A property manager takes over the legal, financial and physical operation of your rental: pricing and leasing it, screening and placing residents, collecting rent, coordinating repairs, handling the Landlord and Tenant Board when it comes to that, and reporting the numbers back to you every month. What it costs depends entirely on the asset, and every fee KEILTY charges is published on this website.
This guide is written for owners deciding whether to hire a manager in Kingston, and for owners deciding whether to change the one they have. It is not a sales page. Where self-managing is the better answer, it says so.
Written by A.J. Keilty. Last reviewed 2026-09-13. If something here is out of date, email Hello@keilty.com and it will be corrected.
A manager does eight things: prices the unit, markets it, screens applicants, papers the lease, collects the rent, coordinates maintenance, handles Board matters, and reports. Pricing in Kingston runs from a flat $149 plus HST a month on a single home to 4% of effective gross income on an apartment community. The decision almost never turns on the fee. It turns on avoided vacancy, avoided turnover and avoided Board exposure, and at an average Kingston apartment rent of $1,713 a month, one avoided vacancy usually pays for a year of management on a house.
Frankly, most descriptions of property management are vague on purpose, because the work is unglamorous and specific. Here is the whole job, in the order it happens.
Sets the rent. Not what the owner hopes for, and not the highest number on a listing site. The number a comparable unit in that neighbourhood, in that condition, actually signed at recently. Getting this wrong in either direction is the single most expensive mistake in the business.
Markets and shows the unit. Photographs, listing copy, syndication, responding to enquiries inside the hour rather than the day, and standing in the unit for showings. Response speed is most of what separates a two-week lease-up from a six-week one.
Screens applicants. Income verification, employment confirmation, credit and prior-tenancy checks, and reference calls that are actually placed. Screening has to stay inside the Ontario Human Rights Code and the Board's rules on what may and may not be asked, which is a real constraint and a common place for self-managing owners to create liability without realising it.
Papers the tenancy. Ontario's standard lease form, correct rent-deposit handling, key receipts, and a move-in condition report with dated photographs. The condition report is worthless the day you need it if it was not done properly on day one.
Collects the rent and works the arrears. Predictable collection, and a defined escalation when rent is late: contact, written notice, repayment arrangement where that is the sensible commercial answer, and a Board filing where it is not.
Coordinates maintenance. Taking the call, triaging emergency against routine, dispatching a trade, and closing the loop with the resident and the owner. Also the unglamorous half: seasonal work, inspections, and catching the small failure before it becomes the insurance claim.
Handles the Landlord and Tenant Board. Preparing notices correctly, filing, assembling evidence, and attending the hearing. Under a full management agreement the owner does not appear.
Reports. A monthly statement an owner can actually read, and a year-end package an accountant can work from without a phone call.
It depends on the asset, and any manager who gives you a single number before asking what you own is guessing. KEILTY publishes every fee, which is unusual in this industry and deliberate. You should be able to price the decision before you speak to anybody.
$149 + HST per unit per month
Single-family homes, including houses, townhomes and condominium units. A flat rate, not a percentage, because the work on a house does not scale with its rent. Full detail at keilty.com/single-family-rental.
7% of effective gross income + HST
Small multi-family buildings, typically 5 to 100 units, billed monthly. Three other fees apply and all three are published: lease renewal at 25% of one month's rent when an existing resident re-signs, a one-time onboarding and property setup fee of $300 plus HST, and maintenance coordination at 10% of invoice on repair work coordinated. Full detail at keilty.com/small-multi-family.
4% of effective gross income + HST
Apartment and build-to-rent communities, billed monthly. Site staff who are exclusively budgeted for and working at the community are KEILTY employees and their employment costs are recoverable at cost with zero markup. A one-time onboarding fee of $5,000 plus HST applies per property. Full detail at keilty.com/apartment-communities.
15% of additional rent
Commercial property under net leases, covering office, retail, industrial and mixed-use. Full detail at keilty.com/commercial-property-management, and the guide to choosing a commercial manager is at keilty.com/choosing-a-commercial-property-manager.
Frankly, the more useful question is not what the fee is but what sits outside it. Ask any manager to name every charge that can appear on a statement in a year: renewals, placement, maintenance coordination, inspection, administration, statement, year-end, early termination. A low headline rate with eight add-ons is more expensive than a higher rate with none, and you cannot tell which you are being offered from a website that publishes no prices at all.
Plenty of Kingston owners should keep self-managing, and it is worth saying so plainly. If you live in the city, have genuine time, own one or two units, and know the Residential Tenancies Act well enough to serve a correct notice, you will do fine and you will keep the fee.
The case changes on four triggers. Distance, because showings and emergencies do not wait for a drive from Toronto or from overseas. Time, particularly if your working hours are the same hours prospective residents want to view. A difficult tenancy, because a Board matter handled badly is far more expensive than several years of fees. And scale, because the point at which informal systems break is usually somewhere between the third and fifth door.
The arithmetic almost never turns on the management fee itself. It turns on vacancy. At Kingston's average apartment rent of $1,713 a month, a single avoided month of vacancy on a house is worth roughly a year of flat-rate management. That is the comparison worth running, and you can run it with your own numbers rather than ours: the property management versus self-management calculator covers vacancy, turnover and the value of your own time, and the vacancy loss calculator prices what an empty unit costs you per day.
Placement. A unit is priced, photographed and listed, enquiries are answered quickly, showings are held, and applicants are screened on income, employment, credit and prior tenancy. The lease goes onto Ontario's standard form, the rent deposit is handled correctly, and a dated move-in condition report is completed before keys change hands. The two places this process most often fails are response speed at the enquiry stage and discipline at the screening stage, and they fail in opposite directions: slow responses cost you good applicants, and loose screening gets you the wrong one.
Maintenance. A resident reports an issue, it is triaged as emergency or routine, a trade is dispatched, and the work is closed out with both the resident and the owner informed. What matters commercially is not the speed of any one repair but whether the small things get caught. A running toilet is a utility bill. An unreported roof leak is a claim, a displaced resident and an abatement application.
Ask any prospective manager who takes the after-hours call, whether it is a person in Kingston or an answering service in another city, and what their actual response and resolution times are. A manager who cannot answer that question with numbers has not measured it.
Two engines drive demand here, and they run on different calendars. Queen's University, St. Lawrence College and the Royal Military College set the student cycle, with most leases turning over on 1 May and units posted 60 to 90 days before they are available, which is the window Queen's own Off-Campus Living Advisor tells students to expect. The rest of the year runs on Kingston Health Sciences Centre, Providence Care, CFB Kingston and the federal institutions, whose staff rent year-round in the west end and in the mid-rise stock going up through Williamsville.
An owner who misses the student window on a University District or Williamsville property is not late by a week. They are late by a year, and the unit either sits or takes a materially lower rent. An owner whose property serves the year-round market has a much flatter calendar and should not be priced or marketed as if it were student stock.
The market is tighter than last year, and looser than its own history. CMHC's October 2025 Rental Market Survey put the Kingston CMA purpose-built vacancy rate at 2.4 per cent, down from 2.9 per cent a year earlier, but still well above the ten-year average of 1.8 per cent. Units with three or more bedrooms were tightest at 1.2 per cent. The average rent across all apartment types was $1,713 a month. What that means for an owner is straightforward: a well-priced unit still leases quickly, but with vacancy sitting above its ten-year norm there is less room for an optimistic asking rent than there was when the market was at 1.8 per cent, and overpricing is paid for in weeks rather than days.
There is also a licensing point specific to this city. Renting a Kingston property for 30 consecutive days or less requires a Short-Term Rental Operator's Licence from the City. It costs $203, is valid to 31 March each year, an operator may licence a maximum of two properties, and the Municipal Accommodation Tax applies.
More on this market, including neighbourhood coverage and the local team, is at keilty.com/kingston.
Three changes took effect on 2026-07-01 and all three raise the cost of getting process wrong.
The window to request a review of a Landlord and Tenant Board order fell from 30 days to 15 days. This is the change most likely to catch an owner out, because a missed deadline is not recoverable and a self-managing owner who is waiting to see what happens can lose the right to challenge an order simply by waiting.
Repayment plans for arrears must now use the Board's own form. Informal written arrangements between an owner and a resident, which were common and generally well-intentioned, no longer do the job.
Maximum fines for Residential Tenancies Act offences doubled to $100,000 for an individual and $500,000 for a corporation. These are ceilings rather than typical outcomes, but they signal where enforcement attention is going.
If you are self-managing, the practical response is to diarise every Board deadline the day it starts running and to stop using homemade repayment agreements. KEILTY publishes free Ontario tenancy date calculators and an Ontario rent increase calculator for exactly this, and you do not need to be a client to use them.
Twelve questions. They are answerable by any manager about any property, they are deliberately not written in KEILTY's favour, and the quality of the answers will tell you more than any brochure.
If you would rather have this as a checklist to take into other meetings, it is on this page to be used. You are welcome to take it to our competitors.
A property manager takes over the legal, financial and physical operation of a rental. That means setting the rent, marketing and showing the unit, screening applicants, preparing the lease on the Ontario standard form, collecting rent and chasing arrears, coordinating repairs and inspections, complying with the Residential Tenancies Act, filing and attending at the Landlord and Tenant Board where it comes to that, and reporting the numbers back to the owner monthly with a year-end package for the accountant.
It depends on the asset. KEILTY publishes every fee: single-family homes are a flat $149 plus HST per unit per month, small multi-family buildings of 5 to 100 units are 7% of effective gross income plus HST, apartment and build-to-rent communities are 4% of effective gross income plus HST with on-site staff recovered at cost and zero markup, and commercial property is 15% of additional rent. One-time onboarding fees apply at building scale: $300 plus HST for a small multi-family building and $5,000 plus HST per apartment community.
A flat fee is better for a single home because the work does not scale with the rent. A percentage of rent means an owner in a higher-rent unit pays more for identical work. A percentage of effective gross income is the right structure at building scale, because there the manager's workload genuinely does scale with occupancy and collections, and it aligns the manager with keeping the building full and the arrears down.
It depends on three things: what your time is worth, how close you live to the property, and how well you know the Residential Tenancies Act. The arithmetic usually turns on avoided vacancy rather than on the fee. At Kingston's average apartment rent of $1,713 a month, one avoided month of vacancy is roughly equal to a year of flat-rate management on a single home. Owners who live in the city, have time, and know the Act often do fine self-managing.
It depends on pricing and on timing against the student calendar. CMHC's October 2025 Rental Market Survey put the Kingston CMA purpose-built vacancy rate at 2.4 per cent, which is tighter than the year before but still above the ten-year average, so a correctly priced unit leases quickly while overpricing costs weeks rather than days. Student-area units follow a January-to-May cycle with most leases turning over on 1 May, and Queen's advises students that properties are typically posted 60 to 90 days before they are available.
Under a full management agreement the manager prepares the notices, files the application, assembles the evidence and attends the hearing, and the owner is kept informed but does not have to appear. Under a leasing-only or placement-only arrangement the owner remains responsible for the tenancy and for any Board proceeding. This is one of the most important distinctions to settle before signing, because it is where owners are most often surprised.
On 2026-07-01 the window to request a review of a Landlord and Tenant Board order fell from 30 days to 15 days, repayment plans for arrears must now use the Board's own form, and maximum fines for Residential Tenancies Act offences doubled to $100,000 for an individual and $500,000 for a corporation. The shorter review window is the change most likely to catch an owner out, because a missed deadline is not recoverable.
Yes. Renting a Kingston property for 30 consecutive days or less requires a Short-Term Rental Operator's Licence from the City of Kingston. The licence is $203, is valid to 31 March each year, and an operator may licence a maximum of two properties. The Municipal Accommodation Tax also applies.
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