Ask an operations manager when vendors are reviewed and the honest answer, more often than not, is "when something goes wrong". The HVAC contractor gets a meeting after the third P1 miss in a month. The cleaning company gets a call after a tenant complaint reaches the owner. The elevator contractor, which has quietly slipped from 96% to 81% on-time on its monthly inspections, gets nothing, because nothing has broken yet. Reviews driven by incidents are always late, always angry, and always about the vendor that shouted loudest rather than the one that matters most. The vendor scorecard solves half of that. It says what to measure and what a good number looks like. It does not say when anyone looks at the number, who is in the room when they do, or what that room is allowed to decide. A scorecard nobody reads on a schedule is a report; a scorecard read every Monday, every month, every quarter and every year, by the right people with the right powers, is a management system. This post ...

A regional manager fires the landscaping contractor on a Friday afternoon. The email is short and, after eight months of missed mowing cycles and two ignored warnings, deserved. On Monday morning three things surface. The irrigation controllers at four properties run on a cloud account the contractor set up in its own name, and nobody at the operator has the password. The gate codes the contractor's crews used are the same codes the residents use, and the contractor still knows them. And the accounting team finds a $9,000 prepaid order for spring mulch, placed through the contractor in February, of which $3,400 has been delivered. The contractor, now unpaid and unhappy, is not returning calls. None of that was a surprise the operator could not have seen. All of it was in the vendor file, the contract and the purchase ledger. It surfaced on Monday because terminating a vendor was treated as an email, and it is not: it is a project with a start date, a sequence, and one rule that ...

An operator with 140 vendors across thirty properties rolls out a portal in March. By September, 56 vendors have logged in at least once, which the dashboard reports as 40% adoption. The other 84 are still emailing PDF invoices to the property accountant, who re-keys them, and phoning the coordinator to ask whether the work order is approved. The portal was mandated in a letter to every vendor. The mandate is being ignored, and the accountant is doing the same work as before plus the work of chasing people to use the portal. Here is the half of the story the operator did not write. A plumber with four vans and an office manager who does the books on Thursday evenings received the letter, logged in once, could not find the work order she had been sent by phone that morning, was asked to upload a certificate of insurance she had already emailed twice, and could not see when the last three invoices would be paid. She went back to email. Nothing about the portal paid her faster or asked ...

Three roofing bids arrive for a 24,000 square foot flat roof on a garden-style apartment building: $84,000, $97,500 and $112,000. The asset manager wants the $84,000 bid approved by Friday. Read the three documents side by side and the picture changes. The $84,000 bid excludes tear-off disposal and the permit, carries a 10-year contractor warranty, and allows for ten sheets of deck replacement when the roof consultant's survey suggests forty. The $112,000 bid includes everything, carries a 20-year manufacturer's no-dollar-limit warranty, and prices forty sheets of deck. The cheapest bid is not the cheapest roof; it is the bid with the most left out. A bid comparison template is the tool that finds that out before the contract is signed rather than in the change orders afterwards. This post gives the template, works the three roofing bids through it, explains how to write the scope of work so bids arrive comparable in the first place, lists the red flags that show up in the levelling, ...

Friday, 4:40 pm. A boiler fails at a 96-unit building and the contracted vendor cannot come until Tuesday. The property accountant finds a second firm that can come Saturday morning, sets it up in the payment system in nine minutes, and the heat is back by noon. The invoice arrives Monday and is paid Wednesday because the residents had heat and the manager is grateful. It is now the following March. The accountant is chasing that vendor for a W-9 it never sent, discovers the certificate of insurance on file belongs to a different company with a similar name, and finds that the bank account the invoice was paid to was given by email and never verified. The vendor has done eleven more jobs since. None of the bargaining power the property had on that Friday exists anymore, because the only moment a property holds all the cards with a vendor is before the first invoice is paid. That is what a vendor onboarding checklist is for. It is not administration; it is the control point of the ...

Open the maintenance contracts in any property portfolio and count how many say the vendor will "respond promptly", "attend as soon as reasonably practicable" or "prioritise emergencies". Then try to work out, from those words, whether the plumber who arrived nine hours after a burst pipe was in breach. You cannot, and neither can the vendor, which is why nothing happens after the ninth hour except an argument. "Respond promptly" is not a time. A vendor SLA property management teams can enforce needs three clocks, each with a number of hours attached, a rule for when the clock starts, and a rule for when it stops: acknowledge (the vendor confirms it has the job), attend (a qualified person is on site), and restore (the fault is fixed or made safe). Almost every SLA dispute traces back to one of those clocks being missing, or to nobody having agreed when it started. This post is a vendor SLA property management template. It defines what a vendor SLA is and what it is not, sets out the ...

A regional manager takes over thirty properties and inherits 140 vendors with them. Some are on contract, most are not. Some have a certificate of insurance on file, and nobody knows how many of those have expired. A few have been paid on the same day for eleven years without anyone checking a rate; one has not been used since 2023 but is still active in the payment system with bank details that were changed by email last spring. Asked which vendors are insured, under contract and paid on time, the honest answer is that the information exists somewhere across four systems and two filing cabinets, and it would take a week to assemble. That is the normal state of vendor management property management teams inherit, and it is not a people problem. It is the absence of a lifecycle: a defined sequence of stages that every vendor passes through, each stage producing a record, and one file per vendor where those records live. This guide sets out that lifecycle in eight stages, the fourteen ...

BERDO reporting is the annual submission of a building's energy and water use to the City of Boston under the Building Emissions Reduction and Disclosure Ordinance, due by May 15 each year for the previous calendar year. Since the 2021 amendment known as BERDO 2.0, the ordinance does two things: it requires covered buildings to report, and it sets emissions standards, in kilograms of CO2e per square foot, that each building must meet or pay for. The standards took effect in 2025 for larger buildings and apply from 2030 to the rest, and they step down every five years to zero in 2050. For a property manager the ordinance is two separate jobs with two separate deadlines: the reporting job, which is data collection, benchmarking and, every five years, third-party verification; and the compliance job, which is keeping the building under its emissions standard or choosing between the alternative compliance payment, renewable energy purchases and a reduction plan. This guide covers both, ...

This Local Law 97 compliance guide is for the owner or manager of a New York City building over 25,000 square feet who has filed the first annual emissions report and now has to plan for the 2030 limits. Local Law 97 of 2019 sets a carbon emissions cap for each covered building, expressed in metric tons of CO2 equivalent per square foot per year, that tightens in steps: one set of limits for 2024 to 2029, a much lower set for 2030 to 2034, and further reductions to 2050. A building that emits more than its limit pays a penalty of $268 per metric ton over, every year, and the report showing where the building stands is due to the Department of Buildings by May 1 each year, certified by a registered design professional. Most buildings are inside their 2024 limit. Most are not inside their 2030 limit, and the gap is large enough that the work to close it takes years to plan, finance and build. This guide covers who is covered, the limits by building type, a worked penalty calculation for ...

Multifamily rent collection KPIs are the six measures that tell an operator whether rent is being collected on time, how much is at risk, and how much has been lost: on-time collection rate, month-end collection rate, delinquency rate, bad debt percentage, days sales outstanding and the ageing profile of what is owed. Each has a formula, a denominator that has to be chosen and held constant, and a benchmark range that depends on the asset class. Most operators track one or two of them, usually the ones their software prints by default, and are surprised at year end by the third. This post is measurement only: what to calculate, from what, how often, what the numbers should look like by asset class, how to read a trend, and how to lay the six out on one dashboard. The workflow that acts on them, the notices, escalation and arrears follow-up, is in our existing guide to building a rent delinquency workflow, and the mechanics of taking payment are in online rent collection for property ...