JunkBossPro Blog — Property Managers & Commercial

Property Manager Junk Removal Accounts: One Client, Every Unit, One Relationship

A property manager is not a customer in the way a homeowner is a customer. She is a relationship. She sends you work every time a tenant moves out, every time someone dumps a couch by the mailboxes, and every time the owner of a building decides the basement storage needs to go. If you set that account up well, it runs for years. If you set it up as a pile of separate customers, it gets messy within a month.

Start With the Big Picture

The overview of every kind of commercial account is in Commercial Junk Removal Software: The Complete Guide to Property Manager, Realtor and Contractor Accounts. This article zooms in on the most common one: the management company that handles apartments, duplexes or rental houses for owners.

The rule is simple. The company that pays is the client. Every place you haul from is an address under that client. In JunkBossPro, one client can hold as many addresses as the manager has, and each address keeps its own notes and job history.

Who Goes on the Client Record

Management companies have more than one person you deal with. Before the first job, find out who does what:

• The person who orders work. Usually the property manager or the maintenance supervisor. They send the move-out requests.
• The person on site. A leasing agent or maintenance tech who hands over keys and answers the door.
• The person who pays. Someone in accounts payable, often at a different office, who wants statements by email.

Put the billing email on the client so statements go to the right inbox. Put the on-site contact and office hours in the address's access notes, because that is what the crew needs. If the account has a purchase order number or a portfolio name the manager wants on every bill, keep it in a custom field so the office can find it.

Every Unit Is an Address

An apartment complex might be one street address with two hundred units. How you add them depends on how the manager talks about the work. If she says “Unit 214 at Oakridge,” set up addresses that include the unit number, so a job and a statement line read the same way she does. If the complex is small and the work is mostly common areas, one address for the complex may be enough.

For landlords with scattered rental houses, each house is its own address. That matters for routing: each one gets placed on the map, so the Waiting List shows exactly where the next trash-out is. Adding many at once is covered in Importing a Property List by CSV: Loading a Manager's Whole Portfolio at Once.

Tag the Account

Tags make commercial clients easy to pull up together. Tag the client as a property manager, and you can filter the client list to every management company you work with. That helps when you want to check in with all of them before the end-of-lease season, or when you want to see which accounts have gone quiet.

Some haulers also tag by how the account came in, for example a referral from another manager. Keep the tag list short. Five tags you use every week beat thirty you forget about.

Decide on Billing Up Front

Ask the manager how she wants to be billed before you do the first job. Most management companies prefer one bill a month. In JunkBossPro, set the client to Monthly, and instead of an invoice per job she gets one statement each month covering every address, with each line labeled by the address. Some smaller landlords prefer to pay as they go with a card on file charged when each job is completed. Both work. The point is to agree on it before the first statement goes out.

Pricing comes from your own service list. Many haulers quote trash-outs by the truck load like any other job, for example a half truck load at $329 or a full truck load at $549, with a dump fee overage over the included weight. Whatever you charge, keep it consistent across the manager's units so the statement does not raise questions.

The First Job Sets the Tone

The first trash-out for a new manager is an audition. A few habits make it go well:

• Confirm access the day before and write it on the address, not on a sticky note.
• Take before-and-after photos of every room, closets included.
• Note anything odd, like a full fridge or a broken window, in the job notes.
• Complete the job in the crew app before leaving, so the office knows it is done.

When the manager calls on Monday to ask how it went, the office can see the photos, the notes and the completed job in one place.

Keep It Growing

Once one manager trusts you, she tells the other managers at her company, and her company manages buildings you have never been to. Every new building is just another address on the same client. The structure you built for the first unit carries the next fifty.

To see every tool for running these accounts, from access notes to monthly statements, visit the JunkBossPro commercial junk removal software page.