Property management
Send the work out once, to companies whose insurance is already read.
A turn, a landscape contract, a re-bid an owner asked for: each one runs on the same round of emails, the same chase for a certificate that expired in March, and the same spreadsheet of who answered. Write the request here instead. Companies carrying the cover your management agreement requires read it, and priced proposals come back to the property’s own file.
Before anyone answers
You set the limits. A person reads the paperwork against them.
Cover is checked when a company asks to answer your request and checked again the day you send it to a property, and the expiration date is watched in between.
Cover a company has to carry
Your figures
- General liability (per occurrence)You set the figure
- General liability (aggregate)You set the figure
- Workers' comp / employer's liabilityYou set the figure
- Auto liabilityYou set the figure
- Umbrella / excessYou set the figure
A limit is yours to set — usually the one your owners' policies or your management agreement already name. If the insurance a company has filed is below your figure, it can't propose on your work until its policy is raised.
What a company files
Read by a person
- General liability COI30-day renewal window
- Workers compensation30-day renewal window
- Auto liability COI30-day renewal window
- Certified Pool Operator (CPO) certification / Lifeguard certification / Background checkCurrent on the day
- W-9 formCollected and verified
- Business licenseRead and kept on file
A lapsed policy has 30 days to come back. After that the company cannot propose on your work and cannot be sent to a property until the certificate is current again. A trade credential gets no window at all: it has to be in force the day the company answers.
You already know where a packet usually fails: the additional-insured endorsement naming your company, which is never part of the underlying policy and has to be issued on its own. That is why a person reads each certificate. A document can be on file, in date, and still not say what you asked for.
One document
Describe the work in plain words, and publish it.
If your owner or your attorney already wrote the specification, attach it and publish that instead. Either way the companies answering price from the same sheet you keep.
An address is enough to publish.
A property does not have to be drawn on a map first. The address opens the account and the request goes out from it. Janitorial, staffing and a unit turn aren’t priced by the square foot, so there is nothing to measure first. Where the price does depend on how much land there is, the map is there when you want it.
Proposals arrive in the order they were sent.
You read them beside each other, on one screen, each from a company whose insurance was in force, or inside its 30-day renewal window, on the day it answered. You choose, and the contract is between you and that company.
It prints, and it files.
It prints, it downloads, and it goes in the owner’s file next to the proposal that won and the contract that followed.
Request for proposals
The document you publish
It prints and it downloads, so the copy in your owner's file and the copy a company prices from are the same sheet.
After you sign
Everything about a property stays under that property.
The schedule, the visits, the photographs, the certificates and the invoices land in one file per property from the day the contract starts.
The property’s file
Six months in
- The scheduleEvery visit, dated
- The visit recordFiled as it is done
- The certificateWith its expiration date
- The invoiceThe company’s own lines
- The contract and the request it answeredBoth kept
Exports as Detailed CSV, General journal CSV (double-entry), QuickBooks Online CSV, QuickBooks Desktop IIF, Xero CSV — whichever your accountant asked for.
An owner asks what happened in March.
March is on the schedule, and each visit carries the record the crew filed when it finished: what was done, when, and the photographs taken on the way out.
Your bookkeeper asks for the month.
Run the export over the period you choose and hand over the file their software imports. The invoice carries the company’s own line items at its own figures, with sales tax and payment processing on lines of their own.
Leaving takes the record with you.
The exports are the same ones you have been running all along, so there is no last step to perform and nothing that only exists here.
Run a service company rather than a portfolio? Get verified once, then choose which published requests to answer, whichever industry put them out.