Every time we onboard a new asset management client, we run a full portfolio audit in the first 90 days. We dig into every lease, every expense line, every vendor contract, and every financial assumption the owner has been operating under.

And every single time, we find the same things.

Not sometimes. Not occasionally. Every time. The specifics vary. The patterns don't. And the amount of money sitting on the table is always bigger than the owner expected.

The typical small portfolio, 10 to 50 units in the Omaha metro, has $15,000 to $30,000 in recoverable NOI that nobody is capturing. That isn't a sales pitch. That's just what the data shows when you actually look.

Here are the seven things we find in every audit.

1. Rents 5-12% Below Market on at Least Half the Units

This is the big one. It shows up in every single portfolio we touch.

The pattern is always the same. Owner or property manager renews leases with small annual bumps, usually $25 to $50 per month. Feels reasonable. Feels fair. But the market moves faster than $25 a year, and after three or four renewal cycles, the gap between what the tenant is paying and what the unit would lease for on the open market is $75 to $150 per month.

On a 20-unit building where half the units are $100 below market, that's $12,000 per year in unrealized revenue. Just sitting there.

The fix isn't aggressive. We build phased rent adjustment plans that bring units to market over two to three renewal cycles. The goal is to capture the revenue without blowing up retention. Push too hard too fast and you create the turnover costs you're trying to avoid. Push strategically and you get the revenue with tenants who stay.

Last portfolio we audited: 24 units, average rent gap of $87 per month across 14 units. Annualized opportunity: $14,616. The owner had no idea. Their property manager never ran the comps.

2. Insurance Not Shopped in 2+ Years

This one is almost universal. The owner set up their policy when they bought the building, it auto-renews every year, and they never look at it again. Meanwhile, the market changes. Carriers enter and exit. Your claims history changes. Your building ages.

Insurance in the Nebraska multifamily market is up 29% year over year as of early 2026. If you haven't shopped your policy recently, you're almost certainly overpaying.

We run every client's insurance through a minimum of three brokers with access to different carrier pools. The savings range from $2,000 to $8,000 depending on portfolio size, coverage structure, and how long it has been since anyone looked.

One client had a 16-unit portfolio insured through a single carrier for five years. Same agent, same company, auto-renewal. We repackaged the coverage, restructured deductibles, bundled with an umbrella policy, and saved $4,700 annually with better coverage limits.

Four hours of work. $4,700 per year, every year, going forward. That's the kind of ROI that makes asset management pay for itself.

3. No Capital Reserve Plan

This isn't a missing spreadsheet. This is a missing strategy.

Most small portfolio owners operate reactively. Something breaks, they write a check. The furnace dies in January, that's a $5,000 surprise. The roof starts leaking in April, that's a $60,000 emergency. The parking lot crumbles, that's a phone call to the bank.

Without a capital reserve plan, every major expense is a crisis. And crises lead to bad decisions. You take the cheapest contractor instead of the best one. You patch instead of replace. You defer instead of invest. Each of those decisions costs more in the long run.

A proper capital reserve plan identifies every major building system, estimates remaining useful life, projects replacement cost, and builds a monthly reserve contribution that funds future needs. It turns $60,000 surprises into $1,200 monthly line items that you plan around.

We build these for every client in the first 90 days. The owner always says the same thing: "I knew I should have done this." Yes. You should have.

4. Property Tax Assessments Never Appealed

The county sends you an assessed value. You pay the tax bill. That's how it works for most owners.

But assessed values are opinions, not facts. They're generated by mass appraisal models that don't account for your building's specific condition, your actual rental income, or recent comparable sales that may support a lower valuation.

In Douglas County, the appeal process is straightforward. You file a protest, present your evidence, and make your case. The success rate on well-prepared appeals is higher than most people think.

We look at every property in the portfolio and compare assessed value per unit against recent sales, actual income, and condition. If there's a reasonable case for a lower assessment, we flag it and walk the owner through the process.

Savings range from $800 to $3,000 per year depending on property size and the gap between assessed and supportable value. And unlike a one-time fix, a successful appeal resets your baseline for future years.

Most owners have never filed a single appeal. Not because the case isn't there. Because nobody told them to look.

5. Utility Costs That Should Be Billed Back to Tenants

This one drives me crazy because it's the easiest fix in the entire audit.

Many small multifamily buildings, especially older ones, have common meters for water, sewer, and trash. The owner pays the bill. The tenants use the utilities with no incentive to conserve. And the owner eats a cost that grows every year.

RUBS, Ratio Utility Billing System, allows you to allocate common utility costs back to tenants based on unit size, occupancy, or a flat fee structure. It's legal in Nebraska. It's standard in professionally managed properties. And it recovers 70-85% of utility costs that the owner is currently absorbing.

On a 20-unit building where the owner is paying $1,800 per month in water and sewer, RUBS implementation recovers approximately $1,260 to $1,530 per month. That's $15,120 to $18,360 per year back in the owner's pocket.

The other move is simple: audit common area electricity. I have walked buildings where hallway lights run on a 24/7 circuit with no timer, where parking lot lights are on broken sensors, and where laundry rooms are heated to 75 degrees year-round with nobody in them. LED retrofits in common areas typically pay back in 8-14 months and then save money for a decade.

6. Vendor Contracts on Autopilot

Landscaping. Snow removal. Pest control. Cleaning. Elevator maintenance.

Most owners sign a vendor contract when they buy the building, and it renews annually without review. The vendor knows this. They raise prices 3-5% every year because they can.

We pull every vendor contract, check the terms, and run competitive bids. Not to be adversarial. Some vendors are worth every dollar. But you don't know who's overcharging you unless you compare.

On a typical 20 to 30-unit portfolio, we find $2,000 to $5,000 in annual savings across all vendor contracts. Sometimes it's a landscaping contract that's 30% above market. Sometimes it's a snow removal vendor who has been charging per-push rates that add up to double what a seasonal contract would cost.

The process takes a few hours. The savings recur every year. And sometimes the best outcome is keeping your current vendor at a better rate because now you have competing bids to negotiate with.

7. No Refinance Analysis Despite Rate Changes

Interest rates moved significantly in 2024 and 2025. Most owners are aware of this in a general sense. Very few have actually modeled what a refinance looks like for their specific properties with today's rates, their current equity position, and their investment timeline.

We run a refinance analysis on every property in the portfolio during the audit. The question is simple: can you lower your cost of capital, pull out equity for reinvestment, or restructure your debt to improve cash flow?

The answer isn't always yes. Sometimes the prepayment penalty kills the deal. Sometimes the current rate is close enough that the closing costs aren't worth it. But we have found refinance opportunities in roughly half the portfolios we audit.

One client was sitting on a 12-unit building with 45% equity and a 6.9% rate. Rates had come down. We modeled the refinance and identified a scenario where the owner lowered their payment by $380 per month, pulled out $95,000 in equity, and used that capital as a down payment on another property.

That isn't a small adjustment. That's a portfolio growth event triggered by a spreadsheet exercise that took two hours.

The Compound Effect

Here's what matters. None of these seven items alone is going to change your life. A $3,000 insurance savings is nice. A $2,500 vendor renegotiation helps. But add them all up.

On a typical 20 to 30-unit portfolio:

Rent adjustments: $10,000 to $18,000/year

Insurance shopping: $2,000 to $5,000/year

RUBS implementation: $12,000 to $18,000/year

Property tax appeal: $800 to $3,000/year

Vendor renegotiation: $2,000 to $5,000/year

Common area utility audit: $500 to $1,500/year

Total recoverable NOI: $27,300 to $50,500 per year.

Now run that through a cap rate. At a 7 cap, $30,000 in recovered NOI creates $428,571 in property value. On buildings you already own.

That's the compound effect of someone actually looking at every line item in your operating statement and asking, "Can we do better?" The answer is almost always yes. The question is whether anyone is asking.

The 90-Day Performance Guarantee

We stand behind this process. When we take on asset management for a portfolio, we commit to identifying specific, actionable improvements in the first 90 days. We show you the dollars. We show you the plan. We show you the timeline.

If we can't find meaningful NOI improvement in your portfolio, we will tell you that too. Not every building is mismanaged. Some owners are doing a great job. But in five years of doing this work, I have never completed a 90-day audit and come up empty.

Let Us Look at Your Numbers

If you own 5 to 50 units in the Omaha or Lincoln metro and nobody has done this exercise on your portfolio, you're almost certainly leaving money on the table. The only question is how much.

Reach out at Tanner@TopTierInvestmentFirm.com or connect with me on LinkedIn. Send me your unit count, general location, and a rough sense of your current NOI. I will tell you whether a full audit makes sense and what we typically find in similar portfolios.

No obligation. No pitch. Just a conversation about your numbers.

The money is there. Somebody just has to go find it.

If you own rental properties and you're not sure they're hitting their ceiling, let's talk. Reach out at Tanner@TopTierInvestmentFirm.com.

Tanner Sherman is the Principal and Managing Broker of Top Tier Investment Firm in Omaha, Nebraska. He co-hosts the Freedom Fighter Podcast with Ryan of Avara Investments.

The 90-Day Portfolio Audit: What We Find Every Time