Because it's significantly more work than you'd expect to rent out a place and manage it. Some people get lucky with golden tenants who never cause trouble, pa

Because it's significantly more work than you'd expect to rent out a place and manage it. Some people get lucky with golden tenants who never cause trouble, pay on time, and even fix little things on their own. Others get unlucky and have to deal with a neverending stream of issues, from dealing with payment issues to having to leave work in the middle of the day to handle the issue of the week. The laws around being a landlord are also more complex than you'd expect. In many locations, you can't show up and fix things on a rental by yourself unless you're a licensed contractor. A lot of landlords ignore that and do it anyway, but if anything goes wrong then you have a target on your back as soon as the tenant engages with a lawyer. Hiring a property management company is a way to pay someone else to handle all of that and take a significant legal liability off of your shoulders. I remember early in my career I worked with a guy who thought he was going to manage a couple rentals on the side while doing his SWE job. He ended up getting PIPed because he was missing so many meetings and had to disappear all the time to deal with the latest issues at one of his locations, or even just to try to find new tenants after the constant turnover.