The management fee is not the number to watch. The total is, and the total is usually double the headline.

A landlord quoted 10% on a $2,500 Toronto unit budgets $3,000 a year. The real figure in a year with a turnover, once the leasing fee and the maintenance markup are counted, lands closer to $5,000.

This post runs the whole calculation, honestly, including where a manager is clearly worth it. We build software for self-managing landlords, so read it with the bias in mind, and check the numbers yourself.

One caveat about all fee data

No Canadian association publishes a benchmark rate study for residential property management. Every figure below comes from property management companies' own published rates and marketing pages, and they disagree with each other by several percentage points, particularly in Alberta and Ontario.

Treat every range as advertised rates rather than a verified market average, and get three quotes in your own city.

What a manager charges

The monthly fee is a percentage of rent collected. Ontario is commonly quoted at 8% to 12%, with 10% typical in the Greater Toronto Area. Alberta runs lower, roughly 6% to 10% depending on the source, with 7% to 10% a defensible middle. BC runs 8% to 12%, with single-family homes typically 8% to 10%.

Note "rent collected." Percentage-based contracts generally charge nothing during a vacancy, which is a genuine alignment of interest. Flat-fee contracts usually charge regardless of occupancy.

The monthly floor: small portfolios often hit a minimum. Ontario single units commonly run $150 to $350 a month, Calgary around $150 a unit. On a lower-rent door, the floor exceeds the headline percentage.

The leasing fee is the biggest number and the most frequently underestimated — typically 50% to 100% of one month's rent per placement, consistently across all three provinces. Ontario flat-fee alternatives run $800 to $1,500. On a $2,500 unit, $1,250 to $2,500 every time a tenant leaves.

The renewal fee runs $100 to $350 where charged — some firms include it.

The maintenance markup runs 5% to 15% on contractor invoices. On $4,000 of annual repairs, $200 to $600 a year for coordinating work you also paid the contractor to do. Some firms advertise no markup, which is a real differentiator rather than a standard feature.

The line items: setup or onboarding $0 to $300; inspections $99 to $250 each, often quarterly or semi-annual, plus move-in and move-out; eviction handling $300 to $800, plus the tribunal filing fee separately, which in Ontario is $186 through the portal or $201 otherwise; returned payment fees $25 to $75.

The real annual cost

Run it on one $2,000 door in a year with one turnover, at a 10% fee.

• Monthly fee, 11 months collected — $2,200
• Leasing fee, 75% of one month — $1,500
• Move-in and move-out inspections — $300
• Two routine inspections — $300
• Maintenance markup, 10% on $3,000 — $300
• Total — $4,600

The total is 19% of gross annual rent, not 10%.

In a year with no turnover the same door costs roughly $2,900, or about 12%. Both numbers are honest. Neither is the headline.

What you get for it

Included in the base fee at most firms: rent collection, tenant communication, maintenance coordination, routine reporting, and provincial compliance.

Billed extra almost everywhere: tenant placement, maintenance markup, tribunal representation and filing fees, inspections, renewals, setup.

Never included anywhere: the actual repair costs, capital work, utilities, property tax and insurance. Those remain yours in full.

The item landlords most often assume is included and is not is the leasing fee. It is also the largest.

Licensing, and the question to ask

This differs sharply by province, and it changes who you are hiring.

• Alberta — property management is a licensed sector under the Real Estate Act, regulated by RECA. Licensed activities include collecting rent, holding damage deposits, arranging leases and advertising for tenants. Penalties reach $25,000 per offence. An owner self-managing is exempt where they hold a substantial interest, defined as not less than 25% ownership.
• British Columbia — rental property management is a distinct licence class under the Real Estate Services Act, regulated by BCFSA and held through a brokerage under a managing broker. It covers finding tenants, advising on rent, advertising and showing, collecting rent or deposits, and managing on an owner's behalf. Owners providing services to themselves need no licence.
• Ontario — the position is different and worth confirming directly. CMRAO licenses condominium managers, a separate thing entirely. RECO registration attaches to trading in real estate. Ask any Ontario manager you are considering exactly what registration they hold, who regulates them, and where your rent is held. A vague answer is itself the answer.

Trust accounts follow the licensing. BC brokerages must hold client money in interest-bearing trust accounts in BC, with a separate ledger per principal for rental management money and reconciliations completed within five weeks of month-end. Alberta brokerages operate pooled trust accounts under the Real Estate Act Rules, and separately every Alberta landlord must hold security deposits in a dedicated interest-bearing trust account regardless of who manages. Ask where your money sits.

What software costs

The realistic products for a Canadian landlord with 2 to 10 doors run from free to about $40 a month.

Landlord Studio is free to three units, then roughly $12 a month. TenantCloud runs free to $50. RentRedi is around $5 to $12 a month for unlimited units. Avail is free to $9 a unit. Hemlane starts at $28 a month plus per-unit charges. DoorLoop starts at $99 a month, which is poor value at three doors. Buildium starts at $62 but is practically aimed at 15 units and up. AppFolio has a 50-unit minimum and a roughly $280 to $300 monthly floor, so it is not an option at this scale.

The Canadian problem nobody advertises: none of the major US-built platforms understand Canadian tenancy compliance. Some handle Canadian banking and dollars. None of them know what an N12 is, or how BC's personal-use notices have to be generated through a government portal.

For a Canadian landlord, the gap is not cosmetic. It is the difference between a tool tracking your rent and a tool keeping you compliant.

The comparison

On a single $2,000 door:

• Property management, turnover year — roughly $4,600
• Property management, no turnover — roughly $2,900
• Software — $0 to $480 a year
• Screening reports — roughly $30 to $45 per applicant, as needed

The gap on one door is thousands of dollars a year. What the manager sells for it is your time and their expertise.

Which brings it back to your own hours.

When a manager is genuinely worth it

Four situations, and they are real.

• Distance — you own in a city you do not live in and have no reliable people there. Coordinating trades remotely for a property you cannot see is where self-management genuinely fails.
• Capacity — a demanding job, health issues, young children, or any circumstance where the hours are not available. Time you do not have is not a cost to optimize away.
• Scale without infrastructure — enough doors for the work to be a job, without the systems to run it. Adding a manager to a broken process fixes less than people expect, but adding one to a genuinely full plate is rational.
• You have run the audit and the number is high — if your measured hours are 100 or more per door per year, the fee starts looking like a fair hourly rate for work you do not want to do.

When it is not

• When the fee exceeds the value of the hours removed — run your own audit first.
• When you would still do the work anyway — plenty of self-managing landlords hire a manager and keep taking the tenant's calls. You now pay twice.
• When the portfolio is small and local — two or three doors within driving distance, with a system in place, is a few hours a month. A manager costs several thousand dollars a year to remove a few hours a month.
• When you want to know your properties — some landlords hand over a portfolio and lose their read on it entirely. Whether it matters depends on whether you intend to grow.

The honest summary

A property manager buys you time and expertise for roughly 12% to 19% of gross rent once everything is counted.

Software buys you a system for roughly 1% to 2%, and leaves the judgment and the tenant relationship with you.

Neither is the right answer for everyone. The right answer depends on your hours, your distance, your capacity and your intentions for the portfolio, and only one of those four is a number you have to go and measure.

Do the audit first. Then decide.

We run 19 doors ourselves and built LuxOasisOS because the alternative was a manager's cut on every door. Every door on one dashboard, verified on both sides of the tenancy, priced for landlords rather than enterprises.