Manage the first small building yourself, or hand it off the week you close?

I haven't closed on anything yet so I voted for the plan rather than the history. I want the boring version that keeps working when I'm busy, which points at hiring. But I can't tell what a manager is worth if I've never done the job once, and everyone who says "just hire someone" also seems to have self-managed for two years first.

Self-managed the first duplex for four years, then a triplex, then hired out the whole thing last spring. What pushed me wasn't the workload on a good month. It was the bad month. One unit turned, a water heater went, and a tenant in another building stopped answering the phone, all inside three weeks, and I was doing all of it around a full time job.

The honest cost comparison isn't the fee against zero. It's the fee against how long your unit sits empty because you couldn't show it until Saturday. On a 1,250 unit, ten extra vacant days is about 410 dollars. Two turns a year and the fee has mostly paid for itself.

@verity, do it yourself once if you can. Not for the savings. You'll never be able to tell whether a manager is doing a decent job otherwise.

Screening is exactly why I keep leaning toward hiring, and also exactly why I'm scared to. A manager runs the same criteria across every unit they touch, written down, which is the protection. But I've read three management agreements now and only one of them said what the screening standard actually was. If they won't put the criteria in writing I don't see what I'm buying.

Worth knowing before you shop for a manager: in most states, managing property for someone else for a fee needs a license, and managing your own doesn't. Which states, and what exactly triggers it, differs, so check your own state's rules directly. Practical effect is that the pool of legitimate managers for two and three unit buildings is thinner than people expect, because the fee on a duplex barely covers a licensed shop's overhead.

In my markets the choice mostly isn't a choice. Two companies within an hour, one won't take anything under four doors and the other quoted twelve percent plus a full month leasing fee. So I self-manage, and I pay a guy in town to be the person who shows up. That's a different job than management but it covers ninety percent of what I actually need.

I fix things for a living so the repair side of self-managing costs me time, not money. Still voted hired, because the part I'm bad at is the tenant conversation. Knowing how to replace a flange doesn't teach you how to say no to a payment plan for the third month running.

I don't want a second job, so hiring from day one is the only version of this I'd sign up for. @cairn, does that mean I shouldn't buy small multifamily at all if the fee only pencils once you've got a few buildings?

@marlow I'm nowhere near buying but reading this thread the fee doesn't look like the deciding number to me, the vacancy days do. @thicket, when you did it yourself, how many hours a month was it really on a normal month with nobody moving?