That sounds like a bad rule of thumb, since house values are largely driven by location, and repair costs aren't. Well, not as much, anyway. I'd go more by size of the house.
We live in an 1800 square foot house. Stuff that we absolutely had to do over the last 10 years:
Replaced the roof. This ran $10k.
Replace the water heaters (we've got 2, running in parallel). $2k.
Replace a damaged gutter. I overpaid for this with covered gutters, I'm not sure what the minimum cost for regular gutters would have been.
Remove a dead tree that was threatening the garage. $900.
About $12,000 over 10 years is for small stuff. $50-$100 expenses for little things like fixing a doorbell.
I'd say we had about $2,600 / year in expenses that were unavoidable ($220 / month).
By way of comparison, our house cost $465k when we bought it in 2003, and is worth roughly $650k-$700k today according to Zillow. Expenses have not climbed as the house value climbed.