Property Management Brainstorm

On this week's FMF, Bob discusses the concept of lagging indicators and considers if there might be a maintenance surge coming for those of us managing rental properties. As a quick definition, a lagging indicator is a data point that tells you what has already happened.  Most of us in managing our rental properties focus on lagging indicators in the form of financial statements to track rent collected, revenue, bank balance, and profitability.  Bob explains that a lagging indicator he has been watching lately is the number of worker orders (maintenance requests) being received monthly. His company tracks this, along with other data points, on a monthly report that is produced by our accounting department. Maintenance request volume has been trending down starting in February and continuing down by 20-30% in March, April, and May. This is an interesting anomaly but it is logical to assume that the service issues aren’t disappearing… they are waiting to be submitted. He encourages listeners to be prepared