The park I’m in the process of due diligence on has a huge trash bill yearly, is there any way I can charge each tenant 10 dollars a month for trash or is that illegal to charge.??
What is your idea of a huge trash bill? If it is about $10 per month then you are right on target. The park we just bought was up around $14 per lot and that was hurting but we were able to get it down to about $10.50.
You need to check your local and state laws about billing back trash. I haven’t heard anywhere that it’s illegal but you would want to be sure.
Every state has different laws, you have to know the laws of your specific state.
Also get bids from other trash providers, you may not need to change the charges or even lower it if a new company will give you a good rate.
the trash is about 17.12 per lot totaling over 5600 a year. I will check the laws cause I would love to bill back any expenses I can.
Get more bids.
Also possible you are getting too much service. Are they emptying a half full dumpster 4 time a week when 2 times would work?
Maybe you have a 2 yard dumpster they empty 3 times a week. Switching to 3 yard dumpster 2 times a week might help.
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17 per lot is really high. In our case, we have to use the municipal service but they were accidentally billing too high because there were changes made a few years ago and never adjusted. So make sure the billing is correct. The second issue was the amount of dumpings. The crew gave their estimate of what we could get away with to help reduce costs. We went from 6 times a week down to 4 and will monitor that.
Good luck.
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We avoid dumpsters when at all possible. We contract with local municipal service for each resident to have their own selected can sizes. We pay the monthly bill and surcharge back every resident. Garbage service appreciates not having to deal with collections and we save a ton in garbage.
I would just add to this discussion, one of the hidden costs of individual toters versus dumpsters. If you are able to keep the dumpster truck off your property, you can potentially save tons on road repairs /extended driveway life which needs to be evaluated in the decision making process. saving 3 bucks a unit sounds great until you need to dish out 30k for a road prematurely. ( not always the case but just wanted to add this so people contemplating trash bills take in the whole picture) but I would say a general rule is minimizing the impact of the truck can be beneficial ( weather keeping him only to the front or reducing # of pickups)
I have had a 10 cy dumpster at my park for the last year and a half. It costs about $200/mo to have emptied (20 lots). I currently have that cost billed back to the tenants on their monthly utility invoices from Multifamily Utility Co. I am incrementally changing the way utilities are handled at my park to eliminate the headaches of collections. I am currently talking to a local trash company to get pricing for each tenant to create an account and have curb side collection each week and be billed directly from the company. This way, my manager is no longer picking up trash that didn’t make it into the dumpster and I don’t have to pay up front and wait for the tenants to reimburse me.