Why Livo
How to choose, including when not to choose us
Three ways to run a rental, what each is genuinely good at, and the situations where hiring us would be the wrong call.
The three options
| Self-managing | A large firm | Livo | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | No fee. You absorb vacancy and mistakes instead. | Competitive percentage, often with more line items attached. | Quoted per property, with every applicable fee in writing before you sign. |
| Who you speak to | Yourself, at every hour. | A portfolio manager, sometimes a queue, and it may change. | Maggie or Kevin, who both know your property. |
| Scale advantages | None. You are a one-off call to every vendor. | Real — vendor pricing, systems, coverage across a wide area. | A consistent vendor bench, without the account volume of a national firm. |
| Local knowledge | Deep, for your one street. | Broad, sometimes thin on a specific submarket. | Built around Greater Boston specifically, including the September cycle. |
| Compliance risk | Entirely yours, and the penalties do not scale down. | Systematised, usually well. | Handled and documented from day one. |
| Best when | One nearby unit, a settled tenant, and time on weekday afternoons. | A large portfolio, or property spread across several regions. | One to a dozen units in Greater Boston, where the details matter and you want a person. |
When you should not hire us
If you own one unit, live nearby, are comfortable with tools, have time during the working week, and your tenant has been in place for years — self-managing will almost certainly leave you better off. The management fee would be buying you something you are already doing well.
If you hold a large portfolio spread across several states, a national firm with regional infrastructure is a better structural fit than we are, and we would say so.
And if what you want is the cheapest possible number, someone will beat us on the headline percentage. Whether they beat us once the markups, renewal fees and vacancy fees are counted is a different question — which is exactly why our fee page lists what we do not charge as well as what we do.
What we are actually built for
Owners with somewhere between one and a dozen residential units in Greater Boston — a condo, a single-family house or a two- to four-family, often a home someone moved out of rather than a property bought as an investment. That owner wants their manager to know the building, to answer the phone, and not to be the fourth portfolio manager assigned to the account this year.
Maggie Li and Kevin Hoang both know every property under management, and Jake Goodman runs the administration behind them. That is a real constraint on how many properties we take, and it is deliberate.
Still deciding?
Start with a conversation and a written quote. It costs nothing, it commits you to nothing, and every fee and the 12-month term are on paper before you decide.