Questions about starting out in property management...

[Adam M.]

I've been thinking about giving property management a shot. I see a lot of managers post saying they have 50-80 doors.

How long does it take to get to that level?

How many did you acquire in your 1st, 2nd, 3rd year?

What are you goals each year to grow?

Does FB/Google CPC advertising draw solid leads? What type of ROI are you seeing from that?

How many units per client do you manage?

$/month per client?

I don't have a lot of money and would be doing this on the side until my business grew and being very technically literate I would want to do my best to have solid SAAS based systems (Appfolio/Buildium, Pipdrive/Salesforce, etc.) in place from the get go. Trying to figure out how long I will be burning cash until I am break even and how much I should budget for lead generation.

[Alex Craig]

@Adam M.  I own a PM company and can say this is a very easy business to grow, mostly because most PM's are not customer serviced (tenants and owners) and are not good business owners.  If you manage for out of state, follow these 3 rules and you will not lose clients and will pick up a bunch if you are good at marketing. 

1) Over Communicate -- do not leave your office until you answer your investors emails and return their calls

2) Transparency in everything you do, especially maintenance. If there is an maintenance issue, take before and after pictures. Be transparent on your billing and let your investors know immediately when an maintenance issues is submitted. On your billing, break out materials and labor.  Most PM's get greedy here and over charge.  PM profits are volume in #'s under mgmt. Not over charging and gouging.

3) Treat every property as if it was your own.

Assuming you know the business inside and out, if you do these 3 things, you will grow your business and retain all your clients. We have lost 1 client (not including ones who sold their properties for reasons nothing to do with mgmt) since January 2016 and added 150 properties.