Columbus, OH - Costs of Managing Property

[Kristina Anderson]

This is our first post!  

My husband and I are in the process of researching the Columbus, OH real estate market, with hopes of purchasing an investment property by the end of 2019. We are based on the East Coast. We need help navigating the nuances of a new market, particularly the costs associated with managing property. Specifically: 

1) what should we expect to pay for a property manager? How does this scale up for larger properties (vs. duplexes)? 

2) what utilities / services are we required to pay as landlords that we may not be thinking of? (i.e., is garbage collection a separate cost or embedded into RE Taxes? Is there a separate sewer cost?). 

3) in smaller buildings, can we expect tenants to do maintenance like shoveling snow in the driveway or mowing the lawn or is that something landlords do?

We don't have a specific property in mind, yet and are open to both duplexes as well as larger residential apartment buildings. If the cap rate works. Any help outlining the "extra" expenses we'll be looking at would be helpful.  (Note: we currently own and live in a 3 family and already understand about surprise costs. We just don't know how the Columbus area works in terms of what our P&L will look like in terms of the L side.)

Thanks to all!

Tina

[Harvey Yergin IV]

Hi Kristina! Columbus is a great market with a ton of competent professionals to help you on your journey. I use a fantastic property manager and  they charge about $85/month for full service property management. I've enjoyed working with them. 

Garbage is a separate thing usually. Depending on which city you are in (Columbus or a surrounding suburb), it may be wrapped up in your city utility bill (i.e. with water/sewer in Westerville) or included with prop taxes (Columbus). Either way, it's custom that tenants are either directly responsible for utilities or billed for utilities (usually just water) to reimburse owner. The owner of course would be on the hook for utilities in a shared/common space. 

Most of our tenants understand that they are responsible for grass and snow.

Hopefully you never have a "L side" :) A big thing would be to look up the actual property taxes when you're running your numbers. You can find all Franklin County addresses here: http://property.franklincountyauditor.com/_web/sea...

Depending on which city you're in and the nature of your deal, your tax liability could be a higher percentage of your costs than you may be used to. 

Any other questions, fire them my way! :)