My partner and I started Stress Free Property Management in Tampa about 2 years ago.  It has been a wild ride.  Our initial office was a storage room about 15x20 that was filled floor to ceiling with junk.   We owned the warehouse and had been using it to store excess building materials we thought we would use.  The rest of the place was rented out to two other businesses.  We thought it would be prudent to start the business in a place we did not have to pay rent, except to ourselves.  This proved a good decision.

After about 4 months, we hired a first employee, Brande Webb.  She had worked for us before for about 7 years at our previous company Apartment Express Corporate Housing. We had built that company from scratch in 1999 to over $5 million in revenue and over 20 employees by 2004.  The company made Inc Magazine's Inc 500 List of the Fastest Growing Privately Held Companies in American in 2003 and 2004.  Having sold the business in 2007, we began looking around for new opportunities.

Chris and I already had extensive experience managing rental properties in our career.  We had in fact been managing over 50 of our rental properties for the past 5 years and several hundred corporate housing units for the last 8 years.  It turned out that we had the perfect skill sets to open a residential property management company. 

Stress Free Property Management was born in 2009 and we exploded in growth.  We went from zero units to over 250 rental properties under management to date. 

I will keep expanding this story in future posts.

Best regards,

David Lowrey

I also have other blogs discussing other aspects of business at http://aictampa.livejournal.com/ and

http://tampapropertymanagement.wordpress.com/

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