We've had this conversation more than once.
An HVAC goes down. Our vendor goes out, assesses the unit, finds multiple issues, and we give the owner options for getting it fixed right. The owner doesn't want to spend the money. He has someone he's been using for years who he thinks can usually handle things for less than what our vendor quoted. He asks us to use his guy instead.
We say no.
Here's an example we just dealt with.
The exhaust vent pipe taped together. Not repaired. Taped.
Our vendor flagged it on the spot. It wouldn't pass an inspection. I called him back and asked him to be specific about why. Carbon monoxide, he said. That kind of patch job can let exhaust gases back into the house instead of venting them outside. The gas is colorless and odorless. Nobody in the home would know.
I wouldn't let my family sleep in a house with that pipe. That's not a dramatic statement. That's just the truth.
What actually happened here
Before we started managing this property, the owner's contact was the one handling repairs. This is what that work looked like. Someone came in, got the unit running for cheap, and left. The vent pipe didn't get fixed. It got taped. The owner paid the bill, moved on, and never thought about it again.
That's the person the owner wanted us to call.
Carbon monoxide situations don't start with dramatic failures. They start with repairs like this one. Small, cheap fixes that look like solutions but aren't. Each one buries the problem a little deeper.
Why this lands on you as the owner
You probably haven't been to Oxford in months (or years). You don't know the residents beyond their names on a lease. But they're in that house tonight, and the mechanical closet is ten feet from where they sleep.
If a resident is harmed by carbon monoxide in a home you own, that isn't a maintenance problem. It's a liability. And "I didn't know the vent pipe had been taped" doesn't protect you when the paper trail shows years of cheap repairs and deferred work.
Owning rental property means accepting responsibility for what's inside it. That includes cheap repairs made by your vendor.
There's also a cost that never shows up on a repair invoice. Maintenance is the number one reason residents move out. Every day without working air conditioning is a day your resident is forming an opinion about this property. We got lucky in this situation. The unit failed in April, not August. A breakdown at 95 degrees after years of patches and band-aids is exactly what residents remember when their lease comes up. Vacancy is expensive. It almost always costs more than the repair someone was trying to avoid.
Why cheap repairs keep happening
Usually it's a combination: a vendor trying to get in and out fast, and an owner who wants to spend as little as possible. Both sides got what they wanted in the short term. The problem got buried.
We have a saying at Cissell Management: fix it right, fix it once. It's not a slogan. It's how we make every call when something needs to be repaired. The right repair today almost always costs less than the wrong repair twice. And the wrong repair, in this case, wasn't just expensive. It was a carbon monoxide hazard sitting inside a home with people in it.
We use vendors we've worked with. People we can trust to do the job right. When one of them tells us something is a liability, we don't just take that at face value. We ask exactly what that means. In this case, it meant carbon monoxide. That's a conversation I'd rather have before something happens, not after.
If you have an old HVAC system in a rental property
A 20-year-old unit has had a lot of hands in it. Some of those repairs were done right. Some weren't.
The tape on that vent pipe didn't appear overnight. Someone put it there, marked it on an invoice as a repair, and moved on. The owner paid the bill and assumed the problem was handled. It wasn't. It was buried.
That's the part that's hard to see from four hours away. You can verify rent was paid. You can verify a work order was closed. Nobody sends an inspector behind the repair tech to check their work. The quality control is the relationship. Knowing the vendor, trusting that they'll tell you what they actually found, and knowing they stand behind what they did.
That's why who does the work matters as much as whether the work gets done. Our vendors call us after a job and tell us what they found. An unvetted contact comes in, does the minimum, and sends a bill. Those are two completely different relationships, and you find out which one you have at the worst possible time.
