What a 0% maintenance markup actually saves you
Most Indianapolis property managers add a markup to maintenance — typically 10–15% on top of every vendor invoice. It rarely shows up in the advertised management fee, and that's the point: it's the quietest line item in property management.
Here's what it costs you. A typical single-family rental runs somewhere around $1,800 a year in routine maintenance — a plumber here, an HVAC service there, a few handyman visits. At a 12.5% markup, that's roughly $225 a year added to your invoices. Not catastrophic. But it's $225 for nothing: the work was already done and billed by the vendor. The markup is just a fee for forwarding you the invoice.
The worse problem is the incentive. A manager who earns a percentage of every repair earns more when repairs cost more. That doesn't mean your manager is inflating repairs — but it means the person deciding whether a $400 fix or a $900 fix is needed gets paid more for the $900 one. You shouldn't have to wonder about that.
We take no markup on maintenance. Repairs pass through at vendor cost, anything over $250 gets your approval before work starts, and every invoice lands in your Owner Portal where you can read it yourself. We make our money the way the fee schedule says we do — 10% of rent — and nowhere else.
That's the whole trick: when the manager can't profit on repairs, the only reason left to do a repair is that the home needs it.