This article is general information for Philadelphia property owners and is not legal, tax or financial advice. It describes how property management services generally work, including our own. Service details and city requirements change, so check current details before you act and speak to a qualified professional about your own situation.
The short answer. A property manager runs the rental so the owner does not have to. That means pricing and marketing the unit, screening applicants, handling the lease and move-in, collecting rent, taking the maintenance calls, coordinating repairs, keeping the city paperwork current, and reporting on the money.
In Philadelphia it also means knowing the things that only matter here: an ageing rowhome housing stock, a leasing calendar built around September move-ins, and a city compliance cycle that does not forgive being late.
Table of Contents
Most people asking what a property manager does are not idly curious. They own one rental, usually a house they used to live in, and the job has quietly grown teeth. They want to know what they would actually be handing over.
So here is the honest version, including the parts that are less flattering.
Before a tenant moves in
Roughly half of a property manager’s value is spent before anybody signs anything, because this is where the expensive mistakes happen.
Pricing the unit. Not what the place down the street is asking, but what comparable units have actually leased for recently. Asking prices tell you what owners hope for. Lease prices tell you what renters paid. Getting this wrong by $100 either way costs more over a year than most people expect, which is why we wrote a separate guide on how much rent to charge in Philadelphia.
Getting the unit ready and marketed. Photographs that do not look like they were taken on a phone in a hallway, a written description that answers the questions renters actually ask, and a listing pushed out to the sites people genuinely search.
Showing it. A property manager meets people at the property. That sounds obvious until you consider the alternative, which is an owner handing out lockbox codes to strangers, or driving across the city after work for a viewing nobody turns up to.
Screening applicants. Income and employment verification, credit and background checks, rental history, landlord references, applied the same way to every applicant. Consistency is the whole point. We cover the process in detail in our guide to screening tenants for a Philadelphia rental.
The lease and the move-in. A lease written for the situation rather than pulled off a template site, a documented record of the property’s condition, and a move-in that does not involve the owner meeting someone on a street corner with a set of keys.
During the tenancy
This is the part owners underestimate, because on a good month it looks like nothing is happening.
Rent collection. Rent arrives, it gets reconciled, and the owner gets paid on a schedule they can plan around. When it does not arrive, somebody other than the owner is the one making that phone call.
Maintenance. The tenant calls the property manager, not the owner. The property manager works out whether it is urgent, sends a licensed and insured contractor who has done work for them before, and keeps the owner informed without needing a decision at eleven at night. A pipe does not wait for business hours, and in a Philadelphia winter it really does not wait.
Being the point of contact. Every question, every complaint, every noise issue, every lost key. This is the bulk of the work by volume and almost none of it by value, which is precisely why handing it over is worth something.
Keeping the paperwork current. Rental licenses renew. Certificates expire. A property manager tracks the dates so nobody finds out by getting a notice. If you want the detail on what Philadelphia asks for, our guide to getting a Philadelphia rental license walks through it, and the City’s own licensing pages are the source of record.
Reporting. Monthly statements and year-end figures, so the property is something you can see at a glance rather than reconstruct from a shoebox each spring.
Renewals. Deciding each year whether to raise rent, hold it, or turn the unit over. It is the most expensive decision an owner makes annually and most people make it on instinct. We ran the actual numbers in our guide to lease renewal versus turnover.
What a property manager does that is specific to Philadelphia
A property manager in a sunbelt suburb of 2015 build-outs has a different job to one here. Three things make Philadelphia its own thing.
The housing stock is old. Rowhomes with original windows, cast-iron radiators, flat roofs with internal drains, and supply lines running through uninsulated back walls. Maintenance here is not a repainted drywall job. It is knowing which contractor has worked on a 1920s rowhome before and which one will make it worse.
The leasing calendar is unusually sharp. Philadelphia moves between May and August, driven hard by the universities and a September 1 move-in date. A unit that leases in ten days in June can sit for six weeks in November. A property manager who knows that will steer your lease end dates toward the window where the renters are, rather than letting them drift into the dead months.
Philadelphia is not one rental market. Rents in Fishtown, Point Breeze, Fairmount and Graduate Hospital move independently of each other. A number that is right in one neighborhood is wrong in the next, and city-wide averages will mislead you on both. A local property manager prices to the block, not the city.
What a property manager does not do
Worth being straight about, because the gap between expectation and reality is where most bad relationships start.
- Guarantee you never hear about the property. You will be consulted on anything expensive. That is a feature.
- Make a bad investment good. If the numbers do not work, managing it well does not change the numbers. It just means you lose less time while they do not work.
- Eliminate vacancy. Tenants move. Good management shortens the gap and keeps the unit ready. It does not abolish the gap.
- Give you legal advice. A property manager is not a lawyer. Any decent one will tell you when a question needs an attorney rather than guessing at it.
- Control what the city does. A property manager can file on time and track every date. Issuance timing belongs to the city.
What it costs
Property management is normally priced as a percentage of the monthly rent, with leasing charged separately when a new tenant is placed. Compliance work tends to be a flat fee.
The thing to compare is not really the headline percentage. It is what sits inside it, and what does not. Ask what is included, ask what gets billed separately, and ask to see it written down before you sign anything. Our own fees are published in full on the HubKey pricing page, and what is covered at each level is set out on our Philadelphia property management page.
If you want to see how the cost compares to what self-managing is quietly costing you in time and vacancy, we built a self-management calculator for exactly that.
Do you actually need one?
Plenty of owners self-manage well for years, and if that is working there is no reason to change it.
It usually stops working for one of these reasons:
- You have stopped enjoying owning the property, and the cause is the admin rather than the asset.
- You do not live near it, or you have moved out of the city entirely.
- You have more than one unit, and the volume has crossed from hobby into job.
- You have been through a difficult tenancy and do not want to be the one in the middle again.
- You suspect you are underpriced but have not had time to check properly.
We wrote a longer piece weighing this up honestly, including when the answer is no: is a property manager worth it?
How to tell a good property manager from a bad one
The industry has a wide quality range and the differences are not visible from a website. Some questions that get you useful answers:
| Ask this | Why it tells you something |
| Who actually answers when my tenant calls at 11pm? | Separates a local operator from a call centre. |
| What is not included in the management fee? | The answer is more revealing than the fee itself. |
| How do you decide what to charge for rent? | Listen for leased comparables, not asking prices. |
| Which contractors do you use, and are they licensed and insured? | A vague answer here is a bad sign. |
| When do I get paid, and what happens if the tenant pays late? | You want a date you can plan around. |
| Can I see a sample monthly statement? | If reporting is an afterthought, you will feel it. |
| How many properties does my manager personally handle? | Attention is finite. Ask the number. |
One more worth asking: what happens when I want to sell. A property manager who will hand you back to your agent is thinking about the relationship rather than the unit.
The National Association of Residential Property Managers is a reasonable starting point for checking that a company takes the profession seriously, though membership on its own is not a guarantee of anything.
Frequently asked questions
What does a property manager do day to day?
Most days it is tenant communication, maintenance coordination and rent reconciliation. Around those sit the bigger jobs: pricing and marketing a vacancy, screening applicants, handling move-ins and move-outs, renewals, compliance dates and owner reporting.
Is a property manager the same as a landlord?
No. The landlord owns the property. The property manager is hired by the owner to run it, and acts on the owner’s behalf within whatever the management agreement sets out.
Does a property manager handle maintenance themselves?
They coordinate it rather than carry it out. The tenant reports the issue, the property manager triages it, and licensed and insured contractors do the work. The owner is consulted on anything above an agreed threshold.
Can a property manager help if I only own one rental?
Yes, and single-property owners are a large share of the Philadelphia market. Most are accidental landlords who kept a former home rather than selling it.
What should I ask a property manager before hiring one?
Who answers an out-of-hours call, what sits outside the management fee, how rent is priced, which contractors they use, when you get paid, and how many properties your manager personally handles.
Can I switch property managers?
Yes. The management agreement sets out notice and how the handover works, so read that before signing rather than after. A good company will make leaving straightforward, which is itself a reasonable thing to ask about upfront.
Start with your number
Before deciding whether a property manager makes sense, it helps to know what your unit should actually be renting for in your Philadelphia neighborhood. Our free Rental Income Analysis is based on what comparable properties have recently leased for, and it takes a few minutes.
If you would rather talk it through, HubKey manages Philadelphia rentals end to end as a licensed Pennsylvania brokerage. Contact us today.
Mike Goldstein is the CEO and Broker of Record at HubKey Real Estate. He bought his first Philadelphia rental property in 2008 and has been managing and acquiring properties across the city ever since. He founded HubKey in 2022 to bring transparency to Philadelphia property management. His focus is helping everyday people build wealth through real estate.
