What a $25K/mo Retainer Actually Covers

Property operations for 3–5 properties: vendor management, maintenance coordination, renovation oversight, compliance calendar tracking, invoice review, weekly status reporting. Principal support: travel planning and briefing, logistics coordination, research requests, vendor intake, calendar support. Weekly briefs for all active properties and open items, delivered every Friday. Weekly operating briefs, documentation discipline, and one clean request lane. That is the retainer.

What is not included: legal representation, financial management, in-person site visits, on-site staff management. We handle operations. Licensed professional functions and physical presence are outside scope. This is not a limitation — it is how we stay focused on what we do well.

Compare the retainer to building the equivalent in-house: one operations coordinator ($70,000–$90,000/year), one property manager at market rate (8–10% of gross rents — on a $15,000/month rent roll that is $14,400–$18,000/year, but the PM does not cover principal support or compliance in any meaningful way), one EA ($50,000–$70,000/year). Total: $134,000–$178,000/year before benefits, management overhead, and the significant cost of their eventual departure and replacement.

The retainer at $25,000/month is $300,000/year. The cost gap narrows considerably when you account for benefits (add 30% to each salary), the institutional knowledge cliff when any of them leave, and the fact that the operations, PM, and EA functions are usually not fully replaced by one person each — you end up with gaps everywhere. We cover the surface area with no knowledge cliff and no turnover risk.

Not hours. Not a headcount. Outcomes. If something is not handled, it is on us. If a deadline is missed, it is our failure. If a vendor overbills and nobody catches it, that is a problem we should have caught. The retainer buys you an operations partner with skin in the game — not a service provider who completes tasks and sends you a bill.

The principals who get the most value from us are the ones who can genuinely disengage from operations. Not because we are good at our jobs (though we are), but because they have transferred accountability and they trust it has landed somewhere solid. That transfer — of mental load, of worry, of the background hum of "what am I missing" — is what the retainer actually buys. The rest is just the work.