How To Starting Property Management in TN

[Michael Hooper]

I'm growing my portfolio in the Middle TN area. I will soon have 20 properties in my portfolio, which isn't quite enough to justify quitting my fulltime job to self manage, but I would like to take on the properties of some of my friends who also own rentals and start marketing to take on more clients. However, after looking into it, it looks like there's a requirement to be real estate broker in TN, which would require a license and 3 years holding that license before you can manage other people's properties.

So my question is, does this sound correct? Can I not manage without a license? It did seem like maybe I could do much of the property management tasks except showing and negotiating properties, but coordinating payment, repairs, etc I could do. Can anyone confirm?

Also, I don't really have any desire to work as a realtor, is this something where I can just employee a realtor (broker) and that satisfy the requirement. I was really excited about starting this up, but as I started looking into it, there seems to be a lot of red tape.