I have a love/hate relationship with my PMC.

[Tamara Sorensen]

We own a single family house, our starter home that we have rented out for several years now. It's large 5 bedroom in a B+ neighborhood in a medium-to-high demand area. The property shows very well, has extensive landscaping and has some upgrades over the years. Every time we've had tenants switch over its been rented out quickly with qualified tenants. Rent is currently at $2250/month.

Our PMC does flat fee per unit rented and they charge us $95/month which is a steal of a deal I feel like. Recently I feel like the PMC is nickel and diming our tenants. They charge a $400 paperwork fee to tenants when signing the lease in addition to the deposit. When we've had tenants renew their lease the PMC has charged them $150. We recently had tenants moved out which were the best tenants we've ever had. They took care of the property, the place was in great condition whenever I was over there and never had late or missed rent in almost two years. The place was spotless when they moved out. They did send a handyman over to do some touchup paint and extra deep cleaning since the cleaning fee was not refundable. I just found out via our tenants that the PMC only returned $800 out of their $2300 deposit which has them understandably upset. There was a $300 mandatory cleaning fee, $300 break lease fee (they broke lease 1 month early) and a re-key fee but I have no idea where the rest went. 

There is not a copy of the lease in our owners portal and I suspect they charge excessive fee's to tenants in order to make up for their low fees that they charge the owners. I don't know whether to try managing this myself or find a different PMC? I understand that there should be reasonable fee's with regards to this but I also don't agree that they should be withholding 2/3rds of a $2250 deposit for tenants that left the place absolutely spotless. They have there upsides though. They are quick to respond, have screened and found qualified tenants and they are very pro-active about listing and marketing the property for tenant turnover. 

This year has been pretty abnormal for us in that there were some very large maintenance issues that occurred after the start of the year. The master showerpan failed and started leaking into the basement. I had to have a contractor there for more than a week and a half repairing the shower, the drywall and the adjacent walls. Tenants were very gracious about letting us get the repairs done. I've spent 5K-6k+ already on repairs on this house since the start of the year. I'm half tempted to try managing it myself for a year but we live two hours away so the logistics of tenant turnover are a concern. 

After having tenants that were so willing to let us get these out-of-ordinary repairs done it feels slimy to be having the PMC charge them these excessive fees. On the flip side we've dumped so much money into this property in the past few months I'm hesitant to change to a full service 10% fee PMC company. I've actually never seen the actual lease that our PMC uses. I feel a bit sheepish admitting that. I don't know if high fees for tenants are just normal when you use property management companies or if this is abnormal. Thoughts?