100 Apartments And Me: What You Want to Avoid

Something that I sometimes leave out in talking to groups is about my experiences with larger clients. It's good to get return business - just ask anybody. But sometimes, these situations can get pretty extreme pretty fast.

So I get a call from a property manager, and he has about 100 units. That's great - I can use the work. It's a slow year, and it's about the time I'm starting to calculate second quarter estimated taxes. I'm ready to go to work.

I get in the truck and go down there - I fix a broken water heater in number 55. I put together the standard invoice, noting the unit number on the line items. I get paid.

Sixty days after that, I return to the same exact site. I fix a leak in number 57. I do the same deal with the invoice, but it doesn't get paid right away. It basically sits on the guy's desk. Following thirty days, I do regular calls and the pay arrives. While I'm cashing it, I get that first inkling that something may be very wrong. The check memo references #55.

The next month another again to do routine work on units 68 and 19. Good for me: I can remember digits easily. I've got everything on the invoice as it should be. But then I get a call from this guy, this city slicker fast talking kind of annoying personality, and why do I feel like I'm getting huckstered when he asks me to go back to my file and figure out why he has two checks for the same job at number 55?

I explain it to him. He says okay. But here's the thing - over the course of three return jobs near the end of the year, I'm out to 55 again, this time to reinstall a new washing machine.

Now, this guy is hanging around the unit when I get there. And once again, he wants me to check the backlog to see just what the story was on 55. Here's where I get a little ticked. I don't carry the paperwork with me, it's all back at the office.

The week after this I call the guy and explain it once again. But now he's getting all confused over number 19 and number 91. And this time, as I look at it, I can't quite tell if it might be my fault. I may have inverted the numbers, but I doubt it. It's more likely to me that I'm getting taken in by somebody who understands the value of having a large property.

You see, there are nearly endless ways to hassle a contractor into dropping service calls for a long annual sheet. Simply persist with questions pending settlement - writing off a couple of possibly erroneous service calls in exchange for a total payment and no more questions.

This is about the most unethical way to do business that I ever heard of, but it happens, and that's why having a lot of return business on a large property can be a blessing and a curse. Do you still get a lot of money? Yes. But just like a friend of mine once said, there is no free lunch, and everything is a trade-off. And that's what I learned from this big client experience.