What a Water Leak Can Teach You About Hiring the Right Property Manager in 2026
Welcome to this month’s “Bonehead Move of the Month,” where we break down real investor horror stories and reveal exactly how they could have been avoided. This one? It’s called The Case of the Mysterious Water Leak—and it’s a painful reminder of why response time and urgency are non-negotiable when it comes to protecting your rental asset.
The Story: A Drip on Friday, a Flood by Saturday
An investor contacted us recently, frustrated and stunned by how poorly her last property management company handled a maintenance call. Here’s what happened:
- Friday PM: The tenant calls in a small ceiling drip. The maintenance coordinator—mentally checked out for the weekend—marks it as non-urgent and schedules it for Monday.
- Saturday AM: The “small drip” becomes a full-blown flood. A burst pipe from the upstairs unit’s water heater pours into the living room. Drywall collapses. The tenant is using bowls and Tupperware to catch water.
- Damage: $10,000 in property damage. Ceiling, walls, plumbing, and a very angry tenant.
When the owner finally got a call, her response said it all:
"How small did you think a ceiling leak could be?"
Where It All Went Wrong
At Red Door Property Management, we call this what it is: a total systems failure.
The biggest mistake? Not taking water seriously. Water damage is among the most expensive and destructive issues a rental property can face. A trained manager should know:
- Water = red alert. Period.
- Request photos from tenants immediately
- Ask smart diagnostic questions: “What’s above the leak? A bathroom? A water heater?”
- If risk is even possible, send emergency vendors out—yes, even after hours
The Wrong Mindset: “I'll Save the Owner Money”
Too many inexperienced managers justify delays by trying to save owners from after-hours charges. But that’s short-term thinking. In this case, trying to avoid a $300 weekend call resulted in $10,000 in damage.
We train our team to understand that proactive communication and fast action actually save investors money long-term—by avoiding disaster and preserving tenant relationships.
What Red Door Would’ve Done Instead
Here’s our process when we get a report like this:
- Ask for photos of the leak
- Ask diagnostic questions to determine possible cause
- Evaluate risk level immediately
- Alert the owner and explain options transparently
- If needed, dispatch after-hours vendors to diagnose fast
Then, we document everything inside our owner portal, including real-time updates, vendor invoices, before/after photos, and communication logs.
The Bigger Lesson for 2026 Investors
As you evaluate your rental portfolio in 2026, ask yourself this:
“Does my current property manager know how to protect me from the worst-case scenario?”
If the answer is “I’m not sure,” or “They’ve dropped the ball before,” it might be time to work with a company that trains for moments like this. We’ve made our own mistakes in our early years—which is why our systems today are built to prevent them for you.
🛠️ Want to learn how we build crisis-proof systems? Check out our owner experience breakdown and schedule a call for a free rental analysis.
Coming Soon: From Red Flags to Real Deals
We’re also working on something exciting: a full video series walking you through how to spot a great investment deal from start to finish. From due diligence to funding to tenant placement—stay tuned as we help you level up in 2026.
Follow us for more “bonehead” breakdowns, smarter strategies, and real investor insights—all from the property management front lines.
Transcript Here
Bonehead: “The Case of the Mysterious Water Leak”
Yeah. How could it have been handled? Did he handle it as appropriate as someone could when receiving a phone call about a water leak? What?
I appreciate these really easy questions, Chris. This is like the biggest softball of softballs. I appreciate it.
Good. Yeah. Well, I like to keep it easy for you.
And now we're going to dive into the bone head. All right. Now, this is a real life situation that was shared from us from an owner. She broke it down for us about her previous experience with a property management company and I'm going to exploit their failings and talk about how Red Door succeeds and how we respond and this also is going to relate to how we communicate with our owners. So Mike, I'm going to read this off and the title of this bone head is going to be the case of the mysterious water leak. And then we'll follow it up with how it was properly handled and how could it have been handled better if possible. All right, here we go. Here's the story.
A tenant called their property management company on a Friday afternoon to report a small drip coming from their ceiling. The maintenance coordinator already mentally checked out for the weekend, marked it as a non-urgent, and scheduled a work order for Monday morning.
Fast forward to Saturday morning. The tenant wakes up to what can only be described as Niagara Falls in the living room. The small drip turned out to be a burst water pipe from the upstairs unit's water heater. By the time anyone from the management company got there, the ceiling had collapsed, drywall was soaked, and the tenant was using mixing bowls and Tupperware to try to catch the flow.
The owner's $10,000 renovation budget for the year was instantly gone in one weekend flood.
When the property manager finally reached out to the owner, the only thing the owner could say was, "How small did you think a drip could be coming from the ceiling?"
Now, how could it have been handled? Did he handle it as appropriate as someone could when receiving a phone call about a water leak?
I appreciate these really easy questions, Chris. This is like the biggest softball of softballs. I appreciate it.
Good. Yeah. Well, I like to keep it easy for you.
That's good. That's good. No, I mean, obviously, this person should have done things so much differently. I mean, first of all, when you hear water, alarm bells should be going off. Water is so so so destructive. So, obviously just to tuck that away and say, "Hey, I'll get to that on Monday" is the biggest no out there. You really need to identify that as a high priority situation and diagnose it. Get somebody out there, whether it's Friday night, whatever needs to happen, that needs to be diagnosed.
But you should have started asking some questions from the tenant to find out what's going on. Is it toilet? Is it a roof leak? I mean, we don't even know where it was, right? So, is it a roof leak? Is it a window leak? Is it a plumbing leak? What's above it? Is there running water there? Is there a toilet? Is there a water heater? Like, what's there? You got to do some investigation. But you have to know enough to put that at the top of the priority list because running water, dripping water has the potential to be so so damaging. I mean, they probably got lucky with only that going wrong, honestly.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Okay. To your point, you're absolutely right. When you hear water or no heat in the winter, these are absolutely immediately actionable items, non-negotiable in my opinion.
Now, I would imagine—I'm trying to put myself back in my early years—and you might receive this call and the first thing you're thinking about is, man, I have to break this news to the owner, which is no problem for me these days. It's not that I find joy in that, but I find joy in the immediate conversation piece of it—how I know that it can save me from issues there. But he might be seeing this as, man, this is going to be an after hours call to the plumbing company and I've got to explain that to the owner and justify why we need to send someone out there where it's, you know what, I'll probably be fine. I'll put it in there for Monday and I'm going to save the owner money from an after hours call.
No, no, no, no, no. That's fear of non-experience. And a lot of these property management companies I think react that way that's unfortunate. Again, I find the enjoyment of knowing that—by discovering this potential I look like a hero—so it's explaining to them immediately, yes Mr. Owner, number one: water—alarm bells go off. We need to discover it, at minimum, the cause, and I need to obtain photo documentation. I need that tenant to share photos of where the water's coming from. I need to know which—being a water leak, I know that it's actionable anyway. But pretending—
But you do need to ask the questions. Because it could be somebody taking a shower and they didn't put the shower curtain in correctly and so that water leaked over the edge and now it's running through. So it could also be a non-issue and it could be a tenant-caused issue. But the point is you need to dig into it and you need to dig into it now.
Yeah. Because you know the damage water can cause, specific maintenance issue can cause.
Yeah. So, it's questions, photos, and then you have that discussion with the owner and you use this as a specific story of what you're trying to help the owner avoid. So even if it does result in sending somebody out there—an after hours call—you could be potentially saving them thousands and thousands of dollars by actioning the item a little bit quicker.
So, yeah. Jerry—it didn't give us his name, but I'm going to call him Jerry—Jerry should not have just tagged it for a Monday morning work order and should have done just a few more minutes of investigation to determine if he should have issued it out to a vendor or a maintenance coordinator sooner rather than just stepping out the door. And then because guess what? When Jerry gets back on Monday he's going to have much more difficult conversation with the owner and a whole lot more work to do. Now he's got to fix the plumbing leak, fix the drywall, now you got to upset tenant. I mean, all the things—just created so much more work and so much more cost for everybody.
Yeah, exactly.
Okay, that's going to wrap up our bone head and yeah, let me know what you guys think of the bone head. I have a whole pile of these that I cannot wait to get through. So, we've got a lot more of these bonehead situations because believe it or not, we come across them a lot. We come across them quite a bit.
Yeah. Yeah, we come across them a lot. And actually one or two of them were ideas that I came up with from my own experience, my early years where things weren't dialed down like they are today in the processes. But I mean—and not only that—you may honestly arguably want a property manager who's got the experience level, who's probably made some of those mistakes because he can probably make better decisions today.
Yeah, that's this guy. You know what I mean?
Okay. That's going to wrap up this month's podcast. I appreciate everyone tuning in. We're getting a tremendous amount of views on these. I love every one of these. Comment. Reach out for a rental analysis. We got some really cool stuff coming down the pipeline for more entertainment and information. And, well, I'm just going to mention it. One thing that we've got brewing right now is an entire walkthrough of spotting a potential real estate deal in every question and step of the way all the way through vetting a potential deal to securing the funding and then landing your first real estate investment opportunity. So stay tuned. Really excited for that. We're going to try to get that out here ahead of the holiday. So you can view that when you're just sitting around on the couch and be a little bit more educated for your first real estate investment deal. But that should be fun. I'm looking forward to that one.
That is coming soon.
All right, that's going to wrap it up. I appreciate you—appreciate you sticking around, Mike, for my comments. Thanks.
See you guys.
All right, see you.
