Self managing first property

[Therese LeDonne]

Hello, My husband and I are about to purchase our first property (single-family home, new construction, riverside county, CA) The house is about 45 minutes away from where we live. Neither one of us has any experience managing a property. We initially planned on hiring a company to manage it, but are thinking since it's only one house and it's not too far from where we live, maybe we will try managing it ourselves. Thoughts? If we do, what apps/software do you guys recommend for tracking expenses/rent and running background checks? 

[Edgar Silva]

Seeing that this is a “New” property, I would lean towards self managing as there really shouldn’t be any big mechanical issues. 

To screen tenants, I use mysmartmove.com. This is super easy to use and you can run your background checks through there.

To collect rent, you can easily set up Zillow monthly payments that are free for tenants when they link their bank account.

For maintenance requests, again assuming this is a new property, I would lean on just using text messages between you and the tenant. No need for fancy software for 1 property.

Excel will be your friend to track costs/expenses.

I’ve recently started moving towards using my own PowerApp for managing my rentals now that I’ve increased my portfolio where tenants can submit requests and I can track expenses with dashboarding capabilities on PowerBi.

Good luck and hope this helps!