David Singelyn
Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Please proceed
Haendel, let me maybe add a little bit to that. I look at it, there's three areas in this area. Time, it is how much renovation work we do, and it's obviously controlling the expenses and time is very important as Jack indicated, I mean there's just cost of having a longer renovation or turn time whether its landscaping, utilities et cetera that are on. With respect to the scope, I think it's one of the things that we, as an industry are all dealing with is making sure that you adequately turn the property, in an efficient time without doing unnecessary work and that's really just getting a consistency and training and expectations throughout the system and we spent time on that. We've made improvements in both of those areas and there's a lot more that needs to be done. Jack and Bryan, Director of Property Management spent a significant amount of their time this last six months in establishing standards as well as training programs and showing all the field managers their expectations. So, we get a consistent delivery across the country, and there is some benefit that we've seem. You've seen some of the expense reductions there, but there is more that can and needs to be done. The last piece is controlling the expenses and that's part getting some better national programs but also maybe changing the mix a little bit and bringing some of the services, not all of them, but just some of the day-to-day services in-house that we can do more efficiently as we walk through and I think that was discussed last earnings call and some of those programs are in place, but it's in place in a very small way and I think there's some more benefit that can be happening there as well. So, it's the number one focus that we have and I am going to reiterate what I said, this is not a one quarter fix. It's a -- unfortunately probably a year fix, but there's benefits every quarter and the last piece, where we've got a lot of benefit in our telephone calls on maintenance are starting to show in really more unfortunately in the fourth quarter, so you don't see them in the numbers but they're there and that is move in process, the quality of move in processes is going to dictate the initial telephone calls, and we're seeing a drop in our maintenance telephone calls on a per property basis this year versus last year, and that's very, very encouraging as well for the future. And I would say, one other operational thing that we did about a year ago, one of the delays in turning a home had been turning on utilities and we've left utilities in our name on a permanent basis and that means we don't have to turn utilities on or off during the turn process.