Managing Our Own Property (License Required?)

[Steven Lewis]

Hello everyone!  This is my first post on the forums (despite surfing the site for many months now), so please bear with me.

As an up-front comment, we are considering the advantages/implications of property holding LLCs and trusts, but that is a topic for a different time. For this forum thread, we're solely focused on the management LLC.

We will soon be moving out of our primary residence and turning it into a rental (in South Carolina, where we live currently and will remain). To learn the ropes, we will be self-managing and would like to do this via a property management LLC. This LLC would theoretically manage all our future investment buy-and-hold rentals as well. Of note, we WILL NOT be managing anyone else's properties. This LLC will provide a nice "barrier" by serving as the main point of contact for all tenant-related issues and would hopefully limit the amount of calls received directly to our personal phones/emails/etc. Additionally, we want to the rental checks/etc. to be made out to something more official than our personal names/bank accounts.

So, with that in mind, here's the question. Do we require a license to set up a property management (PM) LCC, through which, we only manage our own properties. South Carolina requires a PM license, but it only references managing other landlord's property, not self-managing. If a license is required, could this be avoided by naming the LLC something that doesn't use a protected term like "Real Estate" or "Property Management" (if those terms are truly protected)?

If anyone has any personal experience supported by specific sources, references, case law, etc., that would be terrific!  I look forward to the discussion!

Cheers,

Steve