There are two kinds of supers. The kind who reaches for the wrench, and the kind who reaches for the phone. I only want the first kind.
The difference shows up on a Tuesday night at 9pm, when a tenant calls about a clogged toilet. The wrench super goes over with a plunger and a snake and has it cleared in fifteen minutes. The phone super calls the emergency plumber, who shows up at midnight and bills you $250 for a service call plus a minimum hour. Nothing was actually wrong that a wrench couldn't solve.
Multiply that across thirty units and twelve months and it stops being a maintenance story and becomes an expense story. I've seen buildings where the super's first instinct was to call a vendor for everything — cartridges, intercoms, clogged traps — and the annual vendor bills were shocking. Not because the building was old. Because the super was a dispatcher.
In New York City this isn't optional anyway. The Housing Maintenance Code requires any building with nine or more apartments to have a superintendent or janitor either living in the building or within 200 feet of it, reachable by telephone twenty-four hours a day. So you're paying for the role regardless. The only question is whether you're paying for hands or a phone tree.
The interview tells you everything. I don't ask for a resume first; I hand candidates a scenario. "Tenant says the bathroom faucet won't stop dripping. Walk me through what you do." The good ones say: shut the water, pull the cartridge, see if it's a washer or a worn seat, replace it if I have the part, and tell the tenant when I'll be back. The bad ones say: "I'd call the plumber." I hear that sentence and the interview is over. What I'm really testing is pride. A super who takes pride in the building fixes the small thing the right way, and the tenant never calls back about it. A super who doesn't care patches it, covers it, or passes it up the chain, and you get the same work order three times. You can't train pride into somebody. You hire it.
Pay them properly. This is the place owners get backwards. They haggle the super's salary down by a few thousand a year and then spend twenty thousand a year on vendor calls the super would have handled. A good super is the cheapest employee you'll ever have, measured against the money they save you. A bad one is the most expensive, measured the same way.
And there's a second ledger the super keeps: tenant goodwill. When something breaks and it gets fixed the same day, tenants stay. When it takes three days and two unanswered calls, they start browsing listings. Retention is worth more than any rent bump, and the super is the person closest to it. Nobody in your organization has more influence on whether a tenant renews. So hire the hands. Ask what they can fix themselves, watch how they answer, and pay enough to keep them. The wrench is cheaper than the phone.
Peter Hungerford
← All insights