Money
What a management company actually costs you, beyond the 8–10%
The quoted number is almost always 8–10% of collected rent. That's the part every management company will tell you upfront. It's also usually less than half of what actually leaves your account over a year.
Where the rest goes
The management fee is the number in the pitch deck. The other three are the number on the year-end statement — and they scale with exactly the events you'd expect to be routine: a tenant moving out, a repair, a lease renewal.
The three line items nobody quotes upfront
Leasing fees. Most companies charge close to a full month's rent to fill a vacancy — on top of the monthly management fee, not instead of it. Turn over three units in a year and that's three months of rent gone before the tenant has paid a dime.
Markup on vendor work. A $400 repair billed through the management company often shows up as $460–480. It's rarely itemized as "markup" — it's just the invoice total, and there's no line showing what the vendor actually charged.
Renewal and admin fees. Smaller, but persistent: a flat fee every time a lease renews, sometimes a separate fee for each maintenance ticket opened, regardless of how small.
What self-managing actually costs instead
Self-managing avoids all four line items above — and replaces them with something that doesn't show up on a statement: being the person who answers a 9pm text about a leak. For a landlord with one or two units, that's a fair trade. Past six or eight units, it's the thing that makes people sell.
| Management company | Self-managed | OwnAway | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly fee | 8–10% of rent | $0 | Flat, well under a management company's fee |
| Leasing fees | ~1 month's rent per turnover | $0 | $0 — not a leasing service |
| Vendor markup | 10–20%, usually unitemized | $0 (you negotiate directly) | $0 — your vendors, your rates |
| Who answers the 9pm text | Their after-hours line | You | OwnAway, with you looped in and able to step in any time |
The pitch for OwnAway isn't that it's cheaper than doing it yourself — it's that it removes the one part of self-managing that doesn't scale: being reachable, all the time, for every tenant issue, while still using your own vendors at your own rates.