As a rental property investor, when should you hire a property management company?

Is it after a certain number of units?

Is it after you've made a certain amount of money?

Or should you just go ahead in the very beginning and hire a management company?

That's the question I'm going to tackle today's edition of Ask Coach, and we're getting

started right now.

Welcome to the Ask Coach edition of the podcast.

If we haven't met yet, my name is Chad Carson.

You can also call me Coach, and my mission here is to help you get out of the financial grind, so you can do more of what matters.

And with the Ask Coach podcast series, I do my best to answer your burning questions about real estate investing and personal finance. Today's question came from Melody on YouTube, so thank you for that question. But I know a lot of you have this question of when should you hire a property manager or maybe even whether you should hire one in the first place. And I'm going to give you some specific ideas on how you might be able to decide in your own situation when you should do that or if you should do it. But I want to give you a couple of

stories from my own experience and one other investor I know just to show you that this is a

personal decision that could go either way. There's different approaches that are both effective

and both can work as a real estate investor. And I'll tell you about my own situation first. When I began investing in real estate, I was 23 years old. I have a business partner.

We began flipping houses, but slowly but surely, we started acquiring some rental properties.

And we managed those properties ourselves. So we did the leasing. We did the collections of rent.

We handled maintenance calls. And so we kind of built up our

understanding of the systems and how to run the processes of a rental property company by doing

it ourselves. And I think in general, if you have the ability to do this, it's always a good

idea to learn the business from the ground up. I kind of equate this. There's an old maximum

business that if you're going to have a shop or a store, learn to sweep the floors of the store first. Like learn to do the mundane task so that you can build up to doing other tasks. And the bread and butter, the blocking and tackling, the shooting and dribbling, to use every metaphor in the book of real estate investing is property management. And so it can't hurt if you

really want to learn the business, all the details to do it yourself a little bit. And that's what we did

did to start off. But we eventually grew to the point where we started hiring somebody. We hired a

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