All Forum Posts by: Doug H.

@Tony He

The back office has similar transition points requiring people who can't be charged back to the Clients as a building expense.  

.....district managers

.....accountants

.....assistants

@Tony He It's also part of the magic of property management numbers.  Because every unit presents a small percentage chance of different events happening, there are these transition points.

A building at 20 units usually gets a part time Resident Manager who only puts in a few hours a month and is compensated with free rent on a one bedroom apartment.  

A building with 30 units usually gets a part time manager who puts in a few hours a week and is compensated with free rent on a two bedroom.  

A building with 50 or 60 units demands a full time Resident Manager who works 8 hours a day and is compensated with a free two bedroom and an hourly rate.  

A building with 100 units demands a team, as mentioned above.  

It is amazingly non-linear. 

@Tony He -Tony, by infrastructure, I mean people.   No matter how good your systems, property management is labor intensive.  

Most third party managers are managing multiple locations.   Managing 100 units in multiple locations is sufficiently more involved than managing 100 units in one place.  At a 100 unit complex, most large companies use at least 1 manager, 1 assistant and 1 porter or dedicated handyman.  

So, at around 100 units, it takes more than one person.   The cost of that second person will absorb all your profit of not take you negative.  

Then, not long after expanding enough to become profitable with two people, it's time to add a third, and the cycle repeats. 

@Kevin Fox - It's entirely likely I didn't read your entire post.  I get very "nouns & verbs only" when I'm working.  (I was just providing an account of my experiences on the theme.

Keith White ...continuing (stupid iPhone) 3) Everyone in my market who had "made it" and had a property management company, only managed that which they owned. Again, if third-party management was profitable, the smart-money would be doing it. Ultimately, my conclusion, it's only the magic of ownership that provides wealth in the property management game. Now, it's GREAT experience, and I've gone on to manage thousand unit portfolios for other self-managing property management firms before I was able to transition into just managing my properties.

Keith White , my two cents... I started out as a Resident Manager and then scaled up to a full property management company. My company grew to about 300 units under management in multiple buildings around San Diego, and I ran it for 5 years. At the end of that time, I made the decision to wind down and close the doors. Here is why: 1) The margins are just thin. Third party management done right is just plain labor intensive. Every time I started to make decent returns, I would have to scale up infrastructure, and that would eat up all the profits. 2) The profits, if any, per hour committed, are horribly small. You really are on call around the clock, until you have a large infrastructure.

"text ad", not "test ad":... What a ridiculous morning.....

We manage just a little under 800 units in San Diego, and while using multiple outlets thru Appfolio (Zillow, etc), well above 90% of our leasing comes from Craigslist. Doing some testing has shown that the single highest return on effort is posting multiple times on Craigslist on Monday. The highest traffic time for the Craigslist is Monday early afternoon. Also, concerning postlets, it's a great tool. However, we have also found that a certain part of the market responds better to postings that don't look over-produced. We normally post both an HTML ad with postlets and a simple test ad with pictures.

"...use Appfolio." Sigh.

For our larger management company, we you Appfolio. However, for my smaller side rentals, I'm using Cozy. As mentioned above, it takes about 5-7 days for the payments to show up in your account. They seem to be adding features as they grow.