Frequently asked questions
Questions Owners Ask
Pricing, leasing, maintenance, portals, screening, and what applies to a regulated building. If your question is not here, call 818-568-6733 and ask.
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Pricing
5 questions
Full-service management is $100 per unit per month. That is a flat rate — not a percentage of rent, not tiered by portfolio size. If you would rather manage the property yourself with better systems, the UnitSimple Platform is $10 per unit per month.
Yes. Ordinary leasing is included as part of full-service management: listing the unit, photography, showings, applications, screening, and lease preparation. There is no separate tenant-placement fee for ordinary leasing.
No. The management fee is a flat $100 per unit per month and does not move with your rent. A percentage fee increases automatically every time rent increases, even though the work has not changed.
No. There is no UnitSimple markup on maintenance or repair invoices. Owners remain responsible for actual direct costs — labor, materials, subcontractors, permits, equipment, and third-party vendor charges. You see the vendor invoice we saw.
Not always — and it is worth being straight about that. Flat per-unit pricing costs less than a percentage fee when rents are at or above market, and it can cost more when rents are well below market. Where flat pricing wins is predictability: the fee does not rise with your rent, ordinary leasing is included rather than billed per placement, and there is no markup on repair invoices. Those three lines are where percentage-based management usually accumulates cost.
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What we manage
2 questions
Residential and multifamily property: apartment buildings, duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes, condominium units, and single-family rentals. Most of our work is small and mid-size multifamily — buildings from two to roughly fifty units.
Los Angeles County. That includes incorporated cities such as Glendale, Burbank, Pasadena, and Santa Clarita, and communities within the City of Los Angeles such as North Hollywood, Sherman Oaks, Studio City, Van Nuys, and Encino.
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How we operate
6 questions
Yes. You set an approval threshold, and anything above it comes to you with the scope, the bid, and a recommendation before work begins. Below the threshold we handle routine items so a running toilet does not need a meeting.
Through the resident portal, from a phone, with photos attached. Requests are tracked with status and cost as they progress, and the same record is visible to you in the owner portal. Residents can also call for anything urgent — a portal should not be the only way to reach a person.
Yes. The owner portal shows monthly statements with income and expenses, the vendor invoice behind each cost, every unit’s lease status and renewal date, open maintenance requests with cost, and your property documents — leases, inspections, notices, and insurance — stored privately and available to export.
Yes. Residents can pay rent online through an approved third-party payment provider, submit maintenance requests with photos, access their lease and building documents, and get answers from a property assistant that responds only from approved property information. UnitSimple does not hold, pool, or distribute resident rent payments.
With the same written criteria applied to every applicant, in the same order: income verification, credit and payment history, rental history and landlord references, and identity verification. Consistency is the point — applying criteria case by case is how fair-housing problems start. Our criteria are disclosed to applicants before they apply.
Emergency calls reach a real person, and urgent items — no heat, no water, an active leak, a security or safety issue, a suspected gas or electrical hazard — are dispatched immediately rather than queued. Residents are told at move-in what qualifies as an emergency and how to report one.
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Rules and licensing
2 questions
Yes. We manage properties under the City of Los Angeles Rent Stabilization Ordinance, Pasadena’s Measure H, West Hollywood’s rent stabilization program, and other local programs, as well as properties governed by California’s statewide Tenant Protection Act. What applies to a specific building depends on the jurisdiction, the year it was built, and the property’s own facts. We confirm the position for each property with the agency that administers it rather than working from a general rule, and we do not give legal advice.
Brokerage and property management are supervised by Theodore Arakelian, who personally holds a California Real Estate Broker licence, DRE #01951724, and a California General Building Contractor licence, CSLB #1103257. Both are his credentials. Maintenance coordinated with licensed and qualified contractors. No UnitSimple maintenance markup.
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Getting started
3 questions
Yes, and most of our transitions are exactly that. The timeline is usually set by the notice period in your existing management agreement. From our side it is a records exercise — leases, resident ledgers, security-deposit records, keys and access, vendor information, and open maintenance requests — followed by written notice to residents and setting up owner and resident access.
Yes. Call before closing if you can. The first two weeks after a purchase carry real deadlines — notifying residents of the change of ownership, taking control of the security deposits, and verifying that the rents and leases match what the seller represented. Having that list already moving makes a substantial difference.
Call 818-568-6733. Tell us the address, the unit count, and what is not working now. We will tell you what management would cost and whether we are a good fit — including when we are not.
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