What is normal as far as fees from a property management company?

[Richard Bateman]

I've been working with a "turn-key" real estate company that I've been very happy with up until this point, but today they gave me the actual agreement for the asset management on-going portion and there were a couple of surprises.

First, the company wants to garnish 12% of the rent into a trust that they manage in order to build up funds to pay for maintenance items, etc; this is of course still my money, just kept by them so there isn't a problem of maintenance needed but me not able to pay it.  Second, the company wants first a leasing fee any time they replace the tenant equivalent to 100% of a months rent and then a re-leasing fee each time they renew a lease of 50% of a months rent.  This seems awfully high for something that will require at worst a few hours of work.

Is this at all typical? I don't have a binding contract with this company; I've been happy with them so far, but I'm feeling like they are doing a bait and switch by springing this on me last minute and claiming it is standard, hoping I'll be too inexperienced (and I nearly am) to know the difference.

I'm in the "we all have to start somewhere" stage of real estate investing -- this is my first property.  Any advice?