By now you’ve probably seen the Bloomberg story about 1,000 residents across four states organizing unions against their property managers. If you haven’t, here’s the summary: residents in affordable housing properties in four states have collectively organized to force their landlords to address maintenance request backlogs.
The detail that stands out to me is what they’re organizing around. It’s maintenance. Of all the potential grievances (rent increases, for example, or parking), maintenance response times pushed these residents to take collective action.
This is worth examining. It’s unusual for people in general to organize. It’s even more unusual for them to organize against a landlord, especially when they have affordability vulnerability. The pain point has to be severe.
This looks like a canary in the coal mine moment to me. We’ve seen this pattern before with the airline bill of rights and the banking bill of rights. We could be on the verge of a resident-based movement that forces landlords to operate differently.
What does it mean when these types of consumer protection regulations come into place? Someone else runs your business. You have to comply with mandated standards, which will drive up costs and limit operational flexibility.
Understanding the Tenant Bill of Rights Movement: Consumer Protection Patterns
History shows us a pattern. When customers feel powerless in the face of systematic service failures, they organize. The airline bill of rights came from frustrated passengers who’d endured too many delays, cancellations, and lost baggage without recourse. The banking bill of rights arose from consumers tired of hidden fees and predatory practices.
These movements share a common thread: they force industries to change when market forces alone fail to protect consumer interests.
The Current Organizing Efforts
Right now, organized resident groups have emerged in Kansas City, MO, New Haven, CT, Detroit, MI, and Louisville, KY, with over 1,000 residents collectively demanding better maintenance service. These organizing efforts are targeting Capital Realty Group, a major affordable housing owner with 22,000 units, where residents often lack the mobility to simply move to a competitor.
The tenant bill of rights movement focuses primarily on one core issue: the right to timely, effective maintenance service. Tenants are calling for basic habitability, not luxury amenities or premium perks.
Why Property Managers Should Pay Attention
Think about what had to go wrong for 1,000 people to coordinate, take on personal risk, and publicly challenge their property managers. Where have customers organized themselves to force a brand to do something different? And what did that mean to that industry, to that company, to that brand?
If the tenant bill of rights movement follows the pattern of airline and banking consumer protections, property managers should expect increasing regulation, mandatory service standards, and potential legal liability for maintenance failures.
Why Maintenance Is the Breaking Point
I don’t believe that property management maintenance is failing because operators don’t care. It’s failing because the traditional model has become unsustainable. Several forces have converged to create a crisis.
The Labor Crisis: Site-level maintenance turnover runs at approximately 40% annually in many markets. Open positions lead to unspent maintenance budgets in the range of 10-20%, not because companies won’t pay, but because they literally cannot find qualified technicians.
Resource Constraints: Many landlords do not have the resources or the talent to do maintenance on a cost-effective basis. Property managers are caught between resident expectations, staffing realities, and financial constraints.
Resident Vulnerability: In affordable housing, residents often cannot vote with their feet and move to a competitor when service fails. This lack of mobility means maintenance problems affect their daily living conditions with no escape valve. When a market-rate resident faces persistent maintenance issues, they can break their lease or move at renewal. Affordable housing residents rarely have that luxury.
At the most recent MX Summit, I heard Dom Beveridge say something profound: “The business of property management is maintenance. Management is simply the service by which maintenance is delivered.”
This reframes the entire conversation. Maintenance isn’t a cost center to be minimized. It’s the core business of property management. When viewed through this lens, the tenant unionization story becomes even more significant. Residents are organizing around the fundamental business that property managers are supposed to deliver.
The Business Impact of Resident Organizing
If your residents organize and unionize, external parties begin dictating operational standards. You must comply with mandated requirements, which increases costs and reduces operational flexibility.
The immediate consequences include:
Regulatory Compliance Costs: When tenant bills of rights become law, property managers face new mandatory standards, reporting requirements, and potential penalties for non-compliance.
Loss of Operating Autonomy: Organized residents or legislated tenant rights eliminate your flexibility to prioritize maintenance based on operational judgment. Response times, service standards, and resolution processes become mandated rather than managed.
Reputational Damage: News coverage of tenant organizing against a property management company spreads quickly. Negative publicity affects not just the properties involved but the entire portfolio’s reputation. For third-party management companies, this can threaten client relationships and future business development.
Financial Impact: For property owners, tenant organizing and negative maintenance reputation can affect asset valuation and lending relationships. For operators, it can trigger contract reviews and put management agreements at risk.
Questions to Consider
As you look at 2026 and head into budget season, consider these questions:
- What would you do if your residents organized and unionized? How would you respond?
- How many failures would it take for your residents to unionize and threaten legal action that generates news coverage of your operations?
- What would that do to your business? If you’re an owner, how would it affect your ability to secure financing? If you’re an operator, how would it impact your ability to retain clients and win new business?
This Isn’t Isolated
This situation is not unique to one landlord. This is not a unique labor crisis. Similar conditions exist across the industry. When residents see no other option, organizing becomes the natural response.
The Root Cause: Operational Complexity Versus Capacity
Property management has relied on a simple staffing model for decades: approximately one maintenance technician per 100 units. But this ratio makes several assumptions that no longer hold true.
The Staffing Math That Doesn’t Work
The model assumes flatline demand. Reality includes seasonal spikes, unexpected emergencies, and unit-specific issues that cluster unpredictably.
It assumes 100% technician capacity. With site-level turnover running at 40% in many markets, properties operate constantly understaffed.
It assumes predictable hiring timelines. With 4-6 months average time-to-hire for maintenance roles and persistent labor shortages, open positions can remain unfilled for quarters at a time.
Consider the numbers on a 10,000-unit portfolio:
- Staffing requirement: 100 maintenance technicians at 1:100 ratio
- Annual payroll: Approximately $6.5 million at $65,000 per technician
- Turnover reality: At 40% annual turnover, companies constantly hire, train, and lose institutional knowledge
- Hidden dynamic: When positions sit open, NOI improves temporarily because salaries aren’t being paid, but resident satisfaction suffers
Now add trip costs. Industry data suggests 1.5-1.7 trips per work order. For 10,000 units generating approximately 4 work orders per unit per year, that’s 40,000 work orders requiring roughly 60,000-68,000 trips annually. At $107-150 per trip, that’s an additional $6.4-10.2 million in annual trip-related costs.
The traditional maintenance model requires property managers to maintain large, expensive teams with constant turnover while accepting massive trip costs as unavoidable.
The Problem with “Windshield Time”
Every maintenance trip includes time the technician isn’t fixing anything: driving to the property, finding parking, navigating the building, locating the unit, potentially returning for tools or parts they didn’t know they’d need, and driving back.
When maintenance teams lack visibility into what they’re walking into, trips multiply. A technician arrives without the right part. They diagnose an issue requiring a specialist. They discover the resident’s description didn’t match the actual problem. Each scenario means another trip, more wasted time, more expense, and more resident frustration.
How to Stay Ahead of the Tenant Rights Movement
The choice is straightforward. Property managers can respond proactively now, or reactively when regulation forces change.
Four Strategic Approaches
1. Simplify Your Operations First
Shadow a site maintenance technician for a full day. Observe the back-and-forth trips, the unnecessary complexity, the inefficient workflows. Then question why it happens that way.
Observe the work, challenge assumptions, and simplify processes. Even at the site level, individual team members can streamline operations to make work easier for their teams and residents.
2. Adopt Remote Maintenance Capabilities
Many maintenance issues can be resolved, deferred, or minimized without dispatching a technician. Visual technology enables accurate triage, guides residents through simple fixes, and ensures technicians arrive prepared when on-site visits are necessary.
Property managers using remote solutions consistently report 30% remote resolution rates, 50% reduction in trips, and 85+ Net Promoter Scores.
3. Prioritize Resident Experience
Speed is what residents care about most. Fast maintenance response isn’t just about preventing negative reviews. It’s about revenue protection. Every resident who doesn’t churn due to poor maintenance saves thousands of dollars in turnover costs. Read about improving resident satisfaction.
4. Use Technology Strategically
The right tools can multiply team effectiveness: AI-assisted work orders, standardized guides, real-time reporting, and multi-language support. The goal is to remove unnecessary friction so teams can focus on high-value work.
The Bottom Line
Consider this reframing: what if the business is maintenance and management is the service?
If maintenance is the core business, then being exceptional at it becomes essential. Property managers who embrace this reality will thrive. Those who continue treating maintenance as a cost center will face increasing pressure from organized residents, regulatory requirements, and competitive disadvantage.
One thousand residents organized because maintenance failures degraded their living conditions to an intolerable degree. This is a systemic issue.
The tenant bill of rights movement will spread because the underlying conditions exist across the industry: unsustainable staffing models, resource constraints, operational complexity, and gaps that prevent property managers from delivering the service residents expect.
The operators who invest now in simplified workflows, remote capabilities, and resident-first service will capture competitive advantage. They’ll reduce costs while improving satisfaction. They’ll scale without proportionally scaling headcount.
The operators who don’t will face increasing regulation, organized resident action, declining reputation, and mounting competitive pressure.
