How do you handle the hiring of maintenance for rentals?

[Patrick Philip]

I was a property manager for a trailer park for 3.5 years. This job just ended on 10/1/18 (2 weeks ago). I did most of the maintenance, as well as finding all the tenants, collecting rent, filing evictions, etc.

I am no longer interested in being a property manager. But I probably am interested in being a landlord.

From what I'm hearing, property management companies don't even do the maintenance? What is that about? That's the bulk of the job and they don't even do it? I'm not about to pay someone 8-10% just to collect rent and find tenants. That's crazy.

But also, I can't imagine having to pay a licensed plumber for a service call every time some little thing goes wrong like a toilet tank bolt needs to be tightened, and I have to pay $300? That's also ridiculous.

How do you handle this? It's hard to find honest and reliable "handymen," not to mention the issues you might have doing unlicensed work on electrical, etc. For example, I can change an outlet in 5 minutes, but if I called an electrician, they would want $100/hour at least.

As a second part of this question: How does property management work on a large scale? For companies that own 100+ unit apartment buildings or hotels where the main offices of the company is 1000 miles away from the building? Do they have a maintenance staff on site? Do they let them live in one of the apartments or hotel rooms? (I've heard of people doing this in trailer parks). How does this work exactly?

How does BLACKSTONE do it?