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Comment by busterarm | Hacker News Reader

Property management companies take care of this for rental units.

Why not just find a good one that operates in your area and pitch the idea to them? Normally they operate for a percentage of rents but I'm sure you could find one who would do it for flat rate.

Your problem with the insurance company thing is you might have to give them Power of Attorney (which you really don't want to do) to make insurance claims on your behalf.

The Property Management company would already have the liability insurance that any company working in this space would need to do this for you.

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For some reason I cannot edit my comment so I'll reply again.

I've been researching property management companies in Cincinnati (where I live) and I've come to a few conclusions:

1. There are no good property management companies in Cincinnati. At least, there are no highly reviewed property management companies - only those with negative reviews or no reviews at all.

2. Owners looking to rent their homes might be a great demographic for this idea. While most of the property management companies state that they do regular maintenance checkups, they really aren't incentivized to do so and from the reviews I read they typically don't. They're really only incentivized to keep the renter renting so that they continue to get their cut. As it stands, owners and tenants are often at odds when it comes to "needed" repairs because the property management companies charge the owners $50/hour plus parts for any repairs beyond the most routine of maintenance. Basically the property management companies have stuck themselves between a rock and a hard place where it's almost impossible to make both the owner and tenant happy. If, however, the owners were paying a larger monthly fee that covered all repairs, they'd no longer be at odds with the tenant. Of course, the problem of "tenant abuse" would then fall on us. Hopefully by being proactive with regular maintenance the abuse could be mitigated somewhat.

I'm going to call a few property management companies tomorrow to get a better idea of what exactly is and isn't covered under their plans.

Seeing as though I live in Hilton Head, I'm probably in the ideal market to try a scheme like this (#2).

There are a ton of remote homeowners renting out their property here without using a property manager or without using a good one. Unfortunately the homeowners I mention here tend to be extremely greedy people and don't have property managers because they don't want to pay anyone. They do things like advertise their units have cable TV and free wifi and have the cheapest, worst tier of service and constantly call the cable provider every month trying to get credits for fictional outages.

There's probably some money to be made here but I'm not sure I'd want to be the cog that keeps their greed-machine running.

I actually did come across some of these companies when searching for a one stop solution. I'll call a few and see if any of them are interested in servicing my home. I wonder why they've never tried to tap this additional market. My guess is that they are not equipped to deal with individual home owners, instead preferring to deal with landlords that own multiple properties.

If I could find a good reputable property management company in each city, I wonder if a business could be built around them. I'd be the single point of contact for the home owners, subcontracting the work to the property management companies. Hmm, definitely worth some research.

The problem is that while they charge a flat rate monthly, that doesn't include repairs and one-off charges which get passed on to the landlord. Maybe doing a combination of property management and home warranty would be valuable, but neither industry has the best reputation IMO.

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