I want to start by saying that I am genuinely not the type of person who writes long online reviews. In fact, under normal circumstances, I almost never leave public reviews for businesses at all. But after what I experienced over the course of an entire year managing my portfolio with Intempus, I felt a genuine moral imperative as a fellow real estate investor and small landlord to sit down and write this warning. If you are a landlord, real estate investor, or out-of-state owner considering trusting Intempus with your hard-earned assets, I beg you to please take 5 minutes out of your day to read my experience.

I am sharing this detailed account not out of bitterness, but to plead with other property owners to protect themselves from the financial drain, ruined property, and relentless, agonizing stress that I had to endure. Please, take this warning seriously and take your business elsewhere before it costs you.

I trusted Intempus with a portfolio of six properties. Over the course of twelve months, what was promised to be a professional, high-performing property management experience turned into what I consider a complete operational failure across the board. For those wondering, this company was previously called FYVE, until they were purchased by Intempus halfway through our contract. Much of the staff stayed the same. By the time I finally severed ties with them, my overall portfolio return under their management was deeply in the red. Between endless marked-up maintenance fees, uncollected rents, legal expenses, stolen major appliances, destroyed interiors, and what felt like total stonewalling from their executive team, working with them was easily the worst business decision I have made in my real estate career.

To be entirely fair, I want to give credit where it is due: my local point of contact here in the Cleveland area was actually very pleasant to deal with on a personal level. She was responsive, polite, and I truly believe she was trying her best day-to-day. However, as the months went on, it became obvious to me that she was completely hamstrung by regional management and national corporate policy. In my view, because she was forced to follow rigid, unreasonable direct orders from higher-ups, her hands were tied—making her role ultimately just as harmful to my portfolio as the rest of the management chain. A polite local staff member simply cannot save your investment properties when the regional guidelines and corporate policies they execute are fundamentally flawed.

From the very beginning of transitioning my six units over to Intempus, the communication was painful. The emails I received from regional management were constantly vague in nature, leaving me guessing and constantly following up just to decipher what was actually happening with my accounting, work orders, or tenant issues. Every time I attempted to troubleshoot issues, the management simply denied any issues were taking place and took zero responsibility for anything.

What should have been my biggest wake-up call came directly from my existing residents. Early in the transition, several of my long-term, reliable tenants actually reached out to me personally on their own accord. They called me directly to warn me about how remarkably rude, abrasive, and difficult the regional manager was to deal with during routine interactions. They expressed genuine frustration over how unreasonable the company was being. At the time, I foolishly gave Intempus the benefit of the doubt, assuming it was just typical friction during a management handoff or tenants adjusting to a new system. Ignoring those warnings from my own tenants is something I deeply regret. They were completely right, and I urge anyone reading this to listen to what I am telling you: when tenants go out of their way to warn you about your management company's conduct, pay attention.

A good property management firm is supposed to hustle for you, actively look out for your bottom line, and work aggressively to maximize your returns. Intempus did the exact opposite. In my experience, there was zero hustle, zero drive, and zero effort to actually make me money. My units sat vacant for far too long, and rents were set well below market value simply because the company took the path of least resistance rather than actively marketing and pushing for optimal returns.

When maintenance or turnovers were required, everything was handled in the absolute easiest, most expensive way possible without an ounce of effort or creativity. There was no attempt to troubleshoot, no effort to shop around for competitive bids, and no creative problem-solving to protect my profit margins. Every fix was simply handed off to top-dollar vendors at maximum expense and passed directly onto my owner statements. Combining below-market rents, prolonged vacancies, a total lack of hustle, and exorbitant, unscrutinized maintenance charges meant my cash flow was constantly drained, pushing my overall portfolio numbers deep into negative territory for the entire year I was with them.

The ultimate breaking point, however, was what I view as a catastrophic breakdown in tenant placement, applicant screening, property oversight, and legal enforcement on one of my homes. Throughout my time with Intempus, a recurring and deeply troubling theme was that they constantly seemed to advocate for the tenant rather than protecting me, the property owner who was paying them. Nowhere was this more blatant than during the placement and nightmare eviction process at this property.

In my opinion, a property manager’s single most critical responsibility is properly vetting applicants and taking decisive action when things go wrong. Intempus placed a tenant into one of my properties who, based on what I later discovered, should never have passed a standard background check:

A simple public records search revealed that the applicant was an active co-defendant in an ongoing federal narcotics conspiracy case. This was completely missed or overlooked during their screening process.

The applicant submitted income documentation that contained severe irregularities, including reverse (backwards) check numbers and unverified employer information. When I gathered this documentation, brought it directly to the regional management team, and confronted them about how these reverse check numbers were accepted without basic verification, the spoken response to me was a literal "no comment."

The placement was a disaster from day one. Payment issues began almost immediately, yet instead of enforcing the lease, Intempus spent months endlessly fighting against me to NOT file an eviction. Every time I demanded that we move forward with legal proceedings to protect my asset, they made excuses, dragged their feet, and actively advocated on behalf of the non-paying tenant. I was actively told by management that "we don't like to go to court". They forced me to endure months of unpaid rent while my property was being actively destroyed.

Because Intempus was providing zero oversight and sending vague updates, I took it upon myself to speak directly with the surrounding neighbors to find out what was actually happening at the house.

What I uncovered was horrifying:

Neighbors informed me that there were constantly several unauthorized individuals living in the house. Regular drug dealing was taking place right out in the open on the front porch. Folks - this was not a bad neighborhood. This was not a regular occurrence in this area.

The police had been called to the home multiple times due to chaotic disturbances, leading to a cascade of official city code and nuisance violations accumulating against my property.

In one egregious instance, an occupant threw a bottle filled with urine straight through an upstairs window, shattering the glass and damaging neighboring property in the process.

While the neighborhood was dealing with open drug trade, city violations, and shattered windows, Intempus continued to drag out the eviction process, coddle the tenant, and leave me completely in the dark.

By the time court-ordered legal proceedings were finally finalized and I was able to step inside the house to regain physical possession, the interior was a total warzone. The unit was completely vandalized—ruined walls, destroyed flooring, and mountains of left-behind debris that required extensive physical repairs and deep restoration just to make the home habitable again. Worse yet, major appliances were completely missing straight off the property upon my return. Between the physical destruction, missing appliances, months of unpaid back rent, court and legal eviction fees, city violation fines, and turnover expenses, that single property alone suffered over $30,000 in total financial impact.

If you think this is just an isolated local branch issue, please understand that this is a corporate culture problem that appears to go straight to the top of the organization. I escalated these screening breakdowns, lack of enforcement, and massive property losses directly up the corporate hierarchy to executive leadership, including the Vice President and the CEO. My management agreement explicitly included a Damage Protection Waiver—a feature heavily marketed by Intempus to protect property owners from tenant-caused destruction. I formally requested that Intempus honor this contractual protection to cover at least a portion of the devastation caused under their watch.

What followed was an absolute refusal to help. The Vice President refused to honor the damage protection waiver on the grounds that the full scope of the damage was documented after the tenant was evicted and our management contract was officially terminated. This was obviously ridiculous and cowardly.

In my experience, Intempus will collect your monthly fees, send you vague emails, ignore red flags from your tenants, leave your units sitting empty without any hustle, set rents below market value, take the easiest and most expensive route on every repair, place unvetted tenants with unverified income documents and active federal criminal records in your homes, advocate for bad tenants while fighting you against filing evictions, and then hide behind corporate technicalities at the VP and CEO level when your property gets destroyed.

I plead with any landlord reading this: please take my warning seriously. Do not make the same mistake I made. Protect your hard-earned equity, save yourself from endless stress, and take your business far away from Intempus.