After-hours rate
The higher price a vendor charges for work at night, on weekends or on holidays, sometimes called an emergency service charge.
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An after-hours rate is what a vendor charges for coming out outside normal business hours. It can be a higher hourly rate, a flat emergency service charge on top of the normal one, a minimum number of billable hours, or all three. Vendors set their own, and they vary by trade and by area.
The rate itself is rarely the problem. The surprise is. A property owner who sees a night invoice with no explanation asks why, and a manager who didn’t agree the rate in advance has no good answer.
An example
A tenant texts about a dripping faucet at 9:30 PM ET on a Saturday. Sent out that night, the plumber bills the weekend emergency charge. Booked for Monday morning, the same repair costs the normal rate. The job is identical, and the only thing that changed is whether it was treated as an emergency.
How to keep it under control
- Agree every vendor’s after-hours rate and minimum in writing before the first job
- Write down what counts as an emergency, so a dripping faucet waits for the morning
- Tell the tenant when to expect a call when a job waits
- Show the night rate and the reason on the owner’s report
How Now Ours handles it
You decide what counts as an emergency, per property. Everything else waits for the morning, and the tenant is told when to expect a call. On Cautious, the default, Ours asks you before it picks a vendor or spends money, and every message is recorded on the case with the time.