22 units, paying $29,400 a year in management, trying to price the in-house version honestly

The line that jumps out at me is that you priced the employee at their wage and the manager at their fee, which are not the same kind of number. The manager's fee already includes their software, their insurance, their after hours phone, their bookkeeping, their bad debt on a client who doesn't pay, and their turnover when the leasing coordinator quits. You'd be taking all of that on at cost and hoping cost stays flat.

I'm still working out what my first deal costs so I'm not the person to tell you which way to go, but if I were doing your spreadsheet I'd add a line for what a bad hire costs you. One person who mishandles a security deposit accounting in a state with strict deposit timelines is expensive, and deposit rules and deadlines differ state by state.

Numbers, and then what's wrong with them.

Your in-house case is $36,000 against $33,800 outsourced, so you're paying $2,200 a year for control. That's the whole argument, and it's inside the noise of the workers comp quote you haven't gotten. Until that number exists you don't have a comparison, you have two guesses.

What's missing: the value of your own hours in the in-house case. A 22 unit part time manager still escalates to you, and you're the one taking the call at 9pm about the roof. Say that's 4 hours a week of your time. At any rate you'd accept for yourself, that's real and it's not in the spreadsheet.

Second thing missing: the $2,100 maintenance markup you'd recover assumes you can source vendors at the same price the manager gets. They dispatch 200 doors of work. You dispatch 22. My experience is the small owner pays 10 to 20% more per job than the volume dispatcher, so your recovered markup can vanish entirely.

The hybrid you floated is the version I'd actually price, because it puts the labor where your edge is. You know these three buildings. You do not have an edge in tenant screening or in whatever your city's rental registration and inspection cycle requires.

One thing to check before you decide anything: read your loan documents. Agency and DSCR style loans on small multifamily sometimes carry a covenant requiring a professional third party manager, or requiring lender consent to change managers, and self-management can be a technical default even when nobody notices for years. It varies by lender and by the specific note, so pull the documents and confirm in writing with your lender before you fire anybody.

I've seen that clause used as leverage in a refinance conversation. It's cheap to check now and awkward to check later.

tender's point is the first one I'd chase too, and then the management agreement itself.

Things to look for in your current one: notice period for termination without cause, whether there's a termination fee or a requirement to pay out remaining term, whether the manager keeps leasing commissions on tenants they placed after you leave, who owns the tenant files and the application records, and how long they have to remit final funds and deposit ledgers. I've read agreements with a 90 day notice, a clause holding the owner responsible for the manager's renewal commission on any tenant in place, and no stated deadline for transferring deposits. That last one is the fight you don't want.

Also whether the agreement lets you take maintenance dispatch in-house at all. Plenty of them require all work orders to route through the manager and make the owner liable for anything the owner's own vendor does. Your hybrid idea may need their consent in writing, and if they say no, that tells you what the hybrid was worth to them.