Moving away from property management

[Anurag Pulla]

Hey everyone! I am new to bigger pockets and relatively new to real estate investing in general. I have two rentals in the outskirts of Atlanta, GA and I am using a property management to manage these. After joining biggerpockets I realized we can self manage these with rentredi etc.
I am paying my property manager almost 80% of first month rent for new lease + 8% of monthly rent, I realized this is a lot and that most of what they do can be easily done with enough knowledge.

I am looking for suggestions if moving away and doing this myself is actually a good idea. My leases are coming to an end and I don't even know if its easy to get out of their contract.

Any inputs on this would be highly appreciated. Thank you so much in advance.

[Randall Alan]

@Anurag Pulla

If you are a hands on person self-management is a breeze.  Seriously!  We self-managed 20 units while my wife and I both worked full time corporate jobs.  To put that in perspective, think about your own house for a minute.  How many times A MONTH do you have to call someone for service?  0?  1?  On a bad month 2?  That is about 1/4 the work load for property management in my opinion.  You might be worried about "how will you fill your units?"  I'm here to tell you that ALL you need is Zillow.com.  We pay to advertise on Zillow through our rental management cloud software (RentecDirect.com). It's like a few dollars a day to list a property.  In 24 hours we will have more inquiries than we could ever want for any property we list.  We're talking 30-50 inquiries a day! (no joke!)  Yes, we have to put some leg work in when we need to fill a unit - but how often is that... once every year or two per property?  

Our property management program collects applications for us, will run background checks for a small fee, receives our tenants rent each month and deposits it directly into our bank account, sends out leases, collects maintenance requests, tracks income and expenses, etc and much more.  And that software costs maybe $10 a month starting out.  We pay something like $60/month for just under 40 units, and there are no ACH fees charged to collect rent from all those tenants and it is direct deposited the next day after they pay (even though the ACH doesn't actually 'officially' settle for about 4 days (they advance it to  you at no charge).  The point is - if you put systems in place that do most of the work for you, it's really pretty easy.  

Yes, we have a couple of plumbers, a couple of AC guys, an electrician, etc on speed-dial. So when a call does come in, we can usually solve it with one phone call.  Again... pretty easy.  Just use your own house as your reference.  How hard is it to call the plumber?  Plus, managing the properties yourself you will not only be saving money, but also stay connected to your properties more.  No one is going to care more than you will.  Finding a handyman comes in 'handy' too. If we need a unit painted, or whatever, or a hole patched in a wall. But we even do that ourselves now that we have a few years experience under our belts and are now full time landlords.  Can tenants sometimes be a little annoying?  Yes.  1 in 20 will be high maintenance in our portfolio.  I hear from them once a month it seems like.  But the other 95% I don't hear from them unless something is really wrong (ac out, no hot water, or whatever).

Keep the money for yourself.  Self manage.

All the best!

Randy