Should you hire a property manager?
Most owners forget to price in their time, longer vacancies, unscreened-tenant risk, and undiscounted maintenance. See the real comparison.
The real cost of self-management
Self-management looks like the cheaper path. Skip the management fee, keep more of the rent, do the work yourself. The math gets harder once you account for what owners actually spend their time on: fielding 9pm maintenance calls, chasing late rent, screening applicants, coordinating turns, filing taxes, and learning landlord-tenant law one mistake at a time. None of that work is exotic, but all of it has a real hourly value, and almost none of it is priced into the typical "I'll just manage it myself" decision.
The expensive part of DIY isn't the time, it's the variance. A single bad tenant placement leads to missed rent, property damage, and an eviction that can cost 4 to 8 months of gross rent by the time it's settled. A 30-day longer vacancy on a turn outweighs a year of management fees at most rent points. Undiscounted maintenance pricing, missed renewals, and out-of-date lease language quietly erode NOI in ways that don't show up in any one expense line.
That's the comparison this calculator forces. Plug in your hourly value, your real vacancy days, what you actually pay for maintenance, and the eviction risk you're carrying, then compare against a professional manager modeled with the same inputs. The output isn't a sales pitch. It's a side-by-side look at the all-in cost of two paths so you can pick the one that actually pencils for your portfolio.
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