A few minutes of read-only financials and a short questionnaire surfaces what a buyer would discount your business for — how much of your revenue is recurring management fees versus one-time leasing, your door churn and net door growth, whether one investor-owner is too much of the book, and whether your broker license and trust accounting transfer cleanly. We separate the recurring book from transactional fees. Preview costs nothing.
Enter two numbers for an instant Residential Property Management ballpark. No signup — the real number comes from your books.
We answer each one from your books first — so you fix the story before a diligence team writes the number.
Your recurring fee base only holds if doors stay. A buyer wants net door retention and gross churn by cohort — if investor-owners are leaving, in-sourcing, or selling their rentals, the recurring book is leaking, and they're buying a melting ice cube, not an annuity. Door retention is the single biggest swing factor between the low and high end of the range.
How much of your doors and fee revenue sits with your top one to three owners? One investor with 200 doors isn't scale — it's a single point of failure. If they consolidate elsewhere or sell their portfolio, a big slice of recurring fees vanishes overnight, so a buyer discounts those doors heavily.
How much of last year's revenue was one-time tenant-placement, leasing, and renewal fees versus recurring management fees? Placement revenue rides on turnover and new-owner wins — it's not the annuity. Buyers pay the premium multiple for the recurring base and pay less for the transactional slice, so a placement-heavy book is more cyclical and prices lower.
Are you the broker-of-record? Does the license — and the owner relationships — transfer without you? Property management is a licensed real-estate activity in nearly every state, and client rent flows through trust accounts with strict separate-account and reconciliation rules. A license that walks out with you, or messy trust accounting, is a deal-gating problem, not a diligence detail.
Each lever is sized for a typical small firm, ~400 doors / ~$1.3m revenue, ~20% owner-normalized ebitda — about $300K EBITDA. Same number whether we frame it as “what a buyer discounts” or “what you keep by fixing it.”
Net doors (gross adds minus churn) is the headline value driver, and the per-door price is applied to it. Raising the share of revenue from monthly management fees (versus one-time leasing) lifts the multiple — the recurring fee book is the annuity buyers pay up for.
adds about 0.4–0.8× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 months
Proving the annuity holds is the single biggest swing between the low and high SDE band. Better service, communication, and retention programs keep doors — and the recurring fees they carry — under management.
adds about 0.4–0.8× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 months
Get any single investor-owner under ~15–20% of doors, document a transferable broker-of-record path, and keep clean, reconciled trust accounting. This de-risks the book so a buyer underwrites full value rather than haircutting.
adds about 0.3–0.6× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 months
Right-size your fee schedule against the ~8–12% market norm. Buyers price low-revenue-per-door books near the bottom of the $1,000–$2,500 range; lifting revenue-per-door at the source pushes the per-door valuation toward the top.
adds about 0.2–0.4× to your multiple · usually takes 6–18 months
Typical impact ranges blended from lower-middle-market transaction data, sub-$50M M&A databases, and observed consolidator pricing in the $300K–$3M EBITDA band. Directional, not a guarantee — your memo computes your actual numbers from your books.
The metrics buyers grade property management companies on. The diagnostic fills the “your business” column from your actual QuickBooks data.
| Metric | Residential Property Management benchmark | Your business | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recurring / contracted revenue | ~75% of revenue | Your data | Higher is better — the top multiple lever |
| Gross margin | ~55% | Your data | Pricing and job-costing discipline |
| EBITDA margin | ~22% | Your data | What flows to the bottom line |
| Healthy customer-concentration ceiling | top customer under 15% | Your data | Above it, buyers price the risk |
| Typical industry growth | ~10% / yr | Your data | Beating it can add to your multiple |
| Typical sale multiple | 3.0–5.0× EBITDA | Your data | Where the bidding starts; the levers above move you up |
Benchmarks are blended industry composites, service businesses $1M–$10M revenue, 2026-Q1 — directional, not a precise bar. Your memo measures you against your own books. Connect QuickBooks to fill in your numbers →
The diagnostic arrives as formats you can actually use, plus a private, scoped link to share a curated package with a specific buyer — you decide, card by card, what they see.
A branded slide deck, ready to present — for the buyer meeting, the lender, or the board.
A written diagnostic that holds up with buyers, yours to edit — plain-English summary, how we rebuilt your real earnings, every add-back listed.
Live formulas, not a dead printout — the path from raw profit to your real number, plus the cash-tied-up scenarios a buyer can stress-test.
Single-family/small-multifamily property management is a live roll-up, and most SMB sellers are add-ons. Direct buyers: PURE HomeRiver (40,000+ homes, backed by PGIM), Evernest (~23,000 units, LL Funds), Roofstock/Mynd (Bain Capital), Renters Warehouse (acquired by GA technologies), and the Real Property Management franchise (parent Neighborly, now KKR-owned). If you also manage HOAs/communities, Associa (with a Summit Partners minority stake) and CCMC (Charlesbank) are adjacent buyers. They pay for clean recurring books, low door churn, a diversified owner base, and a transferable broker license — and discount hard for the opposite. The memo maps which pool fits a firm your size.
Read-only, through Intuit. We never write to your books. About 5 minutes.
Just what the books can’t show — agreements, key accounts, who runs the crews.
Buyer-readiness score, normalized EBITDA, value range and top flags — instantly.
The full engine, all three deliverables, the dashboard and the buyer deal room.
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Start with the free preview. Pay once — $499 — only when you want the full memo. No subscription, no per-seat pricing.
Most Residential Property Management businesses in the $1M–$10M revenue range trade at roughly 3.0× to 5.0× normalized EBITDA, with a typical deal near 3.3×. Smaller, owner-dependent shops sit at the low end; larger, manager-run businesses with recurring revenue reach the top. Your actual number depends on your books — that's what the diagnostic computes, blending recent lower-middle-market closings, main-street marketplace sales, and academic M&A survey data.
On the recurring management-fee book, two ways that should agree: a multiple of seller's earnings (~2.0–2.3x SDE for a typical small firm, up to ~3x for a clean, low-churn, diversified book) and a per-door price (commonly ~$1,000–$2,500 per managed door). They cross-check against ~0.7x revenue. Your headline number lives or dies on door retention and your recurring-vs-transactional mix — not on how many doors you've ever touched.
Less than you'd think. Tenant-placement (often 50–100% of one month's rent) and renewal fees are transactional — they ride on turnover and new-owner wins, not your existing book. Buyers pay the premium multiple for the recurring management fee (your % of rent collected every month). A business that's mostly placement revenue is more cyclical and gets a lower multiple.
It's a gating item. Property management is a licensed real-estate activity in nearly every state, and client rent flows through trust accounts with strict rules. A buyer needs the broker's license — and your owner relationships — to transfer without you, and they'll diligence your trust accounting closely. Clean, reconciled trust accounts and a transferable license move you toward the top of the range; the reverse can stall a deal.
Sixty seconds. Four numbers. No signup, no email. Just a real answer.