Oh sweet summer child.
You are me, 5 years ago. I owned properties in Orlando and Southern Utah and was managing them myself. I decided hey, why not do this for other people too?
I'm at a place now where I have people and systems to make it rewarding, but it was extremely difficult to get there. Scaling in this business is extremely difficult and stressful as you balance that line of bringing on more properties so you can afford to hire more people while already being overwhelmed by the properties you currently have. Constant 80 hour weeks, late nights, and stress and distractions that massively affects family time. You can do it for sure, but it's not going to be anything like managing your one property.
And you've chosen probably the most difficult market in the country to do this in.
Yes 25% was WAY high in this market. Typical PM rates in this market are 12-18%, usually more toward the lower end of that. That's assuming full service. If you're only handling the guests/maintenance/cleaning and not the listings/marketing then significantly lower. There is unlimited competition here that drives rates down to probably the lowest in the country. And if you are handling the bookings/marketing, get ready for constant calls from the owner that over leveraged themselves thinking this is a cash flow market when, at current prices/rates it is not, unless they invest significant capital into theming.
It's great that you've found a handyman/cleaner you trust. How large are their teams? Can they handle 20 houses? Can they handle you texting them "I NEED YOU AT THIS PROPERTY RIGHT NOW!" 6 times on some days? In the middle of the night?
The typical way things go here is you have a great cleaner/handyman that does good work for a couple houses. Then as you scale up they get overwhelmed and stressed and either start charging a lot more, drop you entirely, or (most commonly) the quality of their work degrades substantially. You may think you'll just hire more but the reality is the good ones are kind of unicorns, and you're going to go through a lot that don't do good work or don't report things to you that they should. The reality you'll eventually learn is that you'll need to hire someone to check on their work. How do you pay for that? It's not worth it to most people to drive across town 6 times a day for $25 per check. If you pay them closer to $100, that might be your entire commission for that turn, before you've even factored in the substantial other costs that are going to come with scaling.
It's possible the charges they were drumming up are ghost charges, but unlikely. Is your property in one of the resorts (Champions Gate, Storey Lake, etc) or off in a private neigbhorhood? If it's in a private neighborhood then maintenance can be lower, but the problem is few of those properties do enough gross revenue to make them management targets. The property really needs to be doing $60k+ in gross revenue in this market to make it worth your time if you're only charging 10-15% on it. Otherwise it is probably going to be a money loser, or making so little money that it's not worth the time unless you are rent shifting, which is evil but is how the large PM companies manage to make these properties work.
Most of those higher producing properties are in the resorts. Those homes are EXTREMELY high maintenance homes. The highest in the country, probably. I own some there and own some in Southern Utah and an average home in my Champions Gate portfolio has more maintenance every two weeks than the Southern Utah properties have in a year. It's the perfect storm of low end houses (they look nice, but they are all builder grade stuff where they are throwing these homes up by the thousands every year), high occupancy with most stays having a high percentage of young wild children, and tired parents after a long day in the parks that are too wiped to police their kids properly. Trust me man, you are going to see things. Lol. And a lot of them are going to include things like arcade machines and theaters which will constantly have issues and are difficult to service.
Do you have the proper licenses to manage other people's properties in Florida? Here are the Florida statutes. You're going to need to read them all: http://www.leg.state.fl.us/Statutes/index.cfm
Do you need a real estate brokers license? That is a hotly debated topic in Florida. Florida won't tell you. They'll just hand you that link. If you PM me I can give you my interpretation of it, but that isn't legal advice. You'll need to get actual legal advice on it and the first two lawyers I hired had conflicting/opposite interpretations.
Have you shopped for business liability insurance yet? Go ahead and give a couple a call and see how fast they hang up on you when you tell them you're managing other people's short term rentals. And if they don't hang up on you, and try to sell you a policy, make sure you read it and find the part where it excludes short term rentals. Trust me, it's in there. There is only one nationwide company left that will do it, and they don't cover pools while most of the homes you're going to be managing will likely have a pool in this market. You're going to need to find someone local that will write a policy for you. But it's going to have to be expensive enough to make it worth their time to create that policy, which is kind of a catch-22 when you don't yet have enough houses to cover and exceed that cost and actually make money for yourself.
You can do it for sure. Boutique smaller PM companies are without a doubt the best option for owners right now and many owners are learning that the hard way after having bad experiences with Executive Villas and the like. You can be that boutique PM. But it is difficult to get there. I remember thinking "I do this for myself and it's not that bad, how hard can it be to do it for a few other people too?". The answer was a LOT harder, lol.
