Landlords, Do Your Tenants’ Toilets Keep Constantly Running, Causing You Exorbitantly High Water Bills? (LeakBird)

Jan.30, 2009 in Prop Management, Running Toilets, Water Industry, Water Leak Detection

Do your tenants’ toilets keep constantly running? Do you receive high water bills maybe once or twice a year? What approaches do you take to combat this problem? What is your system for dealing with it, as a landlord or property manager?

We randomly called 10 property managers in San Francisco to enquire into this issue. 9 out of the 10 of them had had a high water bill in the last 12 months average an excess of $1,000.00. Every single one of them said they didn’t have a system in place to deal with it, and that is was a problem they had grown accustomed to dealing with fairly regularly.

They had to call each and every tenant in the building for the said water bill. They had to send a plumber into every unit to find the running toilet. Once found, they then had to have the toilet repaired. We found that they were always out of pocket equal to or more than the said excess cost of the water bill. They then, since the municipality permitted, such as in San Francisco, sent in their receipts for getting the repairs done in hopes that they might get 50% of their money back within 2 or 3 months. Actually, a couple of them didn’t even pursue this because the time it took to do this wasn’t really worth the few hundred bucks they might get back.

Not a single one of them recommended the dye test to their tenants. We don’t blame them, because since their tenants don’t pay for water, the tenants won’t do it anyway. None of them had ultrasonic or flow meter leak detection equipment installed. We suspect because it’s fairly cost-prohibitive — around $500 per device per rental unit.

We already wrote a piece on the myriad of means to prevent or stop your tenants’ toilets from running.

Anyway, we’re wondering if you’ve had this problem, particularly if you’re in a big city like Atlanta or Dallas or Chicago or New York or Los Angeles? But we’d also like to know if you’re in a small town or province.

What do you recommend? What steps do you take to avoid this problem?

We can tell you that we’ve been developing the first acoustic leak detector for running toilets, which emits an alarm, much like a smoke detector, when the toilet has been running and causes the tenant to call the landlord or property manager (you), so that a plumber can be scheduled ASAP to check the conditions in that particular unit.

This device is called the LeakBird and we’ll be sharing a lot more about it with you as we get closer to launching it as a product.

If you are interested in How You Can Increase Your Cash Flows by $2,500.00 Every Year and Never Pay for High Water Bills Due to Your Tenants’ Running Toilets, sign up for our Free Report here.

Otherwise, please share your stories with us, and tell us what works for you.

Abendigo Reebs is the VP of Business Development for LeakBird Industries LLC in San Francisco, CA. He may be reached by email at ben@leakbird.com

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