I know most of you probably manage your own rental properties, but I'd like you to weigh in on a situation. My FIL rents out a SFH. Normally, he pimps out my husband to do the work, but for the last 8 months that's not been a viable option so he hired a property manager who is an absolute waste of skin as far as I can tell. The guy charges 10% of the rent amount each month to collect the rent check. Anything above and beyond that has an extra fee to go with it. The last tenants complained that service requests were only accepted through email and even then they were rarely, if ever, responded to. Those tenants have now moved out. The property manager's crew came in and took the furniture that the tenants left, but didn't do anything else in the way of cleaning up. The property manager wants something like $12k to fix the place up. That includes $5k to cut the brush in the backyard and $3k to paint the exterior of a mostly brick house. My FIL has thankfully decided to cut ties with said property manager, but we found out that the property manager has changed the locks on the house and we don't have keys. In addition, he has started to do work, what he called a "house flip," without permission. I'm sure that there is going to be a bill associated with that. If I had to guess, I'd say he's probably going to charge somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 for cleaning up, putting up new blinds, and maybe shampooing the carpet.
I guess my first question is, is this a typical fee schedule? I feel like I'm in the wrong business if I could be charging 10% just to collect a check every month. The other charges are absolutely ridiculous given the size of the house and yard. For various reasons, I'm not jumping at the bit to do it myself, but I don't want to see FIL get screwed either.