Buy, sell, and grow your rental portfolio

We own rentals, and we will tell you how many

Plenty of brokerages mention that they invest too and then change the subject. Ours is seven rental units across three small partnerships: two duplexes, a single-family rental, and a pair of short-term rental units. In one of those partnerships the stake is a third, not the whole thing.

That is a deliberately humble portfolio, and its size is the point. It is small enough that we are not bidding against our own investor clients for houses, and large enough that we have signed the loans, absorbed the vacancies and paid for the furnaces ourselves.

The practical effect is that when we hand you a pro forma, it is the kind of document we have had to live with rather than the kind we have had to sell.

Who gets first look at a deal

The fair question that follows is this: if you buy the same kind of houses you manage for me, who gets first look when something good turns up? Here is the rule we actually follow. Anything we source goes to active client buyers and to the owners we already manage for before we would consider it for our own account. In practice, we buy what nobody else wanted.

And any time Intrigue or anyone on our team is a principal in a transaction, buying or selling for ourselves, we put that in writing and we do not represent both sides of it.

You should not have to take that on trust either. Ask us on any specific deal and we will tell you exactly who we represent and what our interest is.

We have no reason to steer you

A property management company that does not sell real estate makes money one way, by managing your rental. Ask that company whether you should sell, and everything about how it earns points toward keeping the house rented. A brokerage that manages nothing earns on the transaction. Ask it the same question and everything points toward listing.

We do both, which is the only reason we can afford to answer the question straight. If the numbers say sell, we can list it. If they say hold, we can manage it. Either way we expect to still be your firm next year, so steering you into the wrong one costs us more than it pays.

The same reasoning is why we do not mark up maintenance. You are billed what the vendor billed us, with nothing added. A company that takes a margin on repairs has a quiet reason to want more repairs, and we would rather not have that reason sitting in the file.

If you are investing from another state

Most of the owners we work for do not live in Indiana, and the whole operation is shaped around that rather than tolerating it. It is also, per the brief we get from our own reviews, the thing people say made the difference.

Practically, it means we are your eyes. We walk the house before you buy it and tell you what the photographs are hiding. We are the ones who open the code enforcement letter, notice that the permit was never pulled, and find out that the sewer lateral has a history, at the point when those things are still cheap to deal with.

It also means you are not coordinating contractors across a time zone, or trying to work out from 800 miles away whether a quote is reasonable. We already know what these repairs cost here, because we pay for them every week, and we do not add anything to the invoice on the way through.

And you get told things you would rather not hear. An owner who only sees a monthly statement has no way to know that a property is quietly deteriorating. We would rather have the awkward conversation early than hand you a surprise at turnover.

Where our off-market deals actually come from

Every firm in this market claims a local network. It is worth naming the two channels that genuinely produce deals for us, so you can judge whether they are real.

The first is the owners we already manage for. We manage roughly 400 properties, and an owner who has decided to get out tends to tell their property manager before they tell anyone else, frequently before the house ever reaches the MLS. That is not networking, it is a direct consequence of running a management book, and a brokerage without one cannot reproduce it.

The second is wholesalers and other investors working the same market. We look at what they bring and we decline most of it, for exactly the pricing reasons any careful buyer should be wary of. When something clears our own underwriting, you hear about it.

Run the numbers before you call anyone

Waiting on an agent to work out after-repair value is a good way to lose a deal to somebody faster. We give clients access to a tool that lets you run your own ARV analysis at no cost, so you are not sitting in a queue while another buyer writes the offer.

Use it to screen your own deals, then bring us the ones that look worth a second opinion and we will pressure-test them with you.