Our Modern Take to Rental Management in 2025

Shooting Straight on Investor and Property Management Profitability in the Modern Rental Market

This business was hard when we started almost 20 years ago and had to help owners navigate the pain and devastation many were dealing with in 2008, and it is somehow much harder now in a post-2020 landscape that we call the “modern rental market.” Management charges rarely make up more than 12% of your total income, but poor performance when it comes to listing presentation, fast follow-up, reducing resident turnover, repair expenses, preserving home value, and proper pricing almost guarantees that your investment will be a stressful and unprofitable endeavor.  The stakes are high, and results are not easy. Rents in our area have been falling for over a year, and many are not even aware.

This is not the time to take advantage of the gig economy or hire a cheap manager.  That’s similar to skimping on an attorney if you are innocent and face serious criminal charges, or very sick and need the best medicine. If a company is pushing their cheap price they are not focused on overall performance because they have to cut corners.  With the upheaval in the real estate industry, newcomers are picking up property management and tend to offer great prices and promises while doing a couple of things well, but this is a surprisingly complex and challenging business these days that requires costly high-tech tools as well as deeply researched and tested strategies combined with care and focus.

   Most of the companies we were competing against when we were founded don’t exist anymore.  During that time we have evolved constantly and even reinvented ourselves since 2020 yet still struggle to stay ahead of Wall Street and private equity-owned homes that are our main competition for premier renters these days.  We aren’t the cheapest, but we are the best, and compounded over time the cash that we deliver to our customers dwarfs the returns homeowners could hope to see with discount managers or self-management in most cases. Despite that, it might be our ability to reduce the stress of being a landlord that is most valuable. While our most well-funded competitors spend huge sums of money to land new customers and then buy their way out of major mistakes, our focus is to keep you as a customer forever through exceptional performance across the board.

We see a lot of numbers thrown around by property management companies, and it’s hard to know for sure what to trust in this business. A 98% occupancy rate for example means that every home they manage is vacant on average about 7 days all year. Our vacancy rate the past couple of years as rents have declined and owners had to digest tough news for the first time in years has stretched out to about 4.5%. If we had more control over pricing we would target, and hit 3%, but our owners determine the rate. We work hard to use convincing messaging, and 4.5% is very good these days. It’s well under one month of vacancy. We don’t want to underprice our homes, but vacancy is considered by professionals to be one of the worst possible expenses. (see Details on Why Vacancy is a Terrible Cost)

There are many reasons why our vacancy rate is low.

Presenting amazing listings and great communication on what the most important priorities should be gives us a significant edge, and that’s what most people notice. We also heavily invest (often company funds) into keeping proven high-quality residents paying top dollar in place for as long as possible. So vacancy rate alone is a very misleading metric anyway. We could rent every home overnight if we underpriced them, had low application standards, waived deposits, and employed other bad management strategies. There are levels to this. (see Details on How Profitable Highly Satisfied Residents are for Investors in Todays Modern Rental Market).

Underpricing a rental is also a common property management company strategy.

If you underprice a home you tend to load up on application payments. Instead, we try to convince owners to start high but set a simple schedule for reducing $25-75 per week during most of the year. That way if we can get the higher rate we will, but we also aren’t waiting, hoping. Nice and clinical which is typically a great approach in our business. That keeps company profit motivation as well as bias and emotion out of our process as much as possible. It also aligns our incentives with yours, some might say we play property management (Moneyball: see more)

These days rental markets are very efficient in most cases.

That means if the home is well presented (our forte), we are getting dozens of website views, multiple showings every week, and following up fast (no company is faster than MoveZen), there isn’t much left to do to help rent the home, including paid ads even though we do run a fair amount. You either improve the offer (updates and upgrades) or get to the right market rent asap (see How Understanding the Efficiency of the Modern Rental Market will Increase Profit).

Our application fee collections are relatively similar now

in a slow market to what they were in 2022, the wildest market we’ve seen in our 20-year history. That’s because in 2022 we listed with some of the highest prices in the industry and used that to control the flow of applications, and bitterly disappointed declined applicants as well. We also have a fair and transparent charging policy. Our reputation and long-term goals meant much more than short-term profit. We don’t play games, we just want to grow enough to compete with the private equity players who have taken over our industry, while delivering industry-leading results at a fair, highly justified price (see The Weak Property Management Company’s Sleight of Hand: Focusing on Cost to Distract From Poor Performance).

Particularly post-2020 We firmly believe our performance more than pays for itself even before tax deductibility (see Adapt to Thrive in A High Interest Rate Rental Market).

We take pride in exceptionally efficient management and finding win-wins for owners, and residents.

The number we are most concerned with is “annual net operating income”, or better yet 5+ years of industry-leading NOI. We take the long view in everything that we do. If we can deliver significant NOI for a customer, they often bring us more rentals. Most of our competitors are fighting to get customers, we are fighting to keep them forever, and the best way to do that is to make them highly profitable. (see Maximizing Returns for Single-Family Residential Landlords by Focusing on NOI, Not Rental Rate).

Since 2020 despite all the negative headlines, inflation,

and the most brutal housing market in history we sent 80% of the rental funds we collected to our owners. That includes our total management cost, repairs and maintenance, and many miscellaneous costs. That equates to profitability for owners that is so exceptional it should be hard to believe. Those are the years we were honored with the statistically verified Inc 5000 Award, which lends a lot of credibility in an industry where true performance is very hard to verify. No one knows more than us that profitability is the measurement that matters to you, not random metrics with little meaning when taken on their own (see Property Management Myths, How to Avoid Them and Set the Right Investment Priorities as a Landlord).

Partner with MoveZen today, roughly follow our advice as these thousands of owners have done, and let’s produce another extremely profitable 5 years together. (see Lessons to Learn from a Housekeeper and Mother of a MoveZen Staff Member)