Thanks for your reply. We do have a flat rate monthly fee but capital improvements are not included. Capital improvements are charged at a fixed % of the cost of the project. This introduces a conflict of interest because there's no incentive for the manager to minimize costs. On the other hand, like you point out hourly rates provide no incentive to minimize time. We were thinking that management fees for capital improvements should be similar to other professional services like legal, engineer etc.. Our experience with other professional services is that they don't inflate the time taken to do the job but do charge a rate that adequately compensates them for their time. You raise an excellent point that I hadn't considered.