us in a timely manner.

How much do you mark up your vendor invoices for rental property maintenance?

$0 We show you our vendor invoices. We charge a $30 admin fee to play with maintenance events.

Can I set my threshold to repairs under $400?

No. We have attempted to have “exceptions” to the rule and we fail every time. We would rather lose you now than to lose you later when we didn’t see the little note in the system for your exception. Maybe we will get clever later and figure out how to flag a property with different thresholds. For now, you have to fit into our processes. Sorry.

Do you use home warranties?

Not Recommended. Over 50% of the time, home warranties don’t cover an issue and our maintenance department spent an hour on the phone with the tenant and the warranty company trying to get status. Home warranties are best used for major ticket items like AC units, furnaces and foundation leaks. Even then, the warranty company usually figures out a way to throw the owner under the bus.

The cost benefits of using home warranties are dubious for small repairs. We simply don’t recommend them but we will not stop you from using them. Nearly all our owners drop them after the warranty expires because they suck.  If you insist on a home warranty, the process looks like this:

1. The tenant calls us.
2. We determine if this is something a home warranty would cover.
3. If it’s something the home warranty will cover, we contact you with the tenant contact information. You will be playing with the home warranty company. 

Every single time, owners eventually give up on home warranties because they realize they are a scam years later.

Property Maintenance Vendors

Vendors are only paid when they provide evidence that the job was completed and they send us an invoice. We include vendor phone numbers, photos, and invoices in case you want to roll up your sleeves and quiz them on the details. We have about 4 vendors for every task you can think of because we don’t want any one of them to have us hog tied.

Property Rehabs / Major Events

Limestone charges a $100 to $1000 admin fee to get updated photos / videos during the progress. These types of events usually include multiple trades. A $1000 admin fee would apply to a “burn out” or massive rehab. Anything major will require your approval, so you will know the costs before work is done.

Property Maintenance Approvals

If you have a maintenance issue less than $400, we just fix it and bill you. It isn’t practical to send 3 handymen out to do an estimate on a $100 problem. We use vendors that we trust to do a good job at a fair price. If one of our vendors starts charging us too much, we simply cut them off. Vendor management is a constant internal process at Limestone.

HOA Violations

We get love letters from HOAs on a daily basis. Not a problem. We first inform the tenant to fix the issue. We put the deadline in our calendar. If they don’t fix the problem, we fix it for them and then bill them. If they don’t pay us, we toss them out. 95% of these are resolved with the tenant fixing the problem. Sometimes, however, an HOA can get naughty by unfairly charging your tenant for a violation that isn’t their responsibility or wrongly accused. If the HOA violation requires us to fight it, then we charge $20 per hour to deal with a naughty HOA. These battles rarely go past $100.

Rental Property Maintenance Customer Service

Don’t forget that you can fire us at any time. We do things efficiently at a fair price. If you don’t think we are doing an excellent job, you can move along to another company at anytime. We fire more owners than owners fire us. The number one reason why we fire owners is because they don’t pay us within a reasonable time. We are able to retain inexpensive vendors because we pay them promptly before we get paid. Limestone is floating thousands of dollars because we trust our owners will pay us back in a timely manner.