RG 208 – Building a Property Management Company From Scratch w/ Jimmy Murray
Jimmy is the co owner and co-founder of Lyon Property 
Management near Boston he created the business from scratch when he realised that he found it so hard to find good management, Jimmy made his first dollar as a child cutting lawns for his aunt and their neighbours. Jimmy’s father was a carpenter so he worked with real estate investors on their houses. Jimmy used to want to work with his father on the job sites but was told instead to read and educate himself so that he didn’t have to do manual labour as his job. After school he went to community college and then transferred to a football school on a scholarship. After uni he went to Rhode Island and had a multifamily investment by the time he was 23.
After uni he went to work as an investment firm analyst and was trading Roth Ira’s and got a 44% return on his own investment. He asked to be a part of the investment team but was told he had to get more education but he realised he didn’t want to go down this route. He decided to go down a different path and studied for 6 months on CFA and failed and didn’t want to retake so he decided to take the money and invest in multifamily. He had come across Bigger Pockets at the same time and realised how easy it was in 2010. He bought his first 4 family property for $140K in a B neighbourhood and worked at the investment company for a further 6 years doing property on the side. He also got into wholesaling to raised money for the multifamily.
Property management is all about process, once the processes are built then everything else will be easier to manage. He quit his job 2 years after buying his second multifamily in 2016 and was managing over 600 units. He promoted his property management company, launched an LLC and started banging on doors working on referrals. The first job he got was a friend of a friend in a bad neighbourhood and he had to boot out the first tenant. For the first 100 units they used Thumbtack which cost them $2-7 for each lead and they had a 50% close rate.
Top tips
- Most important habit – reading 20 pages a day
- Most influential person – Connor Merger
- Most important tool – social media
- Most influential failure – transitioning from PropertyWare – software
- Contact – FB and Instagram – The Notorious CFK