Questions owners actually ask

Only when the matching thing happens. The $499 placement fee applies when a unit turns over and you need a new tenant screened and a lease drafted. The $299 renewal fee applies when a sitting tenant renews and the lease has to be redrawn with a rate change. An owner whose tenant stays put and does not renew in a given year pays neither, and an owner with a long, stable tenancy can go years paying nothing but the $109 a month. Both are quoted before any work starts — neither can appear on a bill you did not agree to.

No, and the difference is the whole point of the number. The industry standard for tenant placement is a percentage of rent, often half a month or a full month — on a $2,800 house that is $1,400 to $2,800, and it rises every time your rent does. Ours is $499 flat on any unit at any rent. It is that low because you keep the two most expensive parts: publishing the listing and running the showings. We do the screening, the lease, the addendum stack and the compliance work, which is the part where getting it wrong is costly.

No. You are billed the vendor’s invoice, at the vendor’s price. A markup on repairs is common in this industry and it quietly reverses the saving of a flat fee — a 10% coordination markup on $6,000 of annual repairs is $600, which is most of a year of our management fee.

None of the three. Onboarding is included, and you can cancel at any time with a simple email, effective the following month — no exit fee, no minimum term, and we will hand your records to whoever takes over. If your property arrives with a tenant already in it, there is nothing to pay beyond the monthly fee until that lease comes up for renewal.

Not upward, ever. $109 per unit, per month is the published rate and it is the most you will pay per door at any portfolio size. Deliberately not a base platform fee plus a per-unit charge — that structure looks cheap on the pricing page and scales badly once you hold five or twenty doors, which is the point at which owners usually notice. A duplex is $218 a month and a fourplex is $436. If you hold several properties or an apartment building, message us: the per-door rate can come down from there, and we would rather quote it properly than print a number that does not fit your building.

The monthly fee pauses. We do not list or show units, so an empty one needs almost nothing from us — charging you for it would be charging for work we are not doing. It restarts when a new tenancy begins. Worth being straight about the sequence though: a vacancy is usually also when a $499 placement becomes due, because that is when a new tenant has to be screened and a lease drafted. So a turnover costs you a one-off rather than nothing at all. Note that a percentage-based manager also earns nothing on a vacant unit, which is precisely why some of them are in a hurry to fill it.

No. Every repair needs your approval, at any amount — there is no threshold below which we act on our own, not even fifty dollars. It means you get asked about small things, which some owners find surprising at first. The trade is that you never open an invoice you did not agree to, and the vendor’s price is the price, because we add no markup and take no referral fee.

The monthly fee is card on file, billed through Stripe. Placement and renewal fees are one-off charges raised at the point the work is agreed, so they never arrive unannounced. Your rent is not involved in any of it — because it never passes through us, we cannot and do not deduct anything from it. Your tenant pays you, and you pay us.

No. Your tenant pays you directly and rent never enters our company account. It is never pooled with other owners' funds, never delayed by our banking, and never exposed if anything happened to us. We set up the payment channel, watch that rent lands, and act immediately when it does not.

Because a percentage was never tied to the work. Managing a $4,000 unit is not twice the work of managing a $2,000 unit, but a percentage charges you twice as much for it. Removing the office and the storefront overhead took out the cost that justified the rest. The same logic is why placement is a flat number rather than a slice of the rent.

We do. Applications, background, credit and eviction history, and pet and assistance animal screening on every applicant — that is all ours. It is priced as its own package at $499 rather than folded into the monthly fee, because it only happens when a unit turns over and an owner with a settled tenant should not be paying a share of it every month. The line is drawn at the physical part: we do not advertise your unit and we do not attend the showing. You get someone to the door; everything from the application form onward is our job.

Because marketing a vacancy is an intense, local, short burst of work and management is a long, procedural, deadline-driven discipline. Doing both adequately is worse than doing one properly. Keeping the physical leasing work out is a large part of why management can be $109 a month and placement can be $499 flat, rather than a percentage of rent plus a full month’s rent every time a tenant changes.

Advertise it yourself or through an agent of your choosing, and come to us as soon as you have interest — ideally before, so the lease is drafted the way we would want to manage it. We take the application from the first enquiry, screen everyone who applies, draft the lease and its addendums, and run the tenancy from there. That is the $499 Screening & Lease Execution package, quoted before any work starts. We deliberately have no referral arrangement with any leasing agent, so nobody is paying us to send you their way.

Ask. Some of it we can coordinate for you at cost, and some of it needs a specialist we are not — an attorney, a licensed inspector, a leasing agent. What we will not do is quietly take it on and do it badly.

A vetted local vendor, when there is a physical job to do. Virtual management means the coordination, communication, accounting and compliance run remotely — not that nobody attends. The difference from a traditional manager is that you are not paying to keep an office open between visits.

Through the maintenance channel, which is monitored outside business hours for genuine emergencies. Emergencies get a vendor dispatched. Everything else is triaged and handled in the morning, which is what a traditional manager does too — they simply do not say so.

Less painful than it feels. You serve notice under your existing agreement — usually 30 days — and we request the file, deposit ledger and lease directly from them. Most owners spend under an hour on it. The one thing worth checking first is whether your current agreement has a termination fee.

For a tenanted property with a clean file, within a week of the paperwork. Where the deposit accounting or the lease has problems, we would rather fix them at the start than inherit them, which can add a week or two.

The opposite, and this is the part owners are most surprised by. Nothing is spent on your property without your explicit approval — at any amount, including a $50 faucet washer. There is no threshold below which we act on our own. It does mean you hear from us about small things; the trade is that you never open an invoice you did not agree to. Rent increases, renewals and tenancy decisions are always yours too — we tell you what you are allowed to do and what we would recommend, and you decide.

$109 per unit, per month to manage — the same rate as a single house, and the most you will pay per door in management at any building size. A duplex is $218 a month, a fourplex is $436, and twelve units is $1,308. Deliberately not a base platform fee plus a per-unit charge: that structure looks cheap at two doors and scales badly at twenty, which is the point at which owners usually notice. Two things sit outside the monthly fee, both flat and both only when they happen: $499 to place a tenant in a unit and $299 to draft a renewal. On a larger building the per-door management rate can come down — message us and we will quote it.

The monthly fee pauses on a vacant unit. We do not list or show units, so an empty one needs almost nothing from us, and charging for it would be charging for work we are not doing. Being straight about the other half of that: refilling the unit is a $499 placement, so a turnover costs you a one-off rather than nothing. On a building with steady turnover both halves are worth modelling — count the paused months and count the placements.

Yes — applications, background, credit and eviction history, and pet and assistance animal screening, on every applicant in every unit. That is the $499 Screening & Lease Execution package, charged per unit placed rather than folded into the monthly fee. What we do not do is advertise the vacancy or attend the showing; that stays with you, your on-site staff or an agent of your choosing. For a building with regular turnover this is the split worth thinking through before you engage us, because you will be running — and paying for — that part repeatedly.

Around twenty doors is where our model stops being the right answer. Above that a building usually needs on-site staff, and a remote back office is the wrong shape for it. We would rather tell you that now than take the account and underserve it. Below twenty, the flat fee is generally the largest controllable line in your operating model.

Coordination, yes — landscaping, shared laundry, bins, stairwell lighting, and dispatching a vetted trade to a roof, boiler or panel. The vendor invoices come to you at the actual price with nothing added, which matters more on a building than on a house because there is simply more of it.

$109 per door is the published management rate across every property you hold, with no base fee and no minimum — and with several buildings it is worth messaging us, because that is exactly where the per-door rate can come down. What it will never do is go up with unit count. Placement and renewal stay at $499 and $299 however many doors you hold. Statements can be consolidated or kept per building, whichever your accounting prefers.

The first payment is taken when you set the card up. After that it is the same date every month, automatically, for $109 per unit. Stripe emails you a receipt each time. Screening & Lease Execution ($499) and lease renewal ($299) are one-off charges raised separately at the point the work is agreed, so they never appear on this recurring payment unannounced.

No. The checkout page is hosted and run by Stripe, one of the largest payment processors in the world. Your card details go straight to them. We never see or store the number — only the last four digits and the expiry date, the same as on a receipt.

Stripe emails you a receipt automatically after every payment. If you need a copy of an older invoice, or a set of them for your accountant, ask us and we will send them over.

Email us. Cancellation takes effect the following month — no exit fee, no minimum term, and we hand your records to whoever takes over. There is an offboarding process behind it — final accounting, deposit handling, records — and we would rather run that properly than have your billing simply stop while the work is still open.

Billing pauses. Tell us the tenancy has ended and we stop charging you until a new one begins — we do not list or show units, so an empty one needs almost nothing from us and charging you for it would be charging for work we are not doing. Pausing is a manual step at our end, so it needs a call or an email rather than a click.

No, and it never is. Your tenant pays you directly and rent never enters our company account, so we could not deduct our fee from it even if we wanted to. The two are completely separate: your tenant pays you, and you pay us $109 per unit.