We manage single-family homes, duplexes and small multi-family buildings throughout the City of Milwaukee and the surrounding suburbs. Roughly seven in ten renter households in Milwaukee County live inside the city limits, and that is where most of our portfolio sits.
Milwaukee's rental stock is overwhelmingly small multi-family - two-flats, three-flats and duplexes, most of it built before 1940. Managing it well means knowing the buildings, not just the addresses.
Riverwest is roughly 64% two-to-four-unit buildings and 72% pre-1940 - two-flats, three-flats and Polish flats, with a renter pool weighted toward students, artists and service-industry workers.
Bay View was Milwaukee's first suburb, built around the 1867 iron works. Higher rents, longer tenancies, a National Register historic district, and a street grid laid to the shoreline rather than the city grid.
Our office is in Glendale and we work the county, with the heaviest concentration in the inner-ring suburbs where the rental stock looks most like the city's.
Milwaukee has requirements that catch owners out, and most of them are geographic in practice. Every non-owner-occupied residential property has to be registered with the Department of Neighborhood Services. A Certificate of Code Compliance is required at sale for non-owner-occupied one- and two-family dwellings, and without it you cannot legally rent the property afterward. Buildings of three or more units get an annual fire inspection. Street parking is restricted citywide from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m., so your tenants need permits.
Add pre-1978 lead paint rules to effectively the entire city housing stock, and the difference between a manager who knows the neighborhood and one who does not shows up in your operating costs, not in a brochure.