Frank Gervasio: The Expense Blind Spot That’s Quietly Killing Property Performance

Most property management firms are laser-focused on the top line. Frank Gervasio, Director of Finance at OneWall Communities, says thats exactly where they go wrong.

Heres a number that should make any property owner pause: a single lost lease, just $1,000 a month, can cost five times that amount to recover. Yet many ownership groups are still negotiating with their management companies over whether the payroll budget is $10,000 too high.

Frank Gervasio, Principal and Director of Finance at OneWall Communities, has sat across the table from enough owners to know that this framing, cutting costs, and boosting NOI is where the logic breaks down.

Expense management isnt about just cutting expenses to save dollars on the bottom line, Gervasio explains. Sometimes those expenses have a real impact if youre not spending them. What you want to measure is the efficacy of the dollars. Its a distinction that sounds simple. In practice, its surprisingly rare.

The Compounding Problem

Gervasio points to a pattern that plays out across portfolios: individually small line items that quietly compound over time. Vendor contracts with automatic annual escalators. Auto-renewals that nobody flags. Billing structures that look fine at a single property but balloon across a 20-asset portfolio.

Many a mickle makes a muckle, he says, quoting George Washington. The small things add up into bigger things. When a management company isnt tracking contract terms with that kind of granularity, or worse, when their accounting team isnt set up to do so, ownership often doesnt find out until the damage is already done.

At OneWall, financial oversight starts well before a management contract is signed. During due diligence on distressed assets, Gervasios team conducts 100% unit walks, catalogs the age of HVACs, appliances, and roofing, and gets into the books as quickly as possible. Every day that deferred maintenance goes unaddressed, its compounding, he says. You need a plan from day one.

Why Other Firms Miss It

The gap, Gervasio argues, comes down to incentive structure. Fee-based management companies are paid on collections, which makes revenue a natural priority and expense oversight an afterthought. When they do build back overhead costs, those charges often get absorbed into catch-all categories like G&A or marketing, where theyre hard to scrutinize.

Ive seen companies send financials where they dont write off bad debt, they just move it around on the balance sheet, Gervasio says. Ive seen chart-of-account structures that were essentially made up. When you take over one of those assets, youre not just cleaning up operations. Youre reverse-engineering someone elses financial story.

OneWalls 3rd party management services are structured differently. Property management agreements at OneWall itemize every point solution used, with no markup. Owners can see exactly what the technology costs and choose whether to adopt it. The goal isnt to hide margin in the expense line, its to build the kind of trust that makes a long-term management relationship actually work.

The Payroll Argument

One of the pushbacks OneWall receives from prospective clients is that payroll is too high. Gervasios answer is direct. This is a people-centered business. Were providing housing to families; thats one of the most important things you can do. The people taking care of those residents are our on-site teams. And if we dont take care of our teams, they cant take care of the people were housing.

The math, he says, confirms it. An overworked, underpaid property team doesnt just create morale problems. It creates vacancies, collection gaps, and maintenance backlogs, all of which are far more expensive to fix than a slightly higher payroll line ever was.

Its the penny-wise, pound-foolish conversation, Gervasio says. Cut the payroll, lose the lease, spend five times as much to recover it. Property management is complex, and the best solutions come from shared incentives. Whether youre exploring new approaches or facing specific challenges, were here to talk. Visit us at onewallcommunities.com or call us at (646) 596-7068.

Disclosure: Individuals or companies mentioned may have a commercial relationship with KeyCrew.

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