Talked to a fellow landlord recently who said something that stuck with me: every deferred maintenance decision is really a bet that the system fails on your schedule, not its own.
sometimes that bet pays off. Sometimes it turns a $400 repair into a $4,000 replacement plus a very unhappy tenant plus a week of vacancy while you scramble for a contractor.
I ve started separating my systems into three buckets: things nowhere near end of life (ignore), things in year 1-2 of their expected remaining life (watch, budget for it, no action yet), and things past the midpoint of expected life (start pricing replacement now, even if it's still working).
It's a small mental shift but it's changed how many "surprise" repairs I actually have. Most of them weren't surprises, I just hadn't been looking. how do you decide when something's worth replacing proactively versus riding it out? Would love to hear where other people draw that line.
I'd track repeat repairs before deciding to replace. Put the date and cost of each call next to the equipment's age. If you're calling somebody back for the same system every few months, you have numbers to compare with a replacement quote instead of guessing.