There is no right or wrong way to tackle the issue of managing investment properties. Most of our investor friends manage their own. We don’t.
If you have the time and patience to deal with all aspects involved, enjoy the day-to-day challenges, and/or have the system in place to get the job done, managing your own would be the most profitable, obviously. By the same token, if you don’t mind taking less profit in exchange for less overall headache, then you can hire a property management company that you can trust.
From the very beginning, we had no desire to be in the middle of collecting rent, repairing properties, or getting to know our renters personally. This does not mean that we do not care about what type of renters occupy our properties, or what conditions our properties are in. Far from it!
Our choice was to delegate the task of managing properties to professionals. It has worked quite well for us thanks, in large part, to the capable property-management company with whom we’ve worked since 2007. And it worked especially well when Covid hit, which was an unanticipated event up to that moment.
The bottom line for us is that we prefer to deal with the managers – who are trained professionals – rather than the renters who are our “customers,” who pay the rent in exchange for a place to stay. Managers, on the other hand, are service providers who get the job done in exchange for a fee. Their pay is directly related to their ability to collect rent from our customers. In effect, they play the role of a buffer between our customers and us.
Our philosophy has always been that we provide a safe place for our tenants to stay while creating positive cash flow for our company each month, net of all expenses including property management.
Happy investing!
