A family in Medina called us last year wanting to hire a house manager. They’d gotten proposals from a few different agencies and they were shocked at the compensation ranges. “Why are you quoting us $95,000 when another agency said they could find someone for $65,000?” the husband asked. “We’re not stupid with money. Why would we pay $30,000 more per year for basically the same role?”
I get it. When you see a huge price difference for what seems like the same thing, obviously you question whether the expensive option is actually worth it. That’s just basic financial sense.
But here’s what I told them, and what I’d tell any family looking at household staffing costs: the cheapest candidate almost always ends up costing you way more money than the qualified candidate you should’ve hired in the first place. I’m not talking about paying extra for luxury or prestige. I’m talking about actual cost-benefit analysis over time.
Let me walk through the real math, because families consistently underestimate what cheap hires actually cost them.
The restart costs add up fast
When you hire someone underqualified or inexperienced to save money, they usually don’t last long. Maybe they get overwhelmed and quit. Maybe you realize after a few months they can’t actually do the job. Maybe they cause problems that force you to let them go.
Now you’re starting your search over. You’re paying agency fees again if you used an agency. You’re investing time in interviews again. You’re doing reference checks and background checks again. You’re training someone new again.
That family in Medina? They hired the $65,000 candidate from the other agency. She lasted five months before they realized she was in way over her head. They came back to us, we found them someone properly qualified at $92,000, and that person’s still with them two years later doing excellent work.
But they paid fees twice. They spent five months with inadequate household management where things were constantly slipping through cracks. They invested all the time and energy into hiring twice. And they paid the cheaper house manager for five months for subpar work.
Add it all up and they spent way more money than if they’d just hired the right person from the beginning. Plus all the stress and frustration of dealing with someone who couldn’t actually manage their household properly.
The mistakes cost real money
Underqualified household staff make expensive mistakes. They hire vendors who do shoddy work because they don’t know how to vet properly. They miss maintenance issues that turn into major repairs. They don’t negotiate effectively so you overpay for services. They create systems that waste money through inefficiency.
A house manager who doesn’t know what they’re doing might hire the first contractor who gives them a quote instead of getting multiple competitive bids. That extra $5,000 or $10,000 on a project adds up fast. Over a year, bad vendor decisions can easily cost you $20,000 to $30,000 or more.
A qualified house manager who knows what they’re doing saves you money through smart vendor management, preventive maintenance, efficient systems, and good judgment. The difference between someone who’s actually experienced and someone who’s just cheap pays for itself pretty quickly.
We saw this play out dramatically with a Seattle family who hired someone inexpensive to manage their two properties. The house manager missed signs of water damage in their vacation home because she didn’t know what to look for during property checks. By the time the damage was caught, they were looking at a $75,000 remediation and repair bill.
A more experienced estate manager would’ve caught that early when it was a $5,000 fix. The “savings” from hiring cheap literally cost them $70,000 in preventable damage.
Your time has value too
When you hire someone who can’t actually manage your household independently, you end up spending huge amounts of your own time overseeing them, fixing their mistakes, handling things they should be handling, and generally doing the job you hired them to do.
That’s not just annoying – it’s expensive. Your time has value. If you’re spending 10 hours a week dealing with household management stuff because your house manager isn’t competent, that’s 40 hours a month. That’s a part-time job you’re doing on top of your actual work.
For lots of wealthy families, the opportunity cost of that time is enormous. You could be focusing on your career, your business, your investments, your family. Instead you’re managing vendors and dealing with household logistics because the person you hired to do that isn’t capable of it.
One of the things families tell us most often about really good house managers or estate managers is “they freed up so much of my time.” That’s the whole point. You hire someone excellent so you don’t have to think about this stuff anymore. But if you hire someone cheap who can’t actually run your household independently, you’re still doing the work yourself while also paying someone to sort of help.
The stress is its own cost
Living with inadequate household management is stressful. Things fall through cracks. You’re constantly worried about what’s not getting done. You can’t actually relax about household operations because you know someone isn’t really on top of it.
I’m not going to try to put a dollar value on that stress, but it’s real. Wealthy families hire household staff specifically to reduce life stress and complexity. When the staff you hired aren’t actually making your life easier, you’re paying money to stay stressed. That’s the worst possible outcome.
The families we work with who have excellent house managers or estate managers consistently say the same thing – it’s so worth it to not have to think about household stuff anymore. Everything just works. They trust that operations are being handled well. That peace of mind is valuable.
Quality scales with pay
Here’s a reality of household staffing markets: the best professionals command higher compensation because they’re actually better at the work. This isn’t arbitrary. It’s supply and demand.
An estate manager with ten years of excellent experience managing complex households, proven vendor relationships, strong systems, and impeccable references can get $110,000 to $130,000 in Seattle because families who’ve worked with great household staff know what that’s worth.
The candidates available at $65,000 are available at that price point for a reason. Maybe they’re early in their careers without much experience. Maybe they’ve struggled in previous positions. Maybe they don’t have the skills that command higher pay. Sometimes you find diamonds in the rough, but usually cheap candidates are cheap because they can’t get higher offers.
When you hire at the bottom of the market, you get bottom-of-the-market quality. That’s not snobbery – it’s just how labor markets work. The truly excellent household professionals aren’t desperate for jobs at low pay. They have multiple options at competitive rates.
When “savings” make sense vs. when they don’t
I’m not saying you should never hire someone less experienced or that you have to pay top-of-market rates for every household position. Sometimes it genuinely makes sense to hire someone earlier in their career and develop them.
If your household needs are relatively simple, if you have time to train and supervise, if you’re okay with someone learning on the job, hiring someone less expensive can work out fine. You’re making a deliberate choice to invest in development rather than paying for established expertise.
But if you need someone who can independently manage complex household operations from day one, if you have multiple properties or significant household complexity, if you don’t have time to supervise closely, trying to save money by hiring the cheapest candidate almost always backfires.
Be honest about what you actually need and what you’re capable of providing in terms of supervision and training. Don’t hire someone entry-level for a role that requires real expertise and then be surprised when they can’t do the job.
The Seattle market specifically
Seattle’s household staffing market is competitive and expensive. Cost of living is high. Housing is absurdly expensive. Qualified household professionals know what they should be earning.
Families trying to hire house managers or estate managers at significantly below-market rates usually either can’t find anyone qualified willing to take the position, or they end up with people who can’t get better offers for legitimate reasons.
You can absolutely find people willing to work for less than market rates. But ask yourself why someone capable would accept substantially less than they could get elsewhere. Sometimes the answer is fine – they’re new to the field, they’re making a career change, they have other priorities that make lower pay acceptable. But often the answer is that they’re not actually capable of commanding higher compensation.
What you’re actually paying for
When you hire a truly qualified house manager or estate manager, here’s what you’re getting that cheap candidates don’t provide:
Someone who can independently run your household without constant supervision. Someone who has established vendor relationships and knows how to vet new vendors. Someone who can anticipate problems before they become crises. Someone with systems for managing everything from maintenance to inventory to scheduling. Someone with good judgment who makes smart decisions. Someone with experience who’s seen enough household situations to handle whatever comes up.
That’s not the same as someone willing to try their best for $65,000. Trying hard is great but it doesn’t replace years of experience and proven capabilities.
The right household manager literally pays for themselves through the money they save you on vendor negotiations, preventive maintenance, efficient operations, and smart decision-making. Plus they give you back huge amounts of time and mental energy. When you look at it that way, paying appropriately for excellent candidates isn’t an expense – it’s an investment that returns value.
The math that actually matters
Here’s how to think about household staffing costs. If you pay $30,000 more per year for a qualified house manager versus a cheap one, that’s real money. But if the qualified person saves you $10,000 through better vendor management, prevents $20,000 in maintenance issues through good systems, and frees up 20 hours a month of your time that you can use for higher-value activities, they’re paying for themselves.
The cheap hire might seem like savings on paper but they cost you money through mistakes, through time you have to spend compensating for their inadequacy, through restart costs when they don’t work out, and through the opportunity cost of not having someone actually excellent managing your household.
Families who understand this math hire appropriately and keep excellent household staff for years. Families who just look at base salary numbers and hire cheap end up in cycles of hiring, disappointment, turnover, and searching again.
That family in Medina gets it now. They told us recently they wish they’d just listened to us from the beginning. The five months with inadequate household management wasn’t worth the attempted savings, and they ended up paying more overall anyway.
You don’t have to make the same mistake. Pay what excellent household staff are actually worth. You’ll save money in the long run and you’ll actually get what you hired someone to provide – a household that runs smoothly without you having to manage it yourself.
