Here’s how rental owners evaluate a property manager’s performance in 2026

Summary: Based on Buildium’s 2026 Rental Owners’ Survey of 300 small‑portfolio owners, rental owners evaluate property managers primarily on five factors: tenant outcomes, maintenance execution, communication speed, financial control, and access to clear reporting. Only 23% of owners say their property manager delivers excellent value today, with poor responsiveness and maintenance cost surprises most likely to drive churn.

What do rental owners actually consider when choosing a property manager—and what motivates them to switch from one management company to another?

Those are two of the most pressing questions we investigated in Buildium’s 2026 Rental Owners’ Survey, which gathered the thoughts of 300 small-portfolio rental property owners in March.

Across the survey, the same priorities came up repeatedly, painting a consistent picture: Owners evaluate property managers on reliability, speed, and visible stewardship of their properties.

They may want to delegate day‑to‑day operations, but most rental owners don’t want to disengage entirely. They expect their property manager to operate independently, though within clearly defined boundaries—especially where financial risk is at play.

With just 23% of rental owners saying that their property manager provides excellent value in 2026, there may be room for improvement—both in the services your company provides, as well as in how that value is demonstrated to rental owners.

In this post, we’ll share the 5 main factors that rental owners take into consideration when hiring and evaluating a property management company, pulled straight from Buildium’s 2026 Rental Owners’ Survey.

Key Metrics from Buildium’s 2026 Rental Owners’ Survey

• Only 23% of rental owners say their property manager delivers excellent value in 2026.
• When choosing a property manager, rental owners’ top priorities include tenant management (57%), maintenance coordination (43%), customer service (34%), and responsiveness (31%).
• Rental owners evaluate property managers’ performance primarily on speed and execution, including response time (43%), maintenance turnaround (31%), occupancy rate (30%), and time to lease (25%).
• Maintenance remains rental owners’ #1 source of stress, cited by 46% as their primary stressor in 2026.
• 59% of rental owners say maintenance/repairs is the most valuable service their property manager provides.
• Rental owners prefer low‑frequency communication, but expect fast responses when issues arise—43% expect a same‑day response, 42% by the next business day.
• Poor communication is the #1 reason why rental owners switch property managers (57%), followed by declines in service quality (54%) and lack of transparency (34%).

Owners Judge Property Managers on Tenant Stability

Tenant management is the single most important responsibility that rental owners hire a property management company to address. So, it makes sense that tenant-related metrics like vacancies, collections, and retention dominate how owners assess their property manager’s performance.

In which areas do rental owners place the most weight? When it comes to tenant management, they care most about whether vacancies are filled quickly, rents are collected on time, and high-quality residents are retained from year to year.

This reflects a broader mindset shift that’s taken place over the past 12 months: For most rental owners—particularly Accidental Landlords—risk reduction and stability outweigh aggressive rent growth right now.

Though 36% of rental owners say they plan to raise rents to market rate in 2026, that marks a significant decrease of 15 percentage points over the past year in their intention to do so. This represents a notable downshift as conditions have gradually changed due to a significant increase in apartment supply in many rental markets across the U.S.

Lastly, it’s important to note the tenant-related changes on which rental owners want to give their final approval. 50% of rental owners would like to be consulted before you make a decision when it comes to selecting new tenants for their properties, increasing rent prices, or offering concessions.

In particular, rental owners of all kinds want to stay apprised of changes to the rent, while Accidental Landlords in particular like to be involved in tenant selection.

So, early on in your relationships with clients, be sure to establish where your owners would like to be consulted, versus simply being kept informed.

As one rental owner explained: “At [the] beginning of [the] relationship, be highly communicative. I live out of state, so I want to be confident I have a property manager who truly is looking around corners and staying ahead of issues for me. Initially, run everything by me and share your opinions. It’s more about earning my trust by showing you’ve got good judgment and ownership on keeping existing tenants happy, finding good tenants to fill vacancies, prompt [in] responding to tenant needs, etc.”

Takeaways for Property Managers

• Strong tenant screening, proactive leasing, and consistent rent collection are core to client retention
• Property managers’ value is framed around risk reduction, not rent maximization, in the current market
• Determining where clients want to give their approval versus simply being kept up to date is key to their satisfaction

As Owners’ Top Stressor, Maintenance Matters

Rental owners have ranked maintenance as their #1 source of stress since Buildium started measuring this in 2018. It also represents their top area of concern when it comes to the future of their properties.

As a result, maintenance is one of the foremost responsibilities they hire a management company to take over. And in turn, owners rank maintenance as the single most valuable service that property managers provide—particularly for the 55% of rental owners who don’t live near their properties.

Still, maintenance-related anxieties persist even among rental owners who work with a property manager. Though the task of finding vendors to complete necessary work has been taken off their plate, they remain stressed about the costs involved in both preventative maintenance and emergency repairs, with prices for materials and labor having increased precipitously since 2020.

Rental owners also judge property management companies heavily on maintenance response time, which ranks as the second-most common metric that owners take into consideration when evaluating performance.

In addition, with 84% of rental owners wanting to give their approval on large-ticket repairs before they’re completed, it’s clear that communicating with the speed and transparency they expect is critical to their satisfaction with your maintenance services. As one rental owner shared: “Be responsive and be transparent. I’d rather get the bad news now. The longer you wait, the more money I lose.”

So, to fully demonstrate their value when it comes to property maintenance, it’s key that managers strike a balance between averting emergencies and keeping owners’ costs down as much as possible.

They should aim to keep unpleasant surprises to a minimum through consistent preventative maintenance practices, and make sure that when issues do come up, their team is ready to respond.

Takeaways for Property Managers

• Preventative maintenance and clear approval thresholds build trust
• Speed and transparency matter immensely in the PM-owner relationship
• Unexpected costs rapidly damage perceived value

Owners Want Fewer Updates, But Faster Responses

Most rental owners prefer to receive non-urgent updates on a monthly basis—and a significant minority of Accidental Landlords (39%) want to hear from you only as needed.

However, as property managers know well, it’s a different story when owners have a question or an issue arises. In that case, Buildium’s survey shows that they expect you to respond by the next business day at the very latest. (Responding to let them know you’ve received their message and are working on a solution can help to extend their patience a bit.)

How important is the speed with which you respond? Rental owners identified responsiveness and transparency as the areas where they most felt their property management company had room to improve.

This came up again in our question about which metrics rental owners use to evaluate a property management company’s performance: Response time is the single most important criterion they monitor, and they also told us that poor communication is the #1 mistake that would prompt them to search for a new management company.

As one rental owner put it: “Be responsive. The absence of communication leads you to assume nothing is being actioned.”

Takeaways for Property Managers

• The ideal property management experience is low-noise, high-reliability
• Owners want fewer non-urgent updates—but silence when issues arise rapidly erodes trust
• Communication failures are the greatest cause of owner churn

Owners Want Final Say on Big-Ticket Decisions

Rental owners are clear that they don’t want to feel like they need to micromanage their property management company. But as we mentioned earlier, they do want the opportunity to weigh in on large repairs and renovations, tenant selection, and rent increases or decreases.

If owners aren’t included in these types of decisions until it’s too late, that’s when problems begin to crop up in the property manager-client relationship. When these issues go unresolved, owners are likely to consider switching to another management company, with unexpected fees, lack of transparency, and declines in customer service all cited in Buildium’s survey as conditions that prompt rental owners to reconsider working with you.

On the other side of the coin, successful relationships between property managers and their owner clients balance autonomy with clear approval thresholds and proactive communication—particularly when it’s time to make financial decisions regarding their property.

Echoing many of the themes we’ve discussed in this post (but particularly this one), one rental owner wrote in Buildium’s 2025 survey: “Be more proactive as a PM of my unit. Visit [the] property and keep me apprised of issues as they come up, and close the loop once resolved. When tenant renewal comes up, let me know [the] recommended increase before offering [it] to [the] tenant. Involve me, as the owner, in decisions that affect my livelihood.”

Takeaways for Property Managers

• Owners want property managers to act independently within defined boundaries
• Clear decision frameworks and approval workflows are key to owner retention
• Transparency matters even more than speed when money is involved

Owners Want Transparency & Easy Access to Info

Lastly: Today’s rental owners want self-service access to information, documentation, and reporting.

As one rental owner put it: “Have clear reporting, including how much rent was collected each month per property and how much tenants are behind. Be transparent about repairs, vacancies, and tenant issues. [The] best thing to do is to have things set up in a way where owners can quickly look at a dashboard and easily know everything that’s going on with their entire portfolio.”

Property managers can position solutions like Buildium as an enabler of transparency within their relationship with their owner clients.

Taken together, these findings suggest that property managers can retain their small-portfolio owner clients by positioning themselves as reliable stewards of their assets—communicating clearly, reducing risk, executing consistently, and preventing surprises.

As many owners prioritize stability over expansion in the current rental market, property management companies that deliver predictability, responsiveness, and trust will find it far easier to attract and retain clients over time.

About the Data

These findings are based on Buildium’s 2026 Rental Owners’ Survey of 300 U.S. rental property owners with small portfolios (95% of respondents own 1–20 units), fielded in February & March of 2026.