Your Reliable Partner for Property Management in Indianapolis

Almost everyone you could ask this question has a stake in your answer. A property management company that only does leasing and management gets paid when you rent, so it has a reason to tell you to rent. A real estate agency that does not manage anything gets paid when you sell, so it has a reason to tell you to sell. Neither of them is necessarily being dishonest. They are just answering from inside an incentive.

We do both. We list and sell properties, and we lease and manage them, and we earn a fee either way. That is the whole reason we can give you a straight answer to this question: we genuinely do not need it to land on one side.

So we do not have a default recommendation, and you should be wary of anyone who does.

What we actually do is model both paths and compare where each one leaves you. A property that only breaks even on rent can still be the better decision, because you keep an appreciating asset and build wealth through it over time. Equally, if you are sitting on substantial equity, cashing it out can be worth more to you than years of thin cash flow.

Two things push our recommendation toward selling. The first is when the rent simply will not cover the payment, so holding means funding it out of pocket every month. The second is when you need the equity now for something else, which is common when people are buying at the other end of a move.

The one people do not expect us to raise is stage of life. If you are at or near retirement, and there is no one you are hoping to pass the property to, holding a barely cash-flowing asset in order to build wealth slowly may not serve you at all. Pulling the equity out can be the better answer. We would rather say that than sign you up.

The first thing you get is an email introducing you to the whole team and setting out the next steps, so you know who is handling what before anything happens.

From there it depends on whether anyone is living in the property. If it is vacant, we schedule a new vacancy inspection. That produces a specific list of the repairs the property genuinely needs, kept separate from optional upgrades that would help it lease faster or for more. You decide what to do with each. If it is occupied, the work is transferring the tenants cleanly: we gather everything we need from you or from your previous manager so the handover is invisible to the people living there.

Onboarding itself runs through a secure form you can save and come back to rather than one long sitting. It collects the details we need for the management agreement and your 1099, and makes explicit which utilities stay in whose name, which is a common source of confusion later.

Your banking details and tax ID are encrypted. Our own staff only ever see the last four digits, and every single time anyone views one it is logged against their name. You are handing account details to a company you have just met, and that should come with more than a promise.

We verify four things on every applicant, and we apply the same standard to all of them: income and employment, credit and debt history, rental history including actually speaking to previous landlords rather than just collecting a reference, and background and eviction records.

We do not publish our specific cutoffs. Screening criteria have to be applied consistently to everyone under fair housing law, and a public threshold invites the wrong conversation about individual applicants. What we will tell you is that the process is the same every time, and we will walk you through our reasoning on any applicant we bring you.

This is the fear that stops most people renting out a house, so here is exactly how it goes.

You hear from us as soon as a tenant starts falling behind, not weeks later. You hear again at 15 days past due, and again at 25 days.

The decisions are yours, not ours. Serving the 10-day notice to quit and filing for eviction are both your call, and we will not do either without your say-so. Our recommendation is to serve the notice once a tenant is 15 days or more behind, and if nothing changes by day 25, to file.

When you authorise a filing, we work with our partner attorney to handle it. Court and attorney fees for an eviction typically run $600 to $800. We would rather you knew that number now than found it out during a bad month.

We say no to some properties, and it is fairer to tell you why up front than to take them on and manage them badly.

We decline when an owner will not fund the make-ready work the property genuinely needs, because putting an unfinished home in front of tenants creates problems that outlast the saving. We decline when an owner insists on a rent the market data does not support, because it sits empty, and everyone ends up unhappy about a result that was predictable. And we decline properties too far outside our service area to inspect, show and maintain properly, because distance turns into slow response times for your tenants.

If any of that applies to your property, we will tell you on the first call.

We charge a property management fee of 10% of the monthly rent. Any additional fees, such as late fees and pet fees, are collected from tenants and passed directly to the owner in full. Owners with 10 or more units under Intrigue get a reduced 8% rate.

We do not mark up maintenance. Every repair is billed to you at cost, as a pass-through expense. We work with dedicated vendors who give us below-market pricing, and that saving goes to you rather than to us. Marking up maintenance is close to an industry standard, and we think it is a conflict of interest. A manager who profits on every repair has a reason, consciously or not, to keep finding repairs. We would rather not have that reason at all. We make nothing on maintenance.

Our leasing fee is one month's rent, capped at $1,000. On a home renting at $2,000 a month, you still net $1,000 in the first month. Renewals are billed at 25% of the new monthly rent instead of that month's management fee, never on top of it. That funds a bonus for the person who secured the renewal, which is deliberate: as owners ourselves, we would far rather keep a good tenant than take another vacancy and another leasing fee.