Real Estate 038: Self Management vs. Hiring a Third-Party Property Manager

It’s been a while since I've written a blog post, mainly due to focusing more on acquisitions, managing the rehab, and stabilizing my portfolio. A question I receive often from my readers is whether or not they should hire a property manager (PM) or self-manager their properties. So I decided to reflect on my past two years of rental property ownership and share my thoughts below.

Should I self-manager or hire a property manager?

Investors understand the importance of buying below market in good locations with enough cash flow to pay its debts, expenses, and whether market cycles. However, all of these assumptions and proformas are only on paper, and a rental property is only good as its executed properly. Like Gary Keller describes in part 3 of his book "Millionaire Real Estate Investor", owning a million, landlords must keep the property in good condition (no slumlording) as well as find quality tenants to live in your rentals. A subset of those two functions is understanding the local markets (e.g. landlord laws, market rents, tenant demographics) as well as efficiencies of a sole proprietor vs leveraging a team (e.g. contractor discounts through volume, bookkeeping, and other administrative functions).

Hiring a Third-Party Property Manager

I have made a conscious decision on day one to hire a third party property manager to manage my rental properties and here are the reasons why:

Cost efficiency: Each property manager is different, but based on the number of doors they manager (e.g. 100 -> 1000), they may work with designated teams of handyman, or even have in-house contractors that save you time and money when dealing with rent ready repairs and/or maintenance calls.
Scalability: In addition to maintenance repairs, the process of searching for tenants, marketing, answering calls, collecting rents and bookkeeping takes time and effort. You may be able to handle the administrative functions easily when you are at a handful of single family properties, but as you scale up to 10, 20, 50 doors, you may end up finding yourself becoming overwhelmed with the tasks at hand.
Liability protection: With my properties, the leases are between the tenant and the property management company, and the property management companies carry legal liability insurance in case there are issues that arise during showings, open houses, and maintenance visits. Furthermore, experienced PMs should be able to advise their clients on understanding local laws and regulations that can be a potential liability.
Increased profit: You may have heard the advertisement "We've seen a thing or two, so we know how to deal with these claims". Its spoken from a large insurance company who have been in the industry for many years and have dealt with issues and challenges day in and day out. Unless you are fully confident in your ability to manage rental properties with maximum efficiencies, you may be leaving money on the table. For example, not pricing your rental rates appropriately, not using the right lease agreement, and understanding what type of rehab is needed for what tenant demographic and type of property. If you are paying your PM $100/door, but through reduced maintenance, longer term tenants, and increased rental rates you are able to recoup even half of that ($50/month), isn't it worth saving yourself hours of labor you can use to buy more cash flowing assets?

Self Managing your Rentals

Although I have made a personal choice to let a third party PM to manage my rental properties, there may be exceptions where others may choose to manage their own rental properties. Here are some of the scenarios I have found with other fellow investors who choose to self-manage their rentals:

Active Real Estate Investor: There are folks who choose to be a real estate investor full-time and have the bandwidth to screen tenants, handle maintenance calls/repairs, and maintain the bookkeeping.
Close proximity: If you invest locally in your backyard (generally <1 hour away), it may be easier for an investor to tour with prospective tenants, handle emergency issues, and keep a close eye on the property.
Low number of rentals: If you are not looking to scale to a large portfolio, it may be easier to self manage your properties from both a economic and time-commitment perspective.
Real World Education: It may not be a "cheap" education, but it may be worthwhile to see first hand how rental property management operates. Especially if you are a newbie investor just starting out, it may be possible to self-manage for a couple years (or months) and then hand it off to a third party PM if it does not work out. However, its important to note that sometimes bad PM work may be harder to unravel than starting from ground zero.

In summary, I plan to continue using my third party PMs for all of my rental properties for the aforementioned reasons above. I have rental properties in three different cities, mostly over 2,000 miles away, and do not have the bandwidth to find tenants, field maintenance calls, and do the bookkeeping. As it is with any professional services such as CPAs and Attorneys, my mantra is "you get what you pay for".

As always, please make sure you do your due diligence and talk to your CPA/Attorney/Financial Adviser before making any investment decision.

Good luck!