Saving $7,000 on a Water Bill, and Other Major Money-Saving Moves
Here at Los Angeles Property Management Group, nothing comes before our clients’ profit and peace of mind. The motto we use as an everyday compass is, “Excellent property management doesn’t cost. It pays.” We make sure to fulfill that promise to every client through the way we manage their property, and every once in a while, we fulfill it quite literally and swiftly with what we call a Major Money-Saving Move. This short article will detail a few examples of these cases, in which we’ve saved our clients thousands of dollars almost overnight.
One example of an MMSM took place when a client hired us to manage his property, a laundromat on Huntington Drive, in the midst of major structural renovations. He told us that he planned to pay a roofing company $10,600 to re-roof the building. Having learned that we could vastly improve on that price, he asked us to call the roofing company and cancel his contract. They agreed to let us. We then re-roofed his property for nearly half the price, saving him $5,200 with just a few phone calls.
Another of our Major Money-Saving Moves came in the form of a corrected gas bill. When one of our supervisors noticed that gas costs had risen mysteriously at a 67-unit apartment building we manage near Cal State Northridge, he demanded that the gas company send a technician to investigate and re-calibrate the meter. The result? A refund check from the gas company to our client, in the amount of $9,100.
One owner of a rent-controlled six-unit building in Boyle Heights came to us seeking the most affordable way he could re-roof his complex. We guided him through the process of applying for an HCIDLA program that allowed him to recoup 50% of the cost of a new roof from his rent-controlled tenants.
Most recently, we took on a client who owns two apartment buildings in Santa Monica. He had parted ways with his previous manager because they wouldn’t investigate when he suspected that the monthly water bill at those buildings didn’t properly reflect how much water was being used. So we sent in technicians who checked the entire complex for leaks (of which they found a few), and made sure all of the water pipes were back in perfect condition. Sure enough, by the end of our thorough, four-month investigation, that client’s water bill had dropped from $8,187 to $1,034. You can see excerpts of these bills below, and the full bills at the bottom of the page. If this issue had gone uninvestigated, the cost would’ve mounted to a staggering number by the end of the year. Instead, that money will remain where it belongs: in the pocket of our client.
And though not all of our Money-Saving Moves are Major ones like these, we believe that the small, transactional savings we provide our clients add up to make a big difference in their own right. For instance, we’ve saved a number of clients significant sums of money over long periods of time by referring them to ancillary services that we know will do better work and charge less than the ones they currently hire: things like sharing our insurance agent.
As we always say, excellent property doesn’t cost. It pays. And sometimes it pays even faster than you’d expect.
