Tell Us Your Buy Box

Most property management companies are structured to protect the doors they already bill you for. We are structured to help you add the next one.

Tell us your buy box — the specific criteria a deal has to meet for you to want it — and we screen inventory against it before it reaches the open market. No cost, no obligation, and no expiry.

What a buy box actually is

It is the written answer to “what would you buy?”, specific enough that someone else could recognise the deal without calling you. Most owners have it in their head. Very few have it written down, which is why they hear about deals two weeks late.

• Price ceiling — and separately, total capital you are willing to put in including make-ready.
• Minimum return — cash-on-cash, cap rate, or a monthly cash flow floor. Whichever you actually decide on.
• Geography — the markets you want and, just as usefully, the ones you will not touch.
• Condition tolerance — turnkey only, light cosmetic, or a genuine value-add project you have the stomach for.
• Property type — single-family, duplex, small multi-family, and minimum bed and bath count.
• Financing — cash, conventional, or something faster. This changes which deals you can realistically win.
• Timeline — buying now, buying this year, or watching.

How it works from there

1. You send us the box. Four minutes, in writing.
2. We screen against it. As properties move through our pipeline, we match them to owner criteria before they list.
3. We underwrite before we send. Anything you get from us has been run with our own rent comps, because we set the rents on those streets. A pro forma from someone who does not manage in the neighborhood is a guess with formatting.
4. You decide. No pressure and no obligation. If nothing fits for two years, nothing fits.
5. If you buy it, we lease it and manage it. No handoff, no second onboarding, no gap where the property sits empty while you find someone.

Where the deals come from

This is the part that makes it work, and it is not a marketing claim — it is a structural consequence of managing property in this market.

• Owners we already manage for sell. Life changes, portfolios get rebalanced, estates get settled. We usually know months ahead.
• Tired landlords call us before they call an agent. Someone self-managing four doors who has had a bad year often calls a manager first. Sometimes the answer is management. Sometimes it is a sale.
• We see condition honestly. We know which properties have been maintained and which have been coasting, because we have been inside a lot of them.

Underwrite it yourself first

You do not need us to run a deal. The Proper Deal Calculator below uses the same formulas as our Ingram Rental Calculator app, so the numbers agree whether you run them here, on your phone, or with us.

Send us your buy box

Use the form below. Put your criteria in the “anything we should know” field — price ceiling, target return, markets, condition tolerance, financing and timeline — and put “buy box” in the property address field if you do not have a specific property in mind yet.

Or just call 937-999-3890 and talk it through. That is frequently faster than typing it.

Get a free rental analysis

Send us the address and we will tell you what it rents for today, what it would rent for after specific work, and whether you should rent it or sell it. No cost, no obligation, usually back within two business days.

Rather talk? Call 937-999-3890 or email hello@daytonproper.com. Our office is at 729 Salem Ave, Dayton, OH 45406.

Questions

Do I have to use you as my manager to submit a buy box?

No. It works better for both of us if we manage what you buy, but it is not a condition. Plenty of owners start with a buy box and become management clients later, and some never do.

Are you acting as my agent?

Representation depends on the transaction and we will be explicit about the arrangement before you are committed to anything, in writing. What we will not do is leave it vague.

What if my criteria are unrealistic?

We will tell you. If your target return does not exist in the market you want at the price you want, that is worth knowing in a four-minute conversation rather than after eight months of waiting for a deal that was never going to appear.

Can I change my buy box?

Any time. Rates move, appetites change, portfolios grow. Send us a new one.