The remote management of a local “salon suites” rental building has been vexed by a fairly incompetent building maintenance outfit and they’ve approached me to see what I’d charge for some specialized maintenance tasks. My partner is one of their first tenants and has become known as “The Mayor” of the building, and they like the trim-out I did on his suite so it’s not random chance they called me.
One of the ongoing things would be to roll through the building and clean hair traps (ick!) in the shampoo bowls once a month. Simple enough, but the time to enter a suite, remove eight screws on the access panel, open and clean the trap, put it all back together and clean up any splashes or spills adds up. I’m estimating ten minutes per, and there’s 30 suites, so 300 minutes or five hours. Most likely, this will be done in the evenings or on Sundays.
Minimum wage around here is something like $17.50/hour. Other than “more than that” I have no idea what maintenance people get, or what a suitable weekend/night differential might be. Most likely this would be paid as an ad-hoc task, rather than as hourly. I was thinking of charging $10 per trap.
I don’t want to low-ball myself and the building owner hasn’t offered anything yet. I realize this is relatively unskilled labor, but the stakes are fairly high. The existing maintenance people recently caused an emergency shutdown of the entire building after they broke a water line under a shampoo bowl, flooded two suites, and disrupted thousands of dollars worth of appointments. They really don’t want that again.
I wouldn’t do it ‘as needed’, but rather just part of a monthly (or more, or less) program. I could see $10 each being reasonable, but either set a minimum or do it as an all or none deal.
My reasoning is that if you do it ‘as needed’, you’re going to get called when they’re having problems (ie sink not draining). Then instead of spending 10 minuets, it’s going to take you a half hour. Plus, without any type of minimum, you’re likely to end up getting random calls to fix one or two clogged sinks and they’ll expect to pay $10 or $20.
What you want (or what I think you’d want) is to stop in once a month, spend 5 hours cleaning traps and collect your $300. The whole idea of maintenance is that you’re staying on top of things specifically so they don’t turn into problems.
My suggestion would be that you have an agreement with them that for $300 a month, you’ll stop in once a month and clean all the traps and maybe a quick ‘visual inspection’ to let them know if there’s anything obvious that needs to be dealt with (ie leaking valve, cracked drain pipe). Anything beyond that and it’ll be an hourly rate plus any expenses (ie parts, tool rental etc). You might even want to specify that this monthly maintenance doesn’t include dealing with clogged drains. Sure, fixing that might only involve cleaning the trap, but you don’t want to find yourself dealing with a bigger, more expensive problem for $10.
As for the actual price, maybe just come out and ask what the previous people were charging and what they were doing (or ask to see a bill). Don’t charge $300 a month if they’re more than happy to pay $500 because the previous people were charging $900. Similarly, you don’t want to look like an asshole charging $300 when the other people were charging $75.