You bought a house in Oxford so your kid had a place at Ole Miss. They graduated, the market stayed strong, and you kept it as a rental. The plan seemed simple: get it rented, collect the check, and let it build wealth quietly in the background while you live your life hours away.
So why does the house keep showing up on your to-do list?
Here's the honest answer. Rented isn't done. A signed lease is the start of dozens of things nobody warned you about when you decided to keep the house, and if you're handling them yourself from Nashville or Birmingham or Dallas, your investment has quietly become a job.
The team your rental actually needs
After 19 years managing rental property in Oxford, I can tell you a single rental house needs eight different roles filled:
- A marketing director who gets the home in front of renters: 50+ listing sites, 3D tours, a database of more than 1,300 renters.
- A screening investigator who verifies every applicant, using technology that catches fake IDs, doctored pay stubs, and fake bank statements. We haven't had an eviction since 2010, and that's not luck.
- A compliance officer who keeps the lease fair-housing legal and written to protect the owner.
- An accountant handling monthly statements, 1099s at tax time, and daily reconciliations verified by a third-party accounting firm.
- A maintenance manager who vets vendors, negotiates discounted rates, and troubleshoots before sending anyone out.
- A 24/7 dispatcher who answers the late-night call, every time.
- A risk manager who makes sure every resident carries $100,000 in liability coverage, backs the property with a $1M general liability policy, and provides pet damage protection beyond the deposit.
- A strategic advisor who knows the Oxford market well enough to call when to renew, how much to raise, and when to sell.
Here's what actually happens instead
Most self-managing owners aren't filling these roles. They got the house rented, they collect the check, and the rest either gets forced on them or doesn't happen at all.
The phone call still comes at 11 p.m., but it gets returned when it's convenient, so a small leak runs two extra days before anyone looks at it. Nobody is vetting vendors or negotiating rates, so you pay retail to whoever answers the phone, and nobody troubleshoots first, so you pay a $150 service call for something a few questions would have solved. Nobody is watching the Oxford rental market, so the rent renews flat year after year and there's no real answer for whether to raise, hold, or sell. And nobody is verifying that your resident actually carries $100,000 in liability coverage, or backing your house with a master liability policy and pet damage protection beyond the deposit, because those programs aren't available to the owner of a single house. One bad incident comes straight out of your pocket.
The real cost of self-managing isn't the work you end up doing. It's all the work that never gets done.
What we charge, and what it's really costing you
Our fee is 13.5% of collected rent, about $338 a month on a $2,500 rental, and it covers all eight roles, 24/7, 365 days a year.
Compare that to what you already pay professionals to fill one role. Your accountant charges $300 an hour to do one thing. An attorney, $280. A plumber charges $150 just to show up. We fill every role above, all month long, for about the cost of a single hour with your accountant.
To be honest, once you add up the retail-priced repairs, the flat renewals, and the vacancies that run long, there's a good chance our fee isn't really costing you anything at all. And that math doesn't count the part you can't buy back: the evenings, the vacations, and the family time that gets interrupted because a stranger's water heater quit.
Getting started is the easy part
Request a free rental analysis and we'll tell you what your house should rent for in today's Oxford rental market. If the numbers make sense, we take over all of it: marketing, screening, leases, maintenance, accounting, and the 2 a.m. phone calls. You collect rent and get your evenings back.
Own the investment, not the job.
