The unit of this business is the door
Company-level totals hide everything that matters in property management. The number that decides your future is revenue per door per month, built from the base fee (a percentage of collected rent or a flat amount), lease-up and renewal fees, and coordination charges, measured against what each door costs you to serve. Doors are not equal: a well-run newer building generates a fraction of the calls, site visits and contractor wrangling that an aging walk-up does, at the same fee. We segment the portfolio so pricing decisions are made building by building instead of on gut feel.
Fee mix is a design choice, not an inheritance. A base fee that chronically undercharges the difficult buildings can be rebalanced with renewal and coordination fees that track the actual work, so price follows effort without a confrontational headline increase.
Cost to serve decides whether growth pays
Your biggest cost is people, so the second number is doors per staff member: how many units one property manager or coordinator can carry before service slips and owners leave. When a portfolio's fees stop covering its share of wages, software and windshield time, there are only two honest moves, reprice it or hand it back, and both need the numbers to be defensible in front of the owner. The quiet killer is churn: a firm adding 200 doors a year while losing 150 is buying growth it never keeps, which is why we track doors lost as closely as doors won.
| Metric | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Revenue per door per month | Whether pricing matches the building, not just the market |
| Doors per staff member | Whether the team scales or is quietly burning out |
| Margin by portfolio | Which owners subsidize which — and who needs a repricing talk |
| Owner churn, in doors per year | Whether growth is real or just replacement |
| Owner receivables for fronted repairs | How much of your cash is lent out interest-free |
Cash flow when the big numbers aren't yours
A manager's bank activity looks enormous and means almost nothing: the rent is the owners' money, and trust float is not cash flow. Your actual cash is swept fees plus owner reimbursements, and the reimbursements are the trap. Every repair you front to a contractor before the owner settles the statement is an interest-free loan you did not mean to make, and across 800 doors those loans add up to a payroll's worth of cash. We run a rolling 13-week forecast on the operating company alone, with fee sweeps, HST remittances and the reimbursement lag modelled honestly.
Growth consumes cash before it returns any. The coordinator gets hired at six hundred doors to be ready for eight hundred, the software tier upgrades early, and the fee revenue arrives a month behind the cost. Sizing an operating line of credit for that lag before you need it is far cheaper than negotiating one during it.
Buying, or one day selling, a rent roll
Growth in this industry is often bought: another manager retires and their book of contracts is for sale. The diligence is financial before it is legal — are the contracts assignable, what will churn look like in the first year when owners reconsider, and what is the real margin per door once the seller's underpricing meets your cost structure. Walla Assaf's background in banking and corporate finance shows up here: we build the lender package, the projections and the deal model through Business Financing Advisory, and where a lender wants CPA-prepared statements, a Compilation Engagement sits behind the application. The same per-door reporting that supports a purchase is what makes your own book credible when you are the seller.
What the engagement looks like
Our Fractional CFO work runs on a monthly rhythm: a short KPI pack on the metrics above, a margin review by portfolio, and one standing decision — a repricing, a hire, a hand-back, a financing — worked to a conclusion rather than left open. It is senior finance attention sized for a firm running a few hundred to a few thousand doors across Mississauga and the GTA, scoped in writing after a free 15-minute discovery call, with no hourly surprises. Between meetings the numbers live in the same QuickBooks Online file the accounting runs on, so the KPI pack is a view of the books rather than a spreadsheet that drifts away from them.
