On the surface, managing your own property might sound easy enough. You might have some notion that it will take little more than placing an ad on Craigslist and then sitting back to move your tenant in and collect your rent. Then, you get that 3 A.M. phone call about the hot water heater exploding. Or your tenant decides not to pay the rent this month. Or you find yourself having to perform your very first eviction. At that point, you may begin to recognize some of the benefits of hiring a property management company.

Property management companies save you time. They also typically make your properties more profitable. They have experience. They’ve already forged good deals with vendors and trades. They know their landlord tenant law. They can even open you up to a wider variety of renters by helping you offer your property up as an affordable housing property if that is what you desire. When that three in the morning phone call happens, they are the ones to handle it. That experience can also be invaluable in helping you avoid lawsuits. This becomes a concern the moment you start renting properties, so this kind of protection becomes invaluable.

Property management companies can also typically get your property rented faster to a higher quality level of tenant. This is because they’ve had experience in marketing properties that you might not have. They know who their target market is for each type of property and where to find those people. They also know what sort of standards to hold tenants to, which means you don’t end up spending thousands of dollars repairing a property after a bad tenant has come and gone. That also keeps late rent and evictions down, which is important whether you’re an investor or simply trying to mitigate a bad mortgage.

Finally, property managers have time that you might not have. This is all they do. You might have another job. You might have other entrepreneurial ventures. In some cases, you might not even live in the same city or state as your properties. If you have a great many properties then it’s often difficult to manage them all on your own. Property management companies can help you with this scenario. If you’re the type of property investor who got into this game so that you could have the time and freedom to do other things besides work then this represents an ideal scenario for you. You’ll have that freedom, and the well managed properties mean you can potentially use the time for other, more lucrative things, such as scouting out new properties to buy.