Property Management Fees Explained

Handing over your responsibilities as a landlord to a property management firm, can let you rest easy and devote your time to personal projects. Many of my acquaintances who have properties spread all over the country, find it impossible to personally spare time for managing the day-to-day affairs of a rental property. They find it easy to outsource the entire job to a property management business, which handles everything from looking for tenants to renewing their lease contracts, besides handling day-to-day responsibilities like maintenance. If you are mulling over handing over your rental estate to such a company, the property management fees explained in this article, will provide you with an insight into the overall costs involved.

Rental Property Management Fees Explained

Most firms will provide you with an itemized list of fees that will be charged for the job of managing your rental property. There are some companies that will handle everything from rent collection and tenant search to maintenance and some which will carry out only a part of the job. Depending on the services provided and the property management contract that you sign, the total property management fees will vary. Let us see what are the itemized costs, generally charged as a part of overall rental property management fees, in the following lines.

Advertising Cost
Be it residential property management fees or commercial property management fees, one of the service components is the advertising cost of your property, which may be borne by the management company. To get tenants, your property has to be advertised in newspapers and websites with real estate property listings. Many firms handle this job of advertising for your property and charge you with whatever costs are involved for the same. So expect this to be a part of the contract.

Basic Property Management Commission
Besides the advertising costs, once you hand over a property to a management company, it charges you with a fixed commission, which may be a percentage of the rent you are paid or just a fixed fee. This may range anywhere between 10% to 15% of the total rent you receive or a fixed fee ranging from $100 to $200.

Lease Up & Lease Renewal Fees
Besides advertising for new tenants, you will have to pay extra for lease agreement creation and renewal of the tenant agreement, that is entirely handled by the firm. This may be around $50 to $100 or more, which also includes a finder's fee, in case of new tenants.

Maintenance Charges
Other than the above main components, most firms also handle the day-to-day maintenance of the property. This may include anything from plumbing repair, to cleaning out the property on a daily basis, electric repair, heating system maintenance and other such varied chores. The fees charged for these jobs, will entirely depend on the maintenance tasks undertaken and costs involved. These will be included in your monthly billing. In case of a large property, maintenance costs can be a large part of the total property management fees charged. In case of small properties, these costs may not form such a large component.

The overall property management fees, will be a sum total of all the above itemized costs. Handing over the entire job to a professional management firm will let you free up your time. If you don't want to get ripped off, I suggest that you survey the property management fees quoted by every firm in your area in detail, before choosing one. This analysis will help you make sure that handling over your responsibilities to a property management firm doesn't eat up too much, into your profits.