Building a contractor panel that actually shows up.

Why we vet our contractors quarterly, and what we look for.

A property management firm is, in many practical respects, a contractor-coordination business. We are only as good as the plumbers, electricians, painters, and handymen we send through your door. The single biggest operational difference between a good agency and a bad one is not software. It is whether the contractor panel is curated, vetted, and pruned regularly. Most are not.

Why contractor panels rot

A panel that worked well two years ago will be 30% dead weight today. Contractors get busy and stop replying. Their teams turn over and quality drops. They move out of your service area. They pick up larger commercial accounts and deprioritise residential work. None of this is malicious. It is entropy. The agency that does not audit for it ends up with a list of names that looks like a panel and behaves like a guessing game.

How we vet, on intake

Before a contractor joins our panel, we check registration, insurance, references, and a sample of recent work. Then we run them on three low-stakes jobs. We watch for: response time on first contact, willingness to give a written quote, accuracy of that quote against actual invoice, and willingness to send progress photos without being asked. Any contractor who cannot do all four within a fortnight is filtered out.

Your contractor panel is your reputation, twice removed. You cannot manage what you do not measure, and most agencies measure nothing.

The quarterly review

Every three months, every contractor on the panel gets graded on the same metrics:

• Callback rate. Of jobs done in the quarter, how many required a second contractor visit? Anything above 5% is a yellow flag.
• Quote-to-invoice variance. Average overrun against quoted price. Anything above 12% is a yellow flag.
• Average response time on first contact.
• Tenant satisfaction via a one-line WhatsApp survey sent after each job.

Two consecutive yellow flags means a conversation. Three means off the panel.

The number that matters

If we had to track one number and only one, it would be callback rate. A contractor who gets the job done in one visit, every time, is worth two who are cheaper but require a second appointment. We optimise for first-visit completion, and our panel is shorter and more reliable as a result.