Plumbing for apartment communities and property managers.

You need two things from a plumber: someone who calls you back, and a price before anything gets torn apart. We’re a small, locally owned shop, and you’ll get the price before we touch anything.

What we handle

• Make-ready and turnover plumbing, from running toilets to shutoff valves that seized up while the unit sat empty. Our rental turnover checklist is a good one to hand your maintenance team.
• Water heaters, one unit at a time or several
• Drain lines and main line backups, including shared lines that back up into ground-floor units
• Backflow preventers. Testing requirements depend on your water utility, so check with them. Our post on backflow preventer testing covers the basics.
• Garbage disposals, outdoor spigots, and the rest of the small stuff on a work order

Make-ready work

Turnover is the best time to catch the slow problems, because nobody’s living there yet. A unit that sat empty for a month can hide a flapper that’s dried out and won’t seal, a disposal that’s rusted stuck, a supply line with a bulge in it, and sink traps that have dried out and are letting sewer gas into the kitchen. Run every faucet for a minute, flush every toilet twice, and look under every sink with a flashlight before the keys change hands.

A drip found during make-ready is a quick fix. The same drip found three months into a lease is a work order, and maybe a ruined cabinet floor.

Pricing

You get the price before we start, so you can approve it or run it past the owner first.

Emergencies

You can call us any time for an emergency. Before one happens, make sure your maintenance staff know where every unit’s shutoff is and where the building’s main is, and label them if they aren’t already. In a burst pipe upstairs, the person who can close the right valve fastest saves the unit below it.

A few things that cut down on calls

A running toilet in one unit wastes water around the clock, and on a building with one master meter, the owner pays for it. Tell residents to report them the same week.

Grease and wipes are behind a lot of shared-line backups. A short note in the move-in packet about what not to put down the drain costs nothing and saves a lot of calls.

Water heaters in a building tend to go in batches, since they were often installed around the same time. Keep a list of each unit’s heater and its age. When the first few start leaking, you’ll know which ones are next and can plan for them instead of scrambling.

An upstairs water heater without a drain pan can bring down the ceiling below. Put a pan and a leak alarm under every one you can.