Spending Limits

Control your maintenance costs by requiring approval for all expenses that exceed a certain spending limit.


You can choose a spending limit for individual issues, annual maintenance costs, or both. When this setting is enabled you’ll be notified if any required work exceeds your approval threshold. All work that will cost less than your thresholds will move forward without your involvement.

Total annual expenses approval threshold: An annual spending threshold ensures that you will not spend more than you have budgeted on your annual maintenance and repair expenses. Properties that have recently been renovated without any serious (non-cosmetic) issues generally target an annual maintenance budget of less than 5% of gross rent.

Individual work order approval threshold: The purpose of an approval threshold for individual service requests is to give you peace of mind that no individual provider is overcharging.

droppingoffkeys.png

Decide when your approval of a maintenance work order should be required

Annual maintenance costs

  • Default: 5%
  • Minimum required: 3%

Assuming your property has been either renovated or professionally inspected in the past 12-24 months you should budget between 5% and 10% of gross rent for maintenance costs. Set your annual spending limit to a percentage of the rent in this range. Careful tracking of annual maintenance costs is useful for highlighting when too many issues are getting reported or are triggering service requests.

This is a percentage of annual gross rent. For example, if your unit rents for $1,000 per month ($12,000 per year) then your annual repair spending limit would be $600.

Individual issues

  • Default: $300
  • Minimum required: $100

Caretaker default limits are based on national averages for common maintenance issues. Generally, if a repair costs more than $300 one of two factors may be at play:

  • The provider is charging too much
  • The issue is more complicated to resolve than it seems. In this case, figuring out how to resolve the issue is often a good use of your time as the property owner.

Limiting the amount that can be spent to address an individual issue is particularly important when average costs in a location are higher or lower than the national average. If this applies to you then do not use the default. If the limit is too low then it will be impossible to resolve issues for your tenant - the minimum spending limit is $100.

Sign up for updates

Share your email with us and we’ll notify you when we post new content.

Have questions for us?

We’re happy to help you figure out if Caretaker is right for your situation.

Get in touch