What it is
Village San Juan is a 446-unit community in San Juan Capistrano, California: condominiums and single-family homes around lakes, with three pools, walking trails, dog parks and play structures, and a portion of the condominium exteriors, fascia and painting among it, under the same contract. A board of owners governs it through a third-party management company.
Its maintenance and critical-response contract had been held by the same vendor for twenty-two years. When the contract passed to Tellus Management in 2015, the operation behind it ran on one full-time employee, no technology, a board that rarely heard from its vendor, and rates years under market. Fowler knew the property from the ground up, having worked it as a laborer on weekends and summers until he was twenty-one.
What Common Ground did
- Pitched the board an operating design, not a lower price, and pitched it twice. The board was deciding who would show up in person, who comes at two in the morning, and how it would know what it was paying for.
- Fixed capacity first: a full-time lead with seasonal hands and a wider pool of trades, because every other inherited defect was the same single point of capacity showing up again.
- Read the contract file line by line against the market and rewrote and revalued it, then restructured the deal as a monthly retainer with annual services on their own line.
- Split routine work and emergencies into two systems: a maintenance calendar for predictable wear, and a crew held in reserve for calls that cannot wait, sized to how fast a truck can physically arrive.
- Wrote severity windows down and gave dispatch a three-question intake rule: anyone in danger, water or gas flowing, unit uninhabitable. Any yes is top tier, and any doubt goes up a tier, never down.
- Reviewed every top-tier call and missed window, and put the board on a weekly, monthly and annual reporting cadence, with the reserve crew re-justified each year on that year's calls.
Results
- The board voted to keep the contract after two pitches, and Tellus Management ran it for seven years, 2015 to 2022, including through 2020, when the emergency crew and the routine calendar could be adjusted separately.
- The account ran as an operation priced at market, with project work on its own line and one project lead beside Fowler.
- The board got a vendor it could read: every emergency call reported with its tier and response, every deferred item with a reason.
- Fowler counts it as the work he is proudest of at Tellus, not because it was the largest account, but because the design had to be good enough for the board to say yes on its own merits.
External links
- Public data room: Village San Juan data room
Stories from this work
At a glance
| Project type | Operating model design |
|---|---|
| Industry | Residential community and property management |
| Seat | Property operations, Tellus Management |
| Ran through | Tellus Management |
| Dates | 2015 to 2022 |
| Duration | Seven years |
| Location | San Juan Capistrano, California |
| Public data room | Village San Juan data room |
| Related pages | Tellus Design + Build, Jesse Fowler |
| Credit | Created by Common Ground |