How to Reduce Telecom Costs for Your Property Management Company

If you run a property management company and someone told you that you were likely overpaying 25–40% on your phone systems, internet, and mobile devices, you’d probably want to know where the money was going. But most PMC owners have never looked. Telecom is the line item that gets paid every month without review—not because the amounts are trivial, but because the bills are confusing, the contracts are opaque, and nobody on the team considers it their job to optimize.

The result is that property management companies routinely carry thousands of dollars a month in telecom waste: services nobody uses, hardware nobody needs, contracts that auto-renewed at rates nobody negotiated, and legacy technology that has cheaper, better replacements available today. Across a portfolio of several properties, these costs compound quietly until someone finally pulls all the bills together and realizes the total is double what it should be.

Why property management companies overpay on telecom

Property management has a structural problem with telecom that most other industries don’t: you’re managing communications infrastructure across multiple physical locations, often with different vendors, different contracts, and different people responsible for each one. A retail chain with 10 stores would centralize their telecom under a single contract with volume pricing. A PMC with 10 properties typically has 10 separate setups, each one acquired piecemeal when the property came under management, and nobody has stepped back to look at the whole picture since.

Add to this the reality of how telecom contracts work. Most are multi-year agreements that auto-renew with built-in escalators. If nobody flags the renewal date, the contract rolls forward—often at a higher rate than what’s currently available in the market. The vendors are not incentivized to call you and offer a lower price. You have to know when your contracts expire, what comparable rates look like, and how to negotiate. Most PMC operators don’t have time for that, so the contracts just keep renewing.

Then there’s the technology lag. Property management is not an industry that moves fast on infrastructure upgrades. It’s common to find phone systems and services that were state-of-the-art a decade ago still running today—not because they’re the best option, but because they still work and nobody has made the case to change them. The problem is that “still works” and “costs what it should” are two very different things.

Where the waste actually hides

We call these the Five Telecom Waste Buckets—the predictable areas where PMC telecom overspending concentrates. Nearly every portfolio we audit has waste in at least three of them.

The frustrating thing about telecom waste is that it’s rarely one big, obvious expense. It’s a death by a thousand cuts—dozens of small charges across multiple accounts and properties that individually seem minor but collectively add up to serious money. Here’s where we most commonly find it.

POTS lines that nobody uses anymore

POTS—plain old telephone service—refers to traditional copper landlines. These were once essential for every property office, gate call box, elevator emergency phone, fire alarm panel, and fax machine. Today, most of these applications have alternatives that cost a fraction of the price. Cellular adapters can replace copper lines for alarm panels and elevators. VoIP handles office phones at a fraction of the cost. Fax machines can be replaced entirely by digital fax services or, in most cases, simply retired.

Yet many PMCs are still paying $50–$100+ per month per POTS line—and some properties have four or five of them still active, connected to equipment that hasn’t been used in years. Multiply that across a portfolio and you’re looking at hundreds or thousands per month in charges for copper lines that serve no purpose.

Legacy phone system contracts

On-premise phone systems—the kind with a physical PBX box in a closet—often come with maintenance contracts, licensing fees, and per-line charges that escalate annually. These systems were expensive to install and are expensive to maintain, and the contracts are structured to make it painful to leave. Modern cloud-based phone systems (VoIP) deliver better functionality—auto-attendants, call routing, mobile integration, voicemail-to-email—at a lower monthly cost with no hardware to maintain.

The transition from a legacy system to VoIP isn’t always trivial, but the math almost always favors it. The companies that delay the switch are paying a premium for the privilege of using older, less capable technology.

Internet service nobody has right-sized

When internet service was set up at each property—possibly years ago—someone chose a speed tier based on what seemed right at the time. Since then, pricing has changed, bandwidth needs have shifted, and the provider has likely introduced new plans. But nobody went back to check. The property office paying for a 500 Mbps business plan when 200 Mbps would be more than sufficient is overpaying every month for capacity it doesn’t use. Conversely, some properties are on plans that are too slow for current needs, creating productivity problems that nobody has connected to the internet tier.

The fix is simple in concept: audit the actual bandwidth usage at each property, compare it to the current plan, and right-size. In practice, most PMCs have never done this because nobody tracks internet performance across properties as a centralized function.

Mobile devices and data plans sitting idle

PMCs often provide mobile phones or tablets to maintenance staff, property managers, or leasing agents. Over time, people leave, roles change, and devices end up in desk drawers—but the service plans keep billing. It’s not uncommon to find a PMC paying for five or ten mobile lines that haven’t been actively used in months. Some companies are also carrying data plans on tablets that were deployed for a specific purpose (showing units, digital lease signing) that have since been replaced by personal devices or other tools.

This is pure waste, and it’s invisible until someone matches the device inventory against the billing records and asks: “Who is using this line, and when did they last use it?”

No volume leverage across properties

A PMC managing 15 properties might have phone service from three different providers, internet from four, and mobile plans scattered across two carriers—all on separate accounts with separate contracts negotiated at different times. None of them reflect the company’s actual purchasing power.

Consolidating to fewer vendors and negotiating based on total volume across all properties almost always produces better rates. The providers want multi-location accounts. They’ll discount to get them. But someone has to do the work of inventorying everything, identifying the consolidation opportunities, and running the negotiation.

Services billed through to properties without review

Some PMCs keep telecom services in their own name and bill the costs back to the properties they manage. In theory, this is fine. In practice, it means the telecom costs are a pass-through that nobody on either side scrutinizes. The management company doesn’t feel the pain because the cost isn’t coming out of their margin. The property owner doesn’t know enough about the telecom setup to question individual line items. The result is a bill that goes unexamined for years. This kind of organizational blind spot is rarely limited to telecom—it’s a symptom of a broader gap between what leadership sees and what the operation actually experiences. (See Why Your Team Won’t Tell You What’s Broken.)

Duplicate and redundant services

This one sounds like it shouldn’t happen, but it does—more often than you’d expect. A property transitions from one phone system to another, but the old lines never get disconnected. Two internet providers are active at the same location because someone ordered a backup circuit during a service outage and nobody cancelled it after the primary was restored. A fax line is still active even though the team switched to digital fax two years ago. Each of these is a small amount. Together, they add up.

How to audit your telecom spend

The good news is that finding the waste isn’t technically complicated. It’s tedious, detail-oriented work—but the pattern is straightforward.

Step 1: Build a complete inventory

Collect every telecom bill across every property your company manages or operates. Phone, internet, mobile, fax, alarm lines, elevator lines, gate systems—everything. This is the step most companies have never done, and it’s where the biggest surprises live. You need to know, for every service: what it is, where it is, who uses it, what it costs, when the contract expires, and whether it auto-renews.

Step 2: Identify what’s active vs. what’s actually in use

Having a service that’s “active” doesn’t mean someone is using it. Check every POTS line, every mobile device, every data plan against actual usage. Call each number and see what answers. Check mobile device management to see when each device was last powered on. Ask your team: “Do you know what this line is connected to?” If nobody knows, that’s your answer.

Step 3: Flag the easy wins

Before you negotiate anything or change any systems, there are usually quick cuts available: disconnecting unused lines, cancelling idle mobile plans, dropping add-on features nobody uses (premium voicemail, international calling plans on domestic-only lines, fax service bundles). These are savings you can capture in the first billing cycle with nothing more than a phone call to the provider.

Step 4: Right-size and renegotiate

Once you know what you actually need, compare it to what you’re paying. Get current market rates from competing providers. Contact your existing vendors with a clear picture of your total spend across all properties and ask for volume pricing. Most vendors would rather give you a discount than lose a multi-location account. If they won’t negotiate, now you have the inventory to make a clean switch.

Step 5: Evaluate technology replacements

Some savings require infrastructure changes—replacing a legacy PBX with a cloud phone system, swapping POTS lines for cellular adapters, or upgrading to a unified communications platform. These have upfront costs but typically pay for themselves within a few months through lower ongoing expenses and better functionality.

Modernize while you cut

The best version of this project isn’t just about reducing what you spend. It’s about improving how your team communicates while spending less. Those two things aren’t in tension—they’re usually the same project.

A modern cloud phone system costs less than a legacy PBX and gives your team features they don’t have today: calls that ring on their mobile when they’re out of the office, voicemails delivered as email transcriptions, auto-attendants that route residents to the right person without a receptionist, and call analytics that show you response times by property. A unified communications platform replaces the scattered mix of email, text, phone, and messaging apps with clean channels that make critical information findable and keep noise out of the way.

The cost reduction gets your CFO or owner on board. The operational improvement is what actually changes how your team works. Do both at the same time and you’ve made a case that pays for itself twice. (For more on this broader topic, see How to Reduce Employee Turnover in Property Management—communications friction is one of the invisible drivers of dissatisfaction that pushes people out.)

Where to start

If you manage fewer than five properties, you can probably do the initial audit yourself in a day. Pull every telecom bill from the last three months, build a spreadsheet, and walk through the steps above. The waste will be obvious.

If you manage more than that—or if your telecom setup spans multiple vendors, legacy systems, and a mix of services you’ve inherited from previous management—the audit gets time-consuming fast. The inventory alone can take days of calling providers, tracking down account numbers, and matching bills to physical locations. It’s the kind of project that keeps getting deprioritized because there’s always something more urgent, even though the waste keeps accruing every month you wait.

That’s the work we do. We audit, inventory, and optimize telecom infrastructure for property management companies—and the savings we find typically cover the cost of the engagement several times over. But the audit is just the starting point. Without ongoing management, telecom costs creep back up through auto-renewals, orphan lines, and rate escalators that operate whenever nobody is watching. Telecom is often just one piece of a broader operational picture—see How to Audit Your Property Management Operations for the full framework.

This article was originally published in March 2026 and is reviewed quarterly for accuracy. Last updated March 2026.