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BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast

How Many Rentals Can One Person Actually Manage?

BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast

BiggerPockets

Education, Business, Investing

4.816.5K Ratings

🗓️ 19 November 2025

⏱️ 33 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Someone drove a car into Henry’s house. Yes, through his rental property.  For 99% of people reading this, that would put them in the hospital from stress. But Henry didn’t even need to lift a finger when this happened to him on vacation. Why? We’re about to tell you on this BiggerPockets Forum Q&A episode! You’ve got a few rental properties—maybe even a decent-sized portfolio—but you want to scale. How many rentals can you realistically self-manage? 10? 30? 50? What’s the tipping point where you go from managing it all to creating another full-time job for yourself? And when should you finally hire a property manager? Henry scaled up to 70 rental units before fully outsourcing, but he agrees that doing it sooner (and with fewer units) might have been the better move. Plus, Dave shares how to analyze real estate deals in under a minute when you’ve got dozens of potential rental properties in the pipeline. That’s right, the Data Deli himself is telling you NOT to open a spreadsheet for 90% of deals, and to use his quick “gut check” process instead. An investor also asks whether they should BRRRR in a rough neighborhood (C- or D-class) with low appreciation potential. Is there enough juice to make it worth it? Dave and Henry say it could be—but only in this circumstance.  In This Episode We Cover How many rental properties can one person realistically scale to (self-managing)? Dave and Henry’s quick “gut check” process for analyzing real estate deals ASAP BRRRRing in a C- or D-class neighborhood (what if it doesn’t appreciate?) The first steps every beginner real estate investor should take before buying property How to run the numbers on a house hack to ensure it makes sense for your lifestyle  And So Much More! Check out more resources from this show on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BiggerPockets.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-1202 Interested in learning more about today’s sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

How many rental properties can one person realistically buy?

0:04.0

And even more importantly, how many properties can one person actually manage?

0:09.2

Is it really possible to scale a rental property portfolio without property managers

0:13.9

eating up all your profits?

0:15.9

Today, we'll dig into that question and much more.

0:23.6

Hey, everyone, I'm Dave Meyer, head of real estate investing at Bigger Pockets.

0:27.6

Thank you all so much for being here.

0:29.9

And Henry Washington, thank you for being here, helping me answer some of our community questions.

0:35.8

Hey, man, this is one of my favorite formats to do,

0:38.6

is finding a way to answer questions and help the BP community.

0:42.6

Absolutely.

0:43.2

Well, we got some really good questions from real investors

0:46.3

on the Bigger Pockets forums today.

0:48.7

First up, we have an investor in California

0:51.7

who's wondering when it's time to hire a property manager.

0:56.1

Then we'll get into tricks for analyzing deals quickly, which is a super important skill to have,

1:01.3

in my opinion, and steps that you can take now, even if you're not planning to buy a property

1:06.7

for the next couple of months. We got that and a couple of more. Let's jump into it.

1:12.0

Our first question comes from Austin in Recita, California.

1:16.7

I have no idea where that is.

1:18.2

But Austin asked, is anyone that manages their own properties able to acquire many properties?

1:24.7

What systems do you use to achieve scale?

...

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