How to Pick a Property Management Company: The 5-Step Process

Choosing a property manager is a decision that affects the value of your asset, and most owners make it after two phone calls and a gut feeling. This is the process we would use, laid out as five steps. Peter walks through several of them on video below.

A note on what follows: this is written to be useful whoever you end up hiring. If you work the process properly and choose someone else, the process still did its job.

The five steps

1. Determine what you actually need
2. Evaluate the marketplace
3. Research the top ten and narrow down
4. Call five companies
5. Meet with one or two

Step 1: Determine what you actually need

Before you look at a single company, get clear on what you are buying. An owner with one condo two miles away and an owner with nine houses in four suburbs are not shopping for the same service, and a manager who is excellent for one can be a poor fit for the other.

Work out where you sit on a few questions. How hands-on do you want to be, and how much repair spending do you want to approve personally? Is the property a long-term hold or something you might sell in two years? Do you need someone who can handle an association, a student rental, or a property that needs work before it will lease? What is your own time worth, and how much of it are you currently spending?

The answers narrow the field before you have looked at anyone.

Step 2: Evaluate the marketplace

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The goal here is to build a list of companies with a clear, active local presence, then cut it to about ten.

Start by finding every professional management company in your market that looks genuinely active: a maintained website, recent listings, a blog or social presence that is not three years stale. Discard anyone part-time, and anyone for whom management is clearly a sideline to sales. Management is an operations business and it does not run well as a side hustle.

Places to look:

• Who is advertising on Google for management terms in your market
• BiggerPockets
• NARPM.org
• Ask every agent you know for a referral
• Ask anyone you know who owns rental property
• Ask your real estate attorney, CPA or banker

While you are looking, start learning the local vocabulary and the local pricing. What do leasing and placement fees run? Who keeps the resident’s late fees? What does an eviction cost, and who pays for it? You cannot evaluate a quote until you know what normal looks like.

Check your state’s requirements too. Ohio requires a real estate brokerage licence to manage property for others, and there is a public licence lookup. Find out whether the companies on your list are licensed and whether they hold client funds in a proper trust account.

One rough sizing signal: the number of active listings on a company’s own site. More listings usually means a larger operation. Decide whether that is what you want, because large and small both have real trade-offs.

Narrow to about ten.

Step 3: Research the top ten and narrow down

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Now do proper due diligence, and do as much of it as you can before you speak to anybody’s salesperson. You would not buy a property without an inspection. A manager can affect the value of that property just as much.

For each of the ten:

• Read whatever they have published. Blogs, videos, guides. It tells you how they think and how much they actually know.
• Look hard at their rental listings. Are the photos good? Are the descriptions detailed? That is exactly the marketing your unit will get.
• Drive past a few properties they manage, if you can identify them.
• Read the reviews, with a clear head. Angry people write reviews, so look for patterns rather than reacting to the worst one.
• Search the company name, and search the owner or principal broker by name.
• Verify the licence on your state’s lookup.
• Work out what their primary focus is. Single-family? Small multifamily? Associations? Commercial? You want someone whose main business is your kind of property.

Cut the list to three to five, and write down their phone numbers.

Step 4: Call five companies

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Call them all, during business hours, and notice what happens. How long it takes someone to pick up, and who picks up, is data. You are about to hand this company your residents’ first impression of you.

Go in with questions written down: the general ones you would ask anyone, plus whatever stood out about that specific company in step 3. If their fees are not published, that is one of your questions, and how readily they answer it is another piece of data.

Ask what the management agreement actually commits both sides to, what happens when a resident stops paying, how maintenance gets approved and billed, and what their average time to lease is. Ask for numbers, and notice who gives you one.

Step 5: Meet with one or two

By now you should have a clear top two. Meet them, in person if you can, and use the meeting for the things a phone call cannot settle.

Walk your actual property with them and see what they notice. Ask what they would do to it before listing, and what they would price it at, and why. A manager who tells you a number you do not want to hear, with a reason attached, is worth more than one who agrees with you.

Read the management agreement before the meeting and bring your questions about it. Pay particular attention to the term, what it costs to leave, who approves repairs and at what threshold, and every fee that is not the monthly fee.

Then pick. If two are genuinely close, choose the one whose answers were most specific.

Where to go deeper

We have written a longer, Columbus-specific version of this with the exact questions worth asking and what a fee schedule should disclose: How to choose a property manager in Columbus. If you would rather start with the numbers, our pricing is published in full, including the charges that only come up in a bad month.