The founding note. Why this, why now.
I spent fifteen years pricing risk on a trading desk in Toronto, and seven years owning a small residential portfolio on the side. Both jobs teach the same lesson, in different vocabularies: the spread is in the operating detail. On a desk, the operating detail is the tick — the basis point you give up when you cross the spread, the wide quote you accept because the alternative is no quote. In residential rental, the operating detail is the second ring — whether the call is answered, whether the trade shows up, whether the notice goes out the day it's eligible or the week after.
Two years ago, I started looking seriously at what it would take to do residential PM at the size most landlords actually run — five to fifty doors — without losing the operating detail. I read what the existing PM industry writes about itself. I called people I trust who use one. I tried four different ones on different parts of my own portfolio. The pattern was consistent: the work was either being done badly, or being charged for in a way that misaligned incentives, or being replaced by software that pretended to do it for you. Often all three.
The reason isn't malice. It's structural. The economics of small-portfolio property management are difficult: the unit revenue is small, the unit work is variable, and the business doesn't scale in the way a SaaS does. Two responses dominate the market.
The first response is the placement-fee model. A PM charges six or seven percent of rent monthly, plus a tenant placement fee — typically one month's rent — when a unit turns over. The placement fee is where the real margin lives, which means every meeting inside the PM about how to grow the business is, structurally, a meeting about how to increase turnover. The incentive is to lose your tenant. Renewals are pursued with effort if pursued at all.
The second response is the SaaS model. A platform charges per-door per-month, with the property management bundled in or sold separately. Margins come from scale: the more doors on the platform, the higher the gross margin per door. The incentive is to add doors faster than the work can be done well — and to gradually replace the human parts of the work (the call, the dispatch, the notice) with portals and notifications that don't quite do the thing they replace.
We are set up the other way.
We charge seven percent of rent collected, all-in. No placement fee. No statement-prep fee. No surprise charges. The math is honest on one side — we eat when you collect — and conservative on the other: at five to fifty doors, the unit economics work only if we keep the existing tenant most of the time and the trade bench is real. Both are operating outcomes, not pricing decisions. The fee schedule exists to keep the incentive shape, not to be the cleverest version of itself.
The thing that surprised me about residential rental, on the way in, wasn't the work — the work is fine. The work has been done for a hundred years. The thing that surprised me was that nobody, at the size most landlords actually operate, was running the apparatus around the work. The trade bench. The legal calendar. The bookkeeping discipline. The renewal cadence. The thirty-thousand-foot view that knows whether a unit is below market without anyone asking. These are not exotic. They are what a real property management company has, and what nobody at small scale was offering at a fee landlords would pay.
Jaray PM is that apparatus. The rest of Jaray Group — screening, rent intelligence, capital — is built around it for one reason: each one is a thing the PM produces as a byproduct of running well, and each one strengthens the PM if it stays inside the operating company rather than spinning out. The structural argument lives on /thesis. The short version is that the operating company is the goal, and the other legs only extract when their extraction makes the PM stronger, not weaker.
We are starting in the GTA, with five to fifty doors per landlord, because that is the size where the operating detail matters most and where the existing options are worst. We will not be in another market until we can drive to it. We will not have a tenth portfolio until the ninth gets the same answer-on-the-second-ring as the first.
This journal is the public version of the operating record. One letter a month, on the first of the month, signed. The occasional pricing or operating memo when something is worth writing down outside the monthly cadence. The thesis is what we believe. The journal is what we've done. If you read one thing first, read the journal.
Write to hello@jaraygroup.com if you'd like to be on it. The inbox is mine.