The Shocking Rent Data That Exposes What Every Landlord Has Been Getting Dead Wrong—And How You Can Cash In Now

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My three long-term rentals sit in Conroe, Texas. New construction, boring on purpose, and they mostly leave me alone so I can go handle whatever broke at a glamping site two hours east.

That’s my entire long-term portfolio. So when Ed Barone opened an answer with the phrase “a landlord with three units,” I sat up.

Ed co-founded RentRedi in 2016 with his son Ryan and now runs marketing there. Close to 200,000 landlords and renters use the platform, so they watch rent move at a scale I never will. I see three doors. They see the pattern behind them.

I sent six questions. A few answers confirmed what I already believed. One sent me back to a spreadsheet, and one I’d argue with.

Your Late Rent Problem Might Be a ZIP Code Problem

Late-payment rates on the platform swing by as much as 4x from state to state, at around 5% in places like Utah and Hawaii and up to 20% in states like Mississippi.

Ed’s read: A landlord with a handful of units treats every late payment as a verdict on somebody. Either the tenant is a problem, or you’re too soft. Sometimes it’s neither, and some of that gap tracks to where the property sits.

I don’t take that as a permission slip. Late rent is still late rent, and it still wrecks your cash flow in month four. But it changes the fix. If one payment in five runs late in your market, you’re operating normally; what you need is a system, not a lecture.

The system is boring:

• Autopay is set as the default at the lease signing.
• Reminders that go off before the due date, not after. 
• A late fee that appears in the written lease and is charged the same amount every single month. 

Small landlords lose on that last one, because the ones who get burned aren’t charging the fee; they’re charging it sometimes.

While you’re in the lease, go read your state’s rules, since most of us wrote that clause once and never looked at it again. Texas is my example because it’s where I operate. 

Under Property Code 92.019, you can’t collect a late fee at all unless it’s spelled out in writing and rent has gone unpaid two full days past the due date, and the fee is only presumed reasonable up to 12% of monthly rent in a building with four units or fewer, 10% in anything larger. Go past that, and the tenant can come after you for $100, three times whatever you wrongly collected, plus their attorney’s fees.

Then count your own 12-month late rate. Count it; don’t estimate it. Compare it to your state instead of to the guy on the podcast in Utah.

What Not Raising Rent on a Good Tenant Actually Costs

RentRedi’s rent-charge data shows the average unit climbing about 46% over roughly 6.8 years. On a $1,500 unit held flat for five years, Ed put the forgone rent around $6,000. Call it $18,000 across three doors like mine.

Then I ran it myself. I think $6,000 is low.

The arithmetic is simple enough to do on your own rent instead of mine. Each year, take market rent minus your frozen rent, multiply by 12, and stack five years of those gaps. At 3% annual growth on a $1,500 unit, you’re out about $8,400. At 4%, about $11,400. And 46% over 6.8 years works out to roughly 5.7% a year compounded, putting the five-year number closer to $16,600.

I’m not dunking on the man’s math. The direction is the point, and the size is bigger than most people assume, so get your own number before you decide the conversation isn’t worth having.

The better half of his answer wasn’t the number anyway. Ed said raising rent isn’t automatically right, because a tenant who pays on time and takes care of the place carries value that never shows up on a rent roll, and one move-out can hand you enough vacancy, cleaning, re-listing, and screening cost to eat a year or two of the increase you just won.

His line, which I’ve thought about more than the $6,000: “A high rent with a bad tenant can cost a landlord far more than a fair rent with a good one.”

So the question isn’t, Should I raise rent? It’s two questions, in order:

1. Is my rent meaningfully below market, not a little below but meaningfully? 
2. And is this specific tenant worth keeping for a discount?

Answer the first one with comps instead of feelings. Pull three or four actively listed units within a mile that match your bed and bath count, sanity-check them against BP Rental Estimator or RentCast, and write the number down with the date on it so next year you’re comparing against something real. 

Within a few percent of market, leave it alone. Fifteen percent under, and you’re not being generous; you’re subsidizing somebody. And when you do move it, small annual bumps beat one giant correction that ends with a vacant unit and a turnover bill.

The Cost of Doing Your Books in April

Most small landlords do their books the week before taxes are due. I’ve been that guy. I don’t recommend the genre.

The annual scramble costs you twice, Ed says. First come the deductions you can’t reconstruct nine months later—the March run to Home Depot or the mileage out to the property—and across a few doors, that can plausibly add up to hundreds or low thousands in overpaid taxes.

The second cost is the one nobody counts. A tenant who’s been five days late for eight straight months is a footnote when you spot it in January. In month two, it’s still a conversation you can have, a payment plan you can offer, and a problem with the room left in it.

Twenty minutes on the first of the month gets you both. Categorize the transactions, photograph any receipts still floating around, log the mileage, and check the dates rent hit the account. The same door’s rent drifting later every month? You just found it in month two.

The Feature List Isn’t the Product

I expected a graveyard of dead features when I asked what landlords request and then never touch. Ed gave me something better.

Ten years in, his position is that there’s no such thing as a typical landlord. Every feature came from somebody’s real request. Some get used by thousands of people and some by a much smaller group, and they ship them either way.

That’s an argument against the way most of us shop for software. You don’t need the longest feature list. You need the three things you touch every month, and for almost everybody, that’s rent collection, screening, and maintenance requests. Every demo is built to impress you, so check it against what you did last month.

Property Management Fees: The Math Changed, but Not at 300 Units

Old rule: Cross some magic door count, hire a manager, and pay 8% to 10% for the privilege.

Ed pushed on that hard. A 300-unit portfolio at $1,500 rent pays over $400,000 a year in management fees at 8%. That’s $450,000 of rent a month, $5.4 million a year, times 8%, landing at $432,000. I ran it because the number sounds fake until you do.

Almost nobody reading this owns 300 units, so run the version you live in. 

Ten doors at $1,500 is $1,200 a month in fees. Software runs $20 to $40. A part-time person at 10 hours a week and $25 an hour is roughly $1,000 a month, and they work for you instead of being split across another 400 units. Right around there is where self-managing stops being a hobby and turns into a decision with a number attached.

Here’s the nuance Ed didn’t add: Self-managing isn’t free. You’re trading a fee for your own hours, and if those are the hours you’d otherwise spend finding the next deal, the manager might be the cheaper option. 

Paying 8% doesn’t guarantee better work either. I’ve watched managers earn every dollar, and I’ve watched managers operate as an expensive answering machine. The test is whether yours produces something you can’t produce with software and one good part-time person.

Where AI Earns Its Keep

Every rental platform is bolting AI onto something right now.

Ed’s framing is that it’s an assistant, not a replacement. Take the busywork off the landlord’s plate, surface the right information at the right moment, and leave the decision with the person who owns the asset.

Use that as your filter the next time you’re sitting in a demo. A tool that drafts the maintenance follow-up, summarizes six months of payment history, or flags the unit drifting later every month is handing you time back. A tool that wants to decide who gets approved or where your rent lands while you nod along is a vendor making calls on property they don’t own, and that’s a strange thing to pay for.

What I’m Doing This Month

Three things were added to my calendar after this conversation:

1. I’m counting the 12-month-late rate on all three doors and comparing it to Texas, instead of to my mood.
2. I’m running comps on each unit and writing down, in a document I’ll reread next year, whether that tenant is worth a discount to keep. 
3. And the books got a recurring 20-minute invite on the first of every month, because a promise to myself has a much worse track record than a calendar alert.

None of it is exciting. It’s an afternoon of work I’ve been putting off since roughly March.