Vacancy Cost Recovery is a significant part of the issues faced by property management companies in the daily management of their properties, approved vendors, and tenants’ requests. When systematic automated processes are not implemented, such tasks become problematic and costly. This is typically the case when tenants move in and out rapidly, and utility services are not transferred smoothly and on time from one tenant to another. Property managers have to contend with these issues:
- Time wasted chasing after incoming tenants to get utilities transferred to their name
- Time wasted analyzing the master utility invoice to calculate the number of days to be rebilled to new tenants
- Financial loss on days of non-allocated services that should have been billed to new tenants and can’t be recouped.
Challenge
In this case study, a property management company had two properties, one with 48 apartments, the other with 83 apartments. Their staff spent 4-5 days each month going through utility invoices to identify the tenants that had not yet transferred utilities to their name.
Armed with the move-in/move-out schedule, the property management staff would go through the electric, gas and water invoices, identifying the meters that should have been billed to new tenants. Once the meter usage had been lifted of the meter and noted, staff would then have to calculate the number of days against actual usage, then input the information on monthly invoices to the tenants.
These additional tasks would not only cost the property management company valuable time each month, but also prevented their staff to perform other value-generating duties.
Solution
This property management company hired RadiusPoint to implement processes that would solve these issues. RadiusPoint started by identifying the areas crippling the property management company’s bottom line: staff running after new tenants, and the inability of the company to recoup the cost of days billed that should have been assigned to new tenants on Day 1 of their moving in.
RadiusPoint created a Vacancy Cost Recovery (VCR) report that saved the property management company 32+ man-hours each month. In addition, RadiusPoint’s intervention recouped 100% of all utility expense that should have been invoiced to new tenants. The move-in/move-out report is input on a weekly basis into RadiusPoint’s proprietary software, ExpenseLogic. Monthly utility invoices are imported into ExpenseLogic and analyzed meter by meter against the unit/apartment number. ExpenseLogic then generates a report showing the apartment number, the meter number, the utility type, the number of days that should be billed to the tenant, and the associated utility costs.
Results
Our property management client saves $1,000+ each month in man-hours. This all-inclusive process has decreased their utility expenses by 12%, through automated rebilling to the tenants.
In addition, the property management staff can now allocate time saved to value-generating tasks, such as taking care of tenants’ requests and better property maintenance.
RadiusPoint’s utility invoice audits, error identification and billing reconciliation with vendors can generate savings of over 25%. Implementing vacant cost recovery (VCR) processes on top of regular utility expense management boosts the ROI of our UEM services even further.
Call our UEM service specialists to discuss your needs in matters of Vacancy Cost Recovery, utility expenses, and process automation.