If you already have a property manager and your returns still look worse than your spreadsheet promised, the fix is almost never a new manager — it’s a review cadence. Learning how to manage your property manager comes down to three things: a monthly expense review by someone who knows what repairs should cost, a hard reporting rule on vacant units, and a written understanding of how the manager makes money.
Eran Reizer, who runs a management company in Florida with his wife Sivan and owns single-family and multifamily doors in Florida, Georgia and Ohio, puts it bluntly: profit or loss is decided by your maintenance crew and your manager, not by location or your underwriting model. He says that when he asks a room of owners whether they’re happy with their property manager, nearly all say no — and most of them have never once audited a monthly report.
What follows is the oversight system: what to look at every month, the 7-to-10-day vacancy rule, the economics to expect from a management company, the door count at which in-house starts to make sense, and how to use managers as market intelligence instead of just vendors.
Key takeaways
- Require a showing report every 7 to 10 days on any vacant unit — how many people viewed it and what they said. Reizer would rather cut rent $25–$50 a month and fill fast than eat $1,500 a month in vacancy.
- Hunt for repeat line items in the monthly report. Three $800 plumbing patches on the same unit means the $5,000 permanent repair was the right call the first time.
- Expect an 8–10% management fee to cover operations and roughly a 15% markup on maintenance calls to be where the manager actually earns. Ask whether major items like AC and roofs are marked up too.
- Reizer outsources management on his 20 houses and duplexes in Piqua, Ohio until the count hits 50 to 70 doors — the point where the income supports dedicated in-house staff.
- Before buying in a new market, call at least three local property managers instead of trusting Zillow rent estimates. They’ll tell you the real vacancy, the real crime picture, and sometimes hand you a motivated seller.
From the Real Estate Pros Show
This article draws on an interview with Eran Reizer of The Multifamily Doctor on the Real Estate Pros Show, hosted by Dylan Silver.
Why Hiring a Property Manager Doesn’t Make Real Estate Passive
Hiring a manager transfers the work. It does not transfer the responsibility, and it does not make the asset passive.
Reizer’s position is that two variables decide whether a rental makes or loses money: the renovation and maintenance crew, and the property manager. Deal math is not the differentiator any more — he points out that underwriting a purchase is something software and ChatGPT can now handle, while nobody can automate the judgment of whether your manager just approved a $2,400 repair that should have cost $900.
He also makes an uncomfortable observation about ownership psychology. When he asks investors whether they’re satisfied with their manager, the answer is almost always no, and the reason is structural rather than personal: no third party carries your interest the way you do. A management company works with its own vendors, at its own prices, on its own schedule. That’s the business model, not a betrayal. The mistake is assuming otherwise.
The practical split he draws is between two roles. A passive investor asks one question — how much? — and belongs in a syndication or a fund. An active entrepreneur buys the deal, builds the crew, and manages the manager. That’s a profession, not a side income.
If you’ve chosen the active route, the job description is solving problems you didn’t cause: mold, rats, code enforcement, a tenant who stopped paying in month two. The owners who get burned are the ones who picked the active route by default, never built an oversight routine, and then discovered eighteen months of margin had quietly gone out the door in maintenance invoices nobody read.
The Asset Management Layer: How to Manage Your Property Manager Every Month
Someone has to read the monthly report with real estate knowledge, and that someone works for you — not for the management company. That’s the asset management function, and on a small portfolio it’s either you or your partner.
On the 24-unit property Reizer and his wife bought in Savannah, Georgia, Sivan handled that layer end to end: sourcing the renovation crew, hiring the property manager, and firing the first one when the numbers didn’t hold up. Her monthly routine isn’t bookkeeping. It’s pattern-hunting in the expense lines.
The pattern he cites as the classic profit leak is recurring maintenance on the same system. Three plumbing calls on one unit at roughly $800 each, patched every time, when a $5,000 permanent repair was the correct decision after the second visit. Nobody at the management company is incentivized to flag that. A manager who marks up maintenance makes more from the patches.
What to pull out of the report every month:
- Repeat repairs on the same unit or the same system
- Any single invoice above your approval threshold you don’t remember approving
- Turn costs against the rent the unit actually re-let for
- Line items with no vendor name or no scope description
Then get on a call monthly or at least quarterly and use it to plan, not just review. Reizer’s example: in the Midwest, nobody rents or buys in deep winter, so the seasonal conversation in the fall is about pre-leasing, specials, and getting turns finished before the freeze. In Florida he doesn’t have that problem. In Ohio it’s the difference between a January vacancy and a January lease.
Whoever controls the expenses controls the profit or loss.
People think you have a property manager, now you have a cash cow, an ATM. No — real estate is tenants, maintenance, mold, rats, raccoons, fires. It’s a lot of things, but it’s not passive.
— Eran Reizer, the Multifamily Doctor
The Vacancy Rule: 7-to-10-Day Showing Reports
Set one non-negotiable reporting rule on every vacant unit: every 7 to 10 days, you want the number of people who viewed it and what their feedback was. That single expectation, set before the unit goes vacant, eliminates most long vacancies.
Reizer called a friend to ask how the Tampa house was doing. Vacant three months. Not a distressed property — a brand-new house. Nobody had told the manager what reporting was expected, so nobody reported, and nobody adjusted.
The math that follows from the report is simple. If two weeks of showings produce traffic but no applications, the price is wrong, and the price is wrong by less than the cost of waiting. Reizer’s rule: take $25 to $50 a month less in rent and fill it now rather than lose $1,500 a month holding for the asking price. You need three or four years of the higher rent to recover a single month of vacancy — and you won’t get it, because you’ll be vacant again at the next turn.
Feedback matters as much as the count. Ten showings and no offers tells you the rent is high. Two showings in ten days tells you the listing, the photos, or the marketing channel is the problem — a different fix entirely.
Competing supply changes the threshold. In Texas, properties are handing new tenants Visa and Amazon gift cards to sign, which means your unit isn’t being compared to last year’s rent — it’s being compared to a concession package down the street. If your manager isn’t telling you what the competition is offering, you’re pricing blind.
How Property Managers Actually Make Money — And What to Ask Before You Sign
The 8% to 10% management fee covers operations. It is not where the company makes its money. Understanding that is the difference between a manager who’s straight with you and one who’s quietly making the number work somewhere you can’t see.
Reizer’s model, run openly: the fee funds the operation, and the margin comes from a 15% markup on maintenance calls — with nothing charged on major items like AC replacements and roofs. His argument for disclosing it is that vendors his company has used for fifteen years price better than what an owner would get calling cold, so the marked-up number still beats the alternative. He also thinks scale is required for the model to work at all, and that a shop planning to manage fewer than roughly 400 doors shouldn’t open its doors.
Questions he uses when interviewing a management company:
- How many people work here, and who will actually handle my property?
- Are your vendors in-house or exterior?
- Walk me through your process — maintenance request to resolution.
- What do you mark up, and what don’t you?
Two warnings. Don’t default to the cheapest bid; you will pay for it in turn times and deferred repairs. And don’t be seduced by the biggest, nicest office. As Reizer puts it, the bigger they are, the smaller you are to them. He’d rather work with a hungry operator running about 50 properties from a home office who needs his business.
The character screen matters if you’re considering managing for others: the job is being the bad guy every day. Tenants are unhappy, owners question every invoice, and nobody sends thank-you notes.
When to Take Management In-House
The threshold is where the portfolio’s income supports a dedicated person. For Reizer, that’s 50 to 70 doors — and he applies it to himself.
He bought 20 single-family homes and duplexes in Piqua, Ohio, a small town near Dayton, over about four months. He knows how to manage; his own company does it for a living. He still outsourced Piqua, and his reasoning was arithmetic rather than preference: at 20 doors the management fee saved doesn’t cover a maintenance tech, a leasing person, and the software, so all you’ve bought yourself is a headache. At 50 to 70, it does, and then the calculus flips.
This mirrors the conventional multifamily guidance he references — the reason people say 70-plus units is that the property can carry its own on-site team. Once it can, you’re no longer negotiating with a vendor whose incentives point sideways. You have someone acting purely in your interest, and you control vendor selection, pricing, turn standards and leasing velocity.
Apply it to your own numbers with two adjustments. First, geography: 60 doors in one town supports a crew, while 60 doors spread across four states supports nothing — you’d need a manager in each market, which is just a management company you now have to staff. Second, asset type: a 24-unit building concentrates the work; 24 scattered houses multiply drive time.
Until you clear the threshold in a single market, the better move is to hire well and manage hard. In-house management below the line converts a fee into a payroll problem.
Using Property Managers as Market Intel and Deal Flow
Before you buy in a market you don’t live in, call at least three property managers. They will tell you things no data tool will.
Zillow and Rentometer give you an asking-price indication, not a leasing reality. A manager who has units on that street knows the actual vacancy, how long a two-bedroom sits, which blocks have crime problems, and which class of tenant applies. Reizer treats that as a mandatory step for a new market, and it costs three phone calls.
Managers also leak motivation, because they see it before anyone else. His example: he asked a manager he respected why one building had been carrying vacancy for a year. The answer was that the owner was a cheap slumlord who wouldn’t fix anything, so nothing would lease. Reizer called that owner directly and it became one of the best deals he’s done.
There’s a simpler tell in the same conversation. Ask how many units the company manages and how many are rented. A manager with 50 units and 20 rented is describing someone who is bleeding — and that someone is a seller who hasn’t listed yet.
It fits his broader approach to finding deals, which is to hunt motivation rather than inventory. The current concentration of it, in his view, sits with owners who financed multifamily between 2020 and 2022 on five- to seven-year adjustable-rate debt at 2% to 4%. Those notes are resetting into the 7s. If rents didn’t keep pace — and in the C and B stock where he invests, some have gone the other way — the coverage math stops working and the owner has to bring cash, raise it from investors, or sell.
Frequently asked questions
How often should I require reports from my property manager?
Two cadences. On any vacant unit, require a report every 7 to 10 days covering how many people viewed it and what their feedback was. On the portfolio, review the full financial and maintenance report monthly and get on a call with the manager monthly or at minimum quarterly.
Set both expectations in writing before the relationship starts. Reizer’s point about the Tampa house that sat vacant three months is that nobody had ever told the manager what reporting looked like, so none happened.
What percentage should a property manager charge, and should they mark up maintenance?
An 8% to 10% management fee is standard and generally covers operations rather than producing profit. Most of the real margin in the business comes from a markup on maintenance work — Reizer charges 15% and discloses it, and charges nothing on major items like AC units and roofs.
A markup isn’t automatically a problem. An undisclosed one is. Ask directly what the markup is, what’s exempt from it, and whether the vendors are in-house or outside contractors, so you can judge whether the marked-up price still beats what you’d source yourself.
At how many properties does it make sense to manage in-house instead of hiring a manager?
Reizer’s threshold is 50 to 70 doors in one market. Below that, the management fees you’d save don’t cover the maintenance tech, leasing person and systems you’d have to hire, so you’ve traded a fee for a staffing problem.
He follows his own rule — he owns 20 houses and duplexes in Piqua, Ohio and outsources their management despite running a management company himself. Geography matters as much as count: 60 doors in one town supports a team, 60 doors across four states does not.
How do I find out the real vacancy and rent levels in a market I don’t live in?
Call at least three property managers who work that market and ask what units actually lease for, how long they sit, and which blocks have crime or collection problems. Rent estimate tools give you asking prices; managers give you leasing outcomes.
Ask each one how many units they manage and how many are currently occupied. A wide gap between the two is a signal about the submarket — and sometimes about a specific owner who is losing money and hasn’t put the property on the market yet.
Should I hire a large property management company or a small one?
Reizer prefers a smaller, hungry operator — his example is a manager running around 50 properties — over a large firm with an impressive office. His reasoning: the bigger they are, the smaller you are to them, and the less attention your units get.
Size isn’t the screen; attention and process are. Ask how many staff there are, who specifically handles your property, whether vendors are in-house, and how a maintenance request moves from call to resolution. And don’t pick on price alone — the cheapest bid usually shows up later as longer turn times and deferred repairs.
The bottom line
Pick one vacant or recently turned unit this week, pull its last twelve months of maintenance invoices, and see whether you’re paying for the same repair more than once. That single audit will tell you more about your manager than any interview question, and it sets up the monthly review habit that decides whether the portfolio actually earns what you underwrote.
