Property Manager or Self manage?

Question

I am interested to here if you Self Manage or have a property Manager manage your properties & Why you decided to do either or?

Me personal I have a property manager run it mine. I don't have the time from my normal job, Family, & church responsibilities.  Also my property manager lets me know how other deals which gives me opportunities to investment in more properties.  It might be something I look at doing my one Self management down the road but with only 2 properties it is hard to justify the time.

Stacey Mollinet · Answer

@Lance Jorgenson I took a good landlord class with the Utah apartment association which helped me learn what to do. The best thing is to charge an application fee to cover a background check. Also have a requirements list that they get with the application - rent can be max 30% of income, max number of people in unit, full deposit required before moving in, no drug or sexual convictions, no bankruptcies or evictions in the past 5 years. Call and check references - confirm job and talk to current landlord. The first to apply and qualify gets the unit. I show those units I manage close to me. A no show is an auto rejection. The market is tight and it fills pretty quickly.  Make sure utilities are in their name before giving them keys. I also give a $5 discount for paying before the 1st and a $5 discount for either depositing it in my account or auto depositing. Totally worth it.

Karen F. · Answer

If you have an understanding of how to do it, then you are far better off self-managing those that are close to home. We self-manage about 30 units, make much more money out of them than we would have if we'd paid a property manager. It's very common to be taken for a lot of money  by a property management company.  BTW, my friend has property in Springville, UT.  He lives out of the country.  He FINALLY got a really great property management company in place for his units, is very happy with it.  If you're not happy with who you're using in Provo, send me a message.

Stacey Mollinet · Answer

I self managed my two rentals that were close (within 15 minutes) and have a property manager for my properties that are far away (one two hours away and the others out of state). If you do the screening right so you have good tenants that pay rent on time, there’s not much to manage. There’s time needed up front to show it when it’s vacant. Once it’s rented though, there’s an occasional repair but not much to do normally.

Ashleigh Leach · Answer

@Lance Jorgenson

I manage 50 doors myself. It’s my only job. Thought about getting a property manager but I don’t want to lose the control over decisions/actions with my tenants. Example: w/ property manager.... tenants that are late on rent get demand letter to pay or face eviction no matter what and they only get 1 payment plan a year. I don’t want to evict an otherwise good tenant and I WILL make payments plans with people to pay. It always works out for me by just being nice to people. Hard to believe.... but it’s true. It cost me money to evict, turn around a property, find a new tenant and I run the risk of a worse tenant! If I property manage my properties I lose control over sympathy or understanding for someone. No property manager can manage my properties better than I can, because they aren’t exclusively focused on mine. My properties and my tenants are the most important and exclusive to me. ￼

Stacey Mollinet · Answer

@Angelika Roerig  I self managed two units that are 10 and 15 minutes from my house.  The rest are more than two hours away or in another state so I have property managers for those.  I didn't need software to manage just two units.  I would market with Facebook marketplace, KSL classifieds (which is a local site similar to Craigslist), Zillow, and Rentler.com.  They usually rented pretty quickly.  I have used RentPrep.com for the screening and I charge the fee to the applicants.  RentPrep also has some good resources if you need them like a Rental Application and a Move In/Move Out checklist.  I definitely recommend doing a Move in/Move Out checklist with repair prices listed.  It has saved me with damages more than once.  I usually sign the lease with them when I take the deposit, which could be several weeks ahead.   I need to have at least some of the deposit and the lease signed in order to stop showing it to other people.  The full deposit is required before moving in.  My first ever tenant talked me into letting them move in with a partial deposit that they would finish paying over the next several months and I'll never do that again.  I give them the keys on move in day.  I was burned once by taking someone's word for having put the utilities in their name, so now I either call the utilities and check or if they have a login I have them pull it up on their phone to show me.

Justin Hammond · Answer

@Lance Jorgenson, I have an "in house" guy manage all my properties. He's full time and I pay him a small salary. So he not only manages my rentals, but he does a million other things I don't want to do (take pics of other properties, sending out letters, data entry, running errands, etc..). He is a young, smart capable guy who is willing to work for less than he's worth so that he can learn the real estate business and see what it's actually like behind the scenes.

Steve Vaughan · Answer

I have both after recently acquiring a community with a PM in place already.  I self-managed 3 dozen for 17 years.

So far it's going ok.  I have enough scale for discounts like no placement or renewal fee, but can see their job is to find a reason to be there pretty much every week.

For 2 houses I'd have a good PM.  Too much work and education required to establish applications, screening, leases, know the laws, etc.  But if going bigger it's worth it.  I paid off over a dozen with the savings from intelligent DIY.

Aigo Pyles · Answer

Your ability to manage your rentals depends on your time. If you have time to manage your properties and if the properties are located near where you reside, then you can self manage them. But if it would eat your time, it would be great to hire property manager.

Laticia Braxton · Answer

Your ability to self manage is heavily dependent upon the time and patience you have available to do so.  You can save quite a bit of money while managing your properties yourself.  As long as you have the proper knowledge of your state and federal housing laws, tools and systems in place and an understanding of property management fundamentals, you can absolutely do this. Feel free to reach out to me if I can be of assistance.

Best of luck to you!

Laticia

Jesse Mancuso · Answer

@Aigo Pyles You make an excellent point about the investment of time. If you have the capacity to self-manage and can do so effectively it might be worthwhile to do so. Be sure to consider the value of your time and effort involved however and make sure you allocate for this when making your decision.

Property Manager or Self manage?

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