Do you outsource your tenant screening/placement by using a realtor?

[Bryan N.]

I use postlets and CL for advertising, show the place myself, screen myself, and hand the keys over myself.  I've often wondered if using a realtor to outsource this is worthwhile.  

[Account Closed]

For my out of state rentals I have a good PM who does it all. For Bay Area rentals, we do it ourselves but its really easy. I just put my townhouse for rent and within one week had it rented at the asking price (over $3K) to an engineer who works at Apple who makes over $150K per year. I advertised on postlets and CL and had my first calls minutes after posting. Our other BA rental is a SFH and thats similarly easy to rent at high rental values and has high quality tenants as well. So in a market like that, why pay a commission? My Indiana rentals are different. Screening is harder, many showings have to be done and of course I am remote so impossible to do myself. However even if I lived in Indy I would probably not want to deal with that class of tenant personally. So if I am local and have high end(A+ category) rentals, I am happy to self manage. The lower end stuff I'd rather have a PM insulate me from the chaos!