Knowledge Base
Price Drift
Price drift is the gradual, often unnoticed increase in the prices a vendor charges a property for the same items or services over time, compounding across invoices until spend runs well above market.
How price drift happens
Drift is incremental by design. A vendor raises a part price a few percent; a service rate ticks up between contracts; a substitute item posts at a higher price than the original. Each change is too small to trip an approval threshold, and multifamily's transaction profile — thousands of small charges across dozens of vendors — gives every increase a place to hide. No one decided to overpay. The property simply kept approving invoices that were each slightly worse than the last, and the compounding did the rest.
Why drift goes undetected
The standard controls all compare a price to itself. Budget variance checks actuals against a budget built from last year's drifted actuals. Approval workflows check invoices against thresholds, not against market. Even contract pricing decays as off-contract items and substitutions accumulate. The only reference drift cannot fool is an external one: the current market price for the same item, checked line by line. That is the comparison a vendor invoice audit makes, and it is the core mechanism of The Benchmark — every R&M line, priced against verified suppliers, every quarter.
Common mistakes
Reviewing only large invoices misses the point — drift lives in the small ones, where scrutiny never reaches. Trusting a signed contract as permanent protection ignores how much spend migrates off-contract within a year. Checking prices once and declaring victory just restarts the clock: drift is a rate, not an event, which is why the counter has to be recurring. And blaming vendors misses the mechanism; drift is what prices do when no one is assigned to watch them.
Related terms
Start with one property and one quarter
Send us a quarter of invoices and we will show you what it should have cost. If there is nothing there, we will tell you that too.
