Should You Hire a Property Manager to Sell Your Home?

A property manager can evict a tenant but generally lacks skills to sell a home.

A potential seller with a rental property wondered if she should hire a property manager to sell, and of course I told her that’s a bad idea. Hiring a property manager to sell your home is little bit like asking a mid-wife to perform brain surgery on you. Does she know how to cut into your skull? Maybe. Would you want her to? Or, how about asking a plumber to build your house? A plumber certainly knows how to install a toilet and fix leaky pipes, but there’s more to building a house than that. Or, let’s take a burger flipper from McDonald’s and let the guy cater your wedding while we’re at it. Sure, he can fry hamburger. But can he create a 7-tier chocolate chiffon with Chantilly and a lemon-based filling, topped by buttercream frosting and dusted with macadamia nuts?

All of these professions share something in common with each other but the degrees of separation are too great. Don’t you deserve a specialist? Now, to be fair, there are a few people in Sacramento who are real estate brokers and as a “favor” to a few clients, might engage in property management. Are they an excellent property manager? Perhaps, but maybe not. If they don’t specialize in property management and simply dabble on the sidelines, the person that suffers could be the client. They might not be up-to-date on all the new tenant / landlord laws. They might not be able to handle potential tenant conflicts that end up in court. Maybe they’re just lucky. For now.

Seriously, if I had a choice to manage my rental by hiring a property management company that is engaged full-time in the business of managing rentals or some guy down the street with a broker’s license, I know which I’d surely choose. The property management company. And vice versa, when it comes to deciding whether to hire a property manager to list that rental home or a full-time listing specialist whose focus is listing and selling Sacramento homes, again, I know which I’d surely choose. The listing specialist every time.

Hiring a pro means you don’t have to settle for less. You know a listing agent can negotiate because she routinely sells homes week after week. She has a track record and top reviews. Take a Sacramento Realtor like me, with 43 years of experience, and you can imagine how many problems and challenges I have resolved over the years. You can easily see how this base of knowledge is a huge benefit to my clients. I am still learning new things every day; adding more to my arsenal of polished skills. I would not dare to claim I could manage rental properties. My license allows it but I’m not a specialist in that area.

Yet, there are agents who will try to sell your home as a property manager. I see the listings in MLS. Terrible photographs, the wrong price, lousy descriptions, clear evidence of little to none sales experience. Yet, these property managers tend to do such a bad job that eventually the client fires them, goes looking for a top agent in Sacramento, and that’s how the client ends up with me. It would be so much easier for sellers to bypass all of that nonsense and just call me directly. But they don’t know until they go through it. They believe the guy who claims sure, I can sell the house and then can’t manage to keep his thumb out of the property photos.

Don’t count on using the guy who evicts tenants for a living to help stage your home for sale and guide you through negotiations. The answer is no, do NOT hire a property manager to sell your home. Hire a full-time Sacramento Realtor who specializes in listings.