Self Managing Out of State

[Satyam Mistry]

I will be closing on my first multi family property (4-plex) soon in south city St. Louis. I currently have 8 SFR in Omaha and self manage those, but this will be my first out of state investment as well. I have connected with a great agent in the area and he will be acting as the GC as the property needs a full rehab before occupancy.

I have good experience with managing my rentals in my local market and feel I can do the same with this new property as I should be able to find a couple reliable handymen through networking with other investors in the community, but am thinking the main thing would be finding someone that can show the property to prospective tenants. I feel if I can get someone to handle that part and go over the lease signing with them in person then I can self manage maintenance requests and rent collection being out of state. I am thinking I could have an agent do the showings and lease signings for a fee as I will still be the one that will be reviewing their applications.

Curious to know others advice and tips on this.

[Lee Ripma]

@Satyam Mistry

I’m glad you liked the episode! So you can totally do this, get the agent to show and sign the lease. I did my own background checks through smart move or TenantCloud. I actually had my units all set up on TenantCloud to pay me. If something went wrong I would sent someone over to fix it, so I did exactly what you are talking about (I think). What I found on the two properties I did this with, I’m just being honest here, I absolutely hated dealing with any calls from the tenants. I had an issue where one tenant was watching TV at 3 am on full blast because she worked nights and was deaf in one ear, was keeping up the other tenants. There was so much BS like that and I hated it. PM just isn’t my thing and I value my time too much to be dealing with something like that. I would much rather have a professional PM to be the go between and me never even know about issues!

The props that I have PM on I find actually cash flow better.

That property I’m describing - I sold it because I created a mess with self managing. I will only use professional PM from now on from the start.

So that’s my honest experience doing it myself. I won’t ever do it again. However, I know others who do it successfully. I guess it just comes down to how you see yourself in your business and what you want to spend your time doing.