All 9 of my rental properties sit about 90 minutes from where I live. Some are single houses, a few are small 2 and 3 unit buildings, so the real door count is 17. I self-manage every one of them, and for years I told people it barely took any time. Then one year I actually logged it: 18.5 hours a month on average, plus around 4,200 yen per trip in fuel and tolls, plus roughly 7,000 yen a month in phone, software and printing. When I ran that against what a management company would charge, the honest answer surprised me. At my current size, doing it myself is worth it. At around 14 more doors, or if the drive were much longer, it would flip.
Here is the full accounting, because the decision to self-manage should be a number, not a feeling.
Where the Hours Go
ud83duded2 RECOMMENDED ON AMAZON US
Top Property Management Books
Build the knowledge base that separates professional landlords from amateur ones.
Once a month I drive the full circuit and physically look at every property. Exterior walls, roof lines I can see from the ground, common stairs and railings, the meter boxes, the bike parking, the drains, and any unit that turned over recently. The loop itself is about 7 hours: 3 hours of driving and roughly 4 hours on the ground across all the stops. I catch things on these rounds that tenants never report, a slow gutter leak, a loosening handrail bolt, a neighbor’s tree pushing on a fence. In 15 years I am confident these visits have prevented at least a few 200,000 yen repairs by catching the 15,000 yen version first.
The inspection drive is the predictable part. The rest of the month is lumpy:
- Tenant calls and messages: about 2 to 3 hours a month, mostly equipment questions and the occasional lockout
- Contractor coordination: 2 to 4 hours when something is being repaired, arranging access, getting quotes, checking the work
- Rent reconciliation and chasing the one or two late payers: about 1.5 hours a month
- Turnovers: a vacancy adds 8 to 12 hours that month for the move-out walkthrough, listing photos, agent calls and the final check
- Accounting and tax prep: averaged out, about 2 hours a month, heavier in February
Across a normal year with 2 or 3 turnovers, it lands near that 18.5 hour monthly average. A bad month with a leak and a move-out at once has hit 40 hours.
What a Management Company Would Cost
ud83duded2 RECOMMENDED PRODUCTS
Landlord-Tenant Law Guides
Know exactly what you can and cannot do u2014 essential reading before any dispute.
Full management here runs about 5 percent of collected rent, sometimes with a small per-unit minimum. My 17 doors bring in roughly 1.42 million yen a month, so 5 percent is about 71,000 yen a month, or 852,000 yen a year. For that, a company handles rent collection, tenant contact, first-response dispatch, turnover coordination and the monthly report. They do not usually cover the leasing fee for a new tenant, which is a separate month of rent, and they mark up contractor work, often 10 to 15 percent.
Putting a Value on My Hours
This is where people fool themselves. If I value my time at 0 yen, self-managing always wins. That is not realistic. I value the landlord work at 3,000 yen an hour, which is roughly what I would pay a competent part-time property assistant. At 18.5 hours a month that is 55,500 yen of my time. Add about 4,200 yen in fuel and tolls for the loop and 7,000 yen in overhead, and my all-in monthly cost to self-manage is roughly 67,000 yen.
Against the company’s 71,000 yen, plus their contractor markup, plus the fact that I would still do my own monthly drive because I do not trust a report I cannot see, self-management comes out ahead by a modest margin. Not a landslide. Maybe 10,000 to 15,000 yen a month once you count the markup, before you value the control and the knowledge I build by being on site.
Where the Break-Even Sits
ud83duded2 RECOMMENDED PRODUCTS
Property Inspection Forms & Checklists
Document everything. A signed checklist at move-in prevents every deposit dispute.
The company’s cost scales with rent. My time cost scales with doors and distance, but not linearly, because the drive is fixed and many tasks batch. When I model adding units, my hours go up about 45 minutes per additional door per month, while the 5 percent fee goes up by the full rent of that door. Run that out and the lines cross at around 31 doors for my setup, not 14. The 14 figure is what it drops to if I assume a 2-hour each-way drive instead of 90 minutes, because then the loop alone eats a full day and the fixed cost stops being fixed. Distance, not door count, is the real variable.
What Would Make Me Hand It Over
I have a written list of triggers, and if two of them hit at once I will hire a company for at least part of the portfolio:
- The monthly loop consistently exceeds 5 hours of pure driving
- My total landlord hours pass 30 a month for three months running
- I add a property more than 2 hours away
- A health issue makes the drive unsafe or unpleasant
- Turnovers cluster so badly that I am doing more than 4 in a single quarter
- I find a company that will do leasing-only or first-response-only at a fee under 3 percent, so I keep the parts I am good at
The Hybrid I Actually Use
I already outsource the pieces that do not need me. Tenant placement goes to a local agent for the standard one month fee, because they have the portal access and foot traffic I cannot match. Emergency after-hours calls route to a 24-hour dispatch service for about 1,100 yen per unit per month, so a burst pipe at 2am is not my phone ringing. That leaves me the monthly drive, the contractor relationships, and the accounting, which are the parts where being the owner actually adds value.
The mistake I made for years was assuming self-management was free because no invoice arrived. Once I put my hours on the same spreadsheet as the company’s fee, the decision got clear, and it also told me exactly which property, the next one over 2 hours away, would be the one I finally hand off. That is the math I re-run every year across all 9 of my properties.
Property Management Company Evaluation u2014 12-Point Checklist
Developed after switching management companies twice. Saves you from costly mistakes that took me years to learn.
ud83cudfe0 More from DIY Father
15 years of landlord experience u00b7 3 apartment buildings u00b7 DIY renovations that saved millions of yen. Browse all articles at diytosan.com
