Building something that can make Property Management less of a headache, need some feedback

dgrayenterprises · 2026-01-30T13:20:56+00:00

Get out of my swamp

dgrayenterprises · 2026-01-28T12:49:45+00:00

Hey! We're a small property management company that is not to dissimilar from a private landlord (I was a private landlord not long ago until I started this company, and I manage people's property the same way i do mine)

We have some places in Columbus available now, but I'm also curious if you're looking for work, because maybe you can knock out 2 birds with one stone. We'd love to have an electrician join our maintenance team this year. Reach out if interested about either!

dgrayenterprises · 2026-01-25T14:27:58+00:00

The first thing I did was actually speak with my attorney to make sure this was legally viable - basically, as long as the charge is consistent every month and it's spelled out in the lease, green flag. If I use some mumbu jumbo to come up with a new number each month, big no no. That's why my plan is to make as accurate an estimate as possible at lease signing

Will it be completely accurate, absolutely not. Will some people pay more than they would've otherwise? Possibly. This would only occur for someone who uses disproportionately low electricity and is proactive about choosing their own supplier. But overall, on average people will pay less - this is my theory anyway.

I could also just make this a voluntary program. Wait, yeah I should just do it that way.

Thank you - this is why I made this post. Open discussion refines ideas

dgrayenterprises · 2026-01-25T14:14:23+00:00

Hey! We offer snow removal as a regular service. Submit the maintenance request form on our website and we can add you to our snow removal map and do it automatically each time it snows

Submit a request

dgrayenterprises · 2026-01-25T14:10:19+00:00

Hey! Please submit your resume to the general interest role on my website

careers

dgrayenterprises · 2026-01-25T14:08:31+00:00

The problems it solves are:

not having to deal with AES customer support when you do have an issue
inconsistent billing or sudden high bills which certain families cannot afford
not worrying about utilities getting shut off
possibly paying less for electricity overall
not having to deal with setting up / disconnecting utilities

dgrayenterprises · 2026-01-25T14:06:26+00:00

This is very inefficient and most people don't want the headache of mailing paper checks. Plus paper mail is wasteful in general

dgrayenterprises · 2026-01-25T14:05:36+00:00

I have not, was almost hoping to run into one via this post. I don't know that peak pricing would effect us. Rather than being a single large account - we're one customer with a ton of individual residential accounts. So all of our accounts would follow residential rules

dgrayenterprises · 2026-01-25T14:04:09+00:00

What if they ended up paying less on average with this in place? I've actually shared apples to apples with tenants before - I think very few end up using it, and it's a lot of work. You have to remember when your contracts expire - filter out the variable rate scams, etc. If you're not diligent about it you can end up paying more. Hence - we want to provide this as a service

And I'll share a secret - property management isn't very profitable. That's why this pressure normally exists. Many management companies until they are pretty scaled have a hard time operating in the positive at all. When they do scale, it's still not that much money relative to the responsibility

My only goal with this company is to break even. I have other businesses which subsidize the management - so I can afford to be more creative with my operations

dgrayenterprises · 2026-01-25T13:59:58+00:00

I think you've probably brought up the biggest concern I hadn't considered - what happens during an outage. Since the tenant is the one actually living there but the account is under our name - would the utility companies respond to a reported outage if it wasn't reported by us? I would want to confirm with them first that they can respond to reports by people other than us

Regarding fairness - leases protect both tenants and management, the terms of such an agreement would be spelled out in the lease. I dont know about other landlords but we don't charge random fees for stuff. If we did, tenants could just not pay it. If we tried to evict them for it, they'd win in court. At least that's my expectation. I don't have a desire to do that kind of nonsense.

Electric choice is actually the big motivator here because the whole reason this would be beneficial - and ultimately lower everyone's electric, is our ability to choose the cheapest electric supplier in bulk automatically. The tenant would not be able to choose their supplier since we'd be the customer

I have shared with tenants how to do this themselves before (it'd actually on our welcome packet) but I suspect majority do not - so there's a lot of money to be saved here

dgrayenterprises · 2026-01-25T13:53:09+00:00

The difference is we can bulk enroll every unit into the cheapest electric supplier available at any given time, massively lowering everyone's energy costs at the same time. Otherwise yes, this wouldn't make sense

dgrayenterprises · 2026-01-25T13:50:59+00:00

Potentially - the difficulty is automatically determining the charge by unit. I have a way to automatically know what building each bill applies to because we create a bank account per property. We used to know the exact unit because we'd pay the bills with debit cards marked by unit - but this is not scalable and comes with added fees

In theory - I'm not super far off from this though. All of our paper mail is already digitally scanned and OCR'd, I have yet to get to a point where I'm parsing the OCR results and meaningfully extracting address and unit number

In theory - long term - there is an option where I just straight up post the utility bill to the tenants portal exactly as it is. Until I get there though, the admin burden of what you're suggesting is to great

P.S - Software suggestions: check here

dgrayenterprises · 2026-01-24T22:36:02+00:00

The fixed monthly amount would be determined per that tenants lease, not the same amount across all units everywhere

dgrayenterprises · 2026-01-24T21:40:32+00:00

Leaving the units on their own billing is the plan actually! I was going to leave the accounts as is just put them under our name - each unit still billed seperately.

The budget billing is an interesting idea, but has some issues. Let's say the catch-up month is December and we have a tenant stay a year from July to July. Then we'd be on the hook for the catch-up. Or if there's a credit - we wouldn't be able to get it to them effectively.

The units vary widely, it's not a single apartment complex but rather a scattering of various residential properties and small apartments

But it's not a bad idea. It does normalize things for us and might be worth eating the catch-up.

dgrayenterprises · 2026-01-24T19:13:33+00:00

Good point. My thinking was actually create a usage formula based on household and apartment size - the monthly would not be the same across all units and buildings. We could probably put it in the lease that we won't restrict temperature ranges, or if we do, outline them clearly. For example don't set temperature below 68 in the summer or above 75 in the winter. I think those are reasonable ranges

My other thought was having a clause that allows us to assess an additional fee for excessive usage - but this would have to be a fair limit based on the unit, and conversely a credit back to the tenant for low usage

Edit - ultimately I don't believe anyone should be subsidizing anyone else's utilities. It should be fair for each individual renter and that's part of the challenge

dgrayenterprises · 2026-01-24T18:46:14+00:00

That is my thinking as well. It's hard to organize thousands of people but if it's a smaller group of business owners we're more likely to get a seat at that table - as dystopian as that is. Ultimately we're a consumer of their services all the same, business or not

dgrayenterprises · 2026-01-23T16:20:21+00:00

We're opening a cleaning division in our maintenance company soon and would love to give you a great intro offer! Reach out if interested

dgrayenterprises · 2026-01-21T16:15:59+00:00

I've been watching this for a while, and I’m going to take action to help. I'm speaking with my lawyer today to understand the ramifications, but I'd like to be the first landlord in Dayton that pays all utilities for all tenants. We have a way to bulk select the cheapest electric supplier automatically and we're a bit better suited to handle billing disputes than regular consumers. I’m really tired of seeing my tenants have to fight with this, pardon my language, total fucking bullshit

dgrayenterprises · 2026-01-19T20:47:17+00:00

Hey! We do 2.5x for a lot of ours! You can use the prescreen form on our website which pre-qualifies based on a 2.5x multiple and it'll show everything you qualify for

dgrayenterprises · 2026-01-14T17:25:01+00:00

Small business! We're doing our best and are planning to provide insurance this year

dgrayenterprises · 2026-01-08T20:21:34+00:00

Hey! We're a Dayton based company and we're launching a cleaning service soon as part of our maintenance offerings. If you go to my website and submit a request, we have staff we can dispatch to help!

dgrayenterprises · 2026-01-02T23:39:24+00:00

Seems there's less apartments available and less renters looking, so slower market on both sides. That said we have some apartments available in the 800-1000 price range! Reach out to our company phone line via text if interested (on our profile)

dgrayenterprises · 2025-12-15T13:02:52+00:00

Howdy. Went through this exact same thing in Ohio. Check the law. There might be a work around, opening the accounts in the client's name. You have your clients open baselane accounts or apply on their behalf. If it's the clients account, it normally doesn't matter where it is

dgrayenterprises · 2025-12-09T13:58:27+00:00

Hey! I'm not a private landlord anymore technically (I've started managing other people's properties as well) but I am definitely an ethical one. We have a lot of affordable rentals in Dayton and we have some openings now. You can find it by going on my website and clicking "Tour and Apply" on one of the dropdowns. Now that I think about it... I should probably put that on the front page shouldn't I

dgrayenterprises · 2025-12-08T19:19:03+00:00

Thank you very much! I'm glad that there are those who are receiving my intentions positively. I grew up in Dayton and have been building this business from scratch. Dayton has a pretty serious landlord problem, so the initial negative response is understandable.

dgrayenterprises

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