Realtor Seeking Broker that does Property Management

[Chris Gottshall]

I’m an agent with a traditional buy/sell broker. We are allowed to lease property, but my broker does not do property management as one of its allowed functions. I’m very interested in building a property management business for others (I manage my own properties already and have been approached about managing others’). Thus, I am considering changing my broker to one that provides this service to clients. My challenge is that I don’t know who in the Twin Cities I should be talking to. Seems that most of the big names do buy/sell/lease, but not PM. Or should I just open my own brokerage? (Been told that costly, but haven’t looked into it seriously.)

I’m looking for advice from others who might know someone that I should connect with in the Minneapolis / Saint Paul market. Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

[James Wise]

Originally posted by @Russell Brazil:

Go through and read @James Wise posts, and watch his videos on youtube before considering getting into property management. It is a thankless job with tiny margins.  The good people who do it, I believe do it so they have a fully vertically integrated business, so they can keep all aspects of real estate in house. This is good so you are not losing a future sale for instance to a property manager, and is good for your back end buy out.

I am curious if that is why James does PM, or if he has other reasons.

 Yea, hit the nail on the head. The money is in transacting sales, not handling the Property Management. The Property Management facilitates more sales & allows more vertical integration with General Contracting (which I also do & it's also low margin) & other down & upstream businesses. Moral of the story is if you want to make money in the Property Management space it needs to be a piece of a much larger pie that you are ready to pour millions into. It's not something that can be ran profitably on a small scale.