01
Inbound · finding a tenantAttract, show, screen, sign.
A consistent leasing path with written criteria and clean records.
Rentals shouldn’t be a mess to run.
Property manager cost calculator
Thinking about firing your property manager? Let’s run the numbers. Nothing you type is sent or saved.
The gray numbers are an example. Type yours and the results update automatically.
In dollars.
Percent of the rent.
Placement fee (use .5 for half a month).
In years. Longer stays mean fewer leasing fees.
Your time budget
Add repairs, other fees, empty days and more
Your side of it
Ads, software, filling a vacancy.
In dollars. Counted on both sides.
Percent added to vendor bills, if any.
Renewals, inspections, admin, late fees they keep.
In dollars. If you have a manager now.
Between tenants. Your honest guess.
Between tenants. Your honest guess.
With a manager, you lose about
$2,100 a year
$175 a month · $21,000 over 10 years if nothing changes
Your time budget
At $25 an hour, that $2,100 a year is 84 hours of your time, about 7 hours a month.
Spend less time than that, and your time is worth more than $25 an hour.
In dollars.
An average month, turnovers included.
The striped part is the difference. “Keep” means rent minus the costs in this calculator, before your mortgage, property taxes and insurance.
- Leasing fees +$1,000
- Management fees: 10% of 11 months’ rent ($11,000) +$1,100
- Month one’s rent is the leasing fee, so no 10% on it. 10% on all 12 months makes it $2,200.
- Your own costs are not counted yet. Add them under “Add repairs, other fees, empty days and more”.
An estimate from the numbers you typed, not a promise. “Keep” means rent left after the costs on this page. The rent, your mortgage, property taxes and insurance are counted the same either way. Before income taxes: the IRS lists management fees among the rental expenses you can usually deduct (Publication 527), so the after-tax difference is smaller. Not tax advice. Earnings disclaimer
The operating model
One landlord. A repeatable system.
Not more software. The whole operation, written down so plainly that someone else, or an AI, could pick it up. This is how I run mine. Take what fits.
02
Managing · during the leaseRun the home without living in your inbox.
One place for tenant messages. A plan for every repair request. Vendors lined up ahead of time. Records you can still find years later.
03
Outbound · the lease endsRenew the lease, or end it cleanly.
Keep the engine running. Renew tenants in good standing and try to keep them forever. Or end it cleanly: notice, move-out, inspection, and the handoff to the next tenant.
04
LastThen teach an AI how you run it.
What you wrote down becomes a knowledge base in your own files. Give it to the AI of your choice, so it works from your rules and not from generic advice. That’s your own AI property manager. It helps with the routine. You keep the judgment.
Running it yourself doesn’t mean doing every job. Need a plumber? Pay a plumber. That’s paying for one job, not a percentage of every rent check.
Free, in the open
Check my work before you join.
Everything here is public. Read one thing, then decide if you want to join.
Fellow landlord, not guru
I built this to work when I wasn’t there.
I’m Rene. I own five properties. I live in one and rent out the other four in Florida.
Deployed, I had email, bad internet and a backwards time zone. I couldn’t drive over to check on anything, so everything had to be set up to work without me there. It held up, and it taught me three words: Control is cashflow. The fewer people between you and the decisions, the more you keep.
What pays for this site? I do, out of my own rental cashflow. Everything here is free, and nothing is for sale on this site: no courses, no coaching, no memberships, no ads. The one thing I’ll ask you to do is join the free community, and joining pays me nothing. I keep it free because I get better at this by being around landlords who care about doing it well. The money details are on one page.
Nobody will care more about your livelihood than you.
Read the full storyLandlord Legends
Come build with fellow landlords.
A free community of DIY landlords: people who run their own rentals or want to, and anyone just starting out. Practical questions, honest feedback, and landlords a few steps ahead of you.
Join Landlord LegendsFellow landlords. Free to join.
It runs on Skool, a site for online groups. You’ll need a free Skool account. At the door you answer two short questions: what kind of landlord you are, and why you’re joining.