Should you hire a property manager, or keep self-managing?

Hire one when the work, the legal exposure or the distance costs you more than the fee. RL Property Management charges $117 to $184 per unit per month with a $0 leasing fee, which on a $1,650 rent is 8.3% of gross rent for the year. Self-managing a single nearby unit with a stable resident is a reasonable choice. Managing several units remotely, while working full time, usually is not.

Sometimes. The honest test is arithmetic plus tolerance. A year of management on Plan Two costs about the same as 30 days of vacancy at $1,650 rent, so if a manager leases the unit meaningfully faster, or renews a resident you would have lost, the fee can pay for itself. If the unit is around the corner, the resident is long-tenured, and the paperwork is current, self-managing that one property is defensible.

It depends on the property, the resident and the month, and the hours-per-unit figures circulated online are not traceable to any published study. What is predictable is the shape rather than the total: quiet months are close to zero, and a turn, a major repair or a nonpaying resident consumes far more time than a year of quiet ones.

Eight jobs: marketing and leasing, screening applicants within fair housing law, rent collection and late notices, maintenance coordination including after-hours emergencies, inspections, Ohio landlord-tenant compliance, accounting and year-end reporting, and evictions when they are needed. Each of those is listed out on this page so you can run them yourself if you decide to.

Screening loosely, and then acting slowly when it goes wrong. A resident who stops paying in month three costs the unpaid rent, the $273 eviction hard cost in Franklin County, the vacancy while the unit is turned, and the repairs. Roughly 3.5% of rentals reach eviction, litigation or another significant dispute, so the question is not whether it happens, it is what your process does when it does.

You can, and the failure mode is predictable: you end up dependent on whichever contractor answers the phone, with nobody who has physically seen the property since the last resident moved in. Remote self-management works when you have a trusted local person who will walk the unit. Without that, the distance is the problem, not the workload.

Nothing to start on an occupied unit: our startup fee is $0. On a vacant unit the fee varies by unit count and plan and is quoted in writing before you sign. A maintenance reserve of $350 to $1,500 per unit is held on your account so routine repairs do not wait on a funding request, and it stays your money.

Not automatically, and any manager who promises that is guessing. What a manager changes is time on market, renewal rate and collection discipline. Across our portfolio that runs 20 median days on market, a 72% renewal rate, 91% occupancy and 96% of rent collected by the 5th. Ask any manager for their numbers and the definition behind each one.

Price the property honestly, then run the vacancy math. A free rent evaluation gives you a written rent range and the comparables behind it, and it is yours to keep whether you hire us, hire someone else or keep managing it yourself. Portfolio medians across the 700+ units we manage are $1,300 for a 2 bed and $1,708 for a 3 bed.