Last month I logged every hour I spent managing my 9 rental properties, and the number surprised even me: 46 hours. Not 46 hours of swinging a hammer u2014 46 hours of phone calls, spreadsheet updates, tenant texts, and driving between buildings. When people ask why I still self-manage after 15 years, they usually frame the question around yen saved. The more honest answer is that self-management is a second job, and I finally sat down to price out what that job actually pays per hour.
Most landlords I talk to only track the money side: management fees avoided, repair invoices dodged. Almost nobody tracks the time side, because time doesn’t show up on a bank statement. But if you’re deciding whether to self-manage or hand things to a company, hours are the real currency you’re spending.
Where the 46 Hours Actually Went
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I broke my time log into categories for the month, and the split was not what I expected going in. Repairs and maintenance calls were not the biggest chunk u2014 administrative work was.
- Tenant communication (texts, calls, move-in/move-out coordination): 14 hours
- Bookkeeping and rent tracking across 9 units: 9 hours
- On-site repairs I did myself: 11 hours
- Vendor coordination for jobs I couldn’t do (electrical, a roof patch): 6 hours
- Driving between properties: 6 hours
That driving line item is easy to underestimate. My 9 properties are spread across a 40-minute radius, and even a 15-minute fix turns into an hour once you add travel both ways. Over a year, that’s roughly 72 hours just sitting in the car.
The Hourly Rate I’m Actually Paying Myself
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A property management company in my area typically charges around 5% of monthly rent, which for my portfolio works out to about 42,000 yen a month. If I compare that fee to my 46 hours, I’m effectively paying myself roughly 913 yen an hour to do this work myself. Some months that number looks fine. Other months, when a water heater fails at 9pm and I lose an evening driving out to shut off a valve, the effective hourly rate drops closer to 400 yen once you count the stress and the lost sleep.
That’s the calculation most self-managing landlords never run. We assume that avoiding the management fee is automatically a win, without asking what our own hour is worth. If you value your time at even 2,000 yen an hour u2014 well below what most tradespeople charge u2014 self-managing 9 units at 46 hours a month means you’re effectively paying 92,000 yen a month in opportunity cost to save 42,000 yen in fees. On paper, that’s a loss.
Why I Still Choose to Self-Manage Anyway
So why haven’t I switched to a management company after doing this math? Three reasons, and none of them are purely financial.
First, quality control. In year 3 of owning my second property, I hired a management company for exactly 8 months. Response time to tenant complaints stretched to 4 days on average, and I had two tenants leave partly because of it. My own average response time is under 3 hours during the day. Vacancy from a bad tenant experience costs far more than 42,000 yen a month u2014 a single month of vacancy on a typical unit in my portfolio runs about 65,000 yen in lost rent plus turnover cleaning.
The Repairs That Actually Eat a Whole Evening
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Not every repair call is equal. A stuck door lock takes 20 minutes. A clogged drain takes 40. But certain jobs reliably consume 3 to 4 hours once you count diagnosis, a parts run to the hardware store, and the actual fix. In my log, three jobs ate more than half my repair hours for the month: a toilet flapper replacement that turned into a full tank rebuild (2.5 hours), resealing a bathtub that had started leaking into the unit below (3 hours), and troubleshooting a breaker that kept tripping in one kitchen (4 hours, including a call to an electrician friend for a sanity check). Those three jobs alone were 9.5 of my 11 repair hours.
How I Actually Reduce the Hour Count
Since I started tracking time seriously about 2 years ago, I’ve cut my average monthly hours from around 58 down to the 46 I logged last month. A few changes made the biggest difference:
- I now keep a shared document tenants can use for non-urgent requests instead of texting me directly, which cut communication time by roughly 30%.
- I batch property visits by neighborhood instead of responding to each call individually, saving close to 20 hours a year in driving alone.
- I pre-stock common failure parts (toilet flappers, faucet cartridges, breaker switches) so a single repair trip doesn’t turn into two.
- I outsource anything electrical or involving gas lines without hesitation u2014 those jobs are rarely worth the time savings against the safety risk.
None of these changes eliminated the second-job feeling entirely. Self-managing 9 properties will always be somewhere between 35 and 50 hours a month depending on how many repair calls come in. What changed is that I now treat those hours as a real cost, not a rounding error, when I decide whether to take on property number 10.
The Question Worth Asking Before You Self-Manage
If you’re weighing self-management against hiring it out, don’t just compare fees to rent. Track your own hours honestly for one month first, the way I did, and multiply that number by what an hour of your time is actually worth to you. For some landlords with 2 or 3 units and flexible schedules, self-managing is close to free money. For someone juggling 9 properties and a day job, the math gets a lot more personal, and the right answer might be different for every single property you own.
I still self-manage all 9 of my properties, mainly because the quality control matters more to me than the hourly math suggests it should. But I check that math every year, and the day it stops making sense, I’ll be the first to admit it.
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