What scale can you get to when you self manage?

[Austin Fowler]

Is there anyone that both manages their own properties, and has managed to acquire many properties? What systems do you use to achieve scale? Anyone still buying long term rentals at the moment? If so, where and how and can you achieve positive cash flow?

[Randall Alan]

@Austin Fowler

Hi Austin,  we have 37 rentals we self manage.  My best suggestion to you is to automate where you can.  Our favorite automation tool is one of the cloud based Property Management systems out there.  We use Rentec Direct, which costs us about $2 per door per month… but there are many out there and most offer a pretty comprehensive suite of features.  
It collects our rent, deposits it to our bank account, applies late fees, allows for use of credit cards, screens our tenants, has a full accounting suite with reporting, broadcasts our vacancies on 20-30 websites, collects applications, lets our tenants report maintenance issues, and much more.  

The 35-40 number has worked well for us.   It’s not too busy, and we are able to travel regularly, including internationally.  

We used traditional financing on almost all of our units.  We had the advantage of buying between 2018-2021, when prices and interest rates were more favorable.  It is just technically harder to achieve today if for no other reason the interest rates and run-up in prices from the Covid era.  It has been getting better in my opinion recently.  We didn’t buy any properties for about  2 years between 2021 and 2023, but have bought couple properties in the past 2 years. 

All the best!

Randy