Long-Term Residential
Long-Term Rental Property Management in Atlanta
A rental property should behave like an investment, not a second job. ATLStay manages unfurnished twelve-month residential rentals across metro Atlanta end to end — marketing, screening, leasing, rent collection, maintenance, inspections, accounting, and renewals — with the Georgia compliance work that becomes mandatory the moment you hire a management agent.
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Who this is for
Twelve-month leases, run properly — by licensed Georgia Realtors.
Every property is different. These are the owners this service was built around — if one of them sounds like you, we should talk.
- Owners of one Atlanta rental who are tired of chasing rent, sourcing plumbers, and answering 9pm texts.
- Accidental landlords — you moved, kept the house, and now need it run properly instead of informally.
- Out-of-state and overseas owners who need real boots on the ground in Fulton, DeKalb, Cobb, and Gwinnett.
- Short-term-rental owners converting a property to a 12-month lease after an HOA change, an ordinance change, or plain burnout.
- Investors with two to ten doors who want one operator, one statement, and one phone number.
What Full-Service Management Actually Covers
Most owners reach us after managing a rental themselves for a while. It usually works fine — right up until a water heater fails on a Friday night, or a tenant goes quiet on the 8th of the month, or a renewal slips past and a below-market rent rolls forward for another year. The real cost of self-managing is rarely the money. It is the attention.
Full-service means we own the entire lifecycle. We assess what the property needs to lease well, photograph and market it, screen applicants against a written standard, prepare and execute a Georgia-compliant lease, complete a documented move-in inspection, collect the rent, handle maintenance, inspect on a schedule, account for every dollar, and negotiate the renewal before the lease runs out. When something goes wrong, we fix it and then tell you exactly what happened.
You keep the decisions that matter. Repair approval thresholds, target rent, pet policy, renewal strategy, and whether to sell all stay with you. Everything underneath that line is ours. The point of hiring a manager is not to hand over control — it is to stop being the one who has to notice.
Screening Is the Decision That Sets Up the Next Two Years
Nearly every bad landlord story starts with a rushed approval. A vacant month feels expensive, so the first applicant with a pulse gets the keys. Twelve months later that decision has cost several times what the vacancy would have.
We screen every adult applicant the same way, every time: verified income measured against a written threshold, full credit review, rental history with prior landlords contacted directly rather than by emailed form, employment verification, and public-record review for prior evictions. The standard is written down before the property is ever listed. That matters for quality, and it matters for Fair Housing — criteria that shift depending on who is asking are exactly how owners end up in a complaint.
We also read an application for what it does not say. Gaps in address history. An employer whose number nobody answers. A co-signer volunteered before anyone asked for one. None of those are automatic denials. All of them are worth a phone call before a lease gets signed.
Criminal history gets handled with particular care. Georgia's own landlord-tenant handbook flags that refusing applicants with a criminal record can create Fair Housing exposure when it is applied as a blanket rule, and points landlords to HUD's guidance on evaluating the nature, severity, and age of an offense case by case. We follow that approach and document the reasoning.
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What could your property earn with Long-Term Rental Management?
Tell us about the property and we’ll come back with real numbers and a plan for it — written by a person on our team, within one business day.
Free, no obligation. Prefer to talk? Call (678) 938-6413
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Georgia's Deposit Rules Change the Day You Hire a Manager
This is the part most owners have never been told, and it is the single most useful thing on this page. Georgia exempts small landlords from several security-deposit requirements — but that exemption vanishes the moment a third party manages the property for a fee. O.C.G.A. § 44-7-36 exempts an owner who, with spouse and minor children, holds ten or fewer rental units, then adds that the exemption 'does not apply to units for which management, including rent collection, is performed by third persons, natural or otherwise, for a fee.'
In practice, three things become mandatory on a professionally managed Georgia rental. The security deposit must sit in an escrow account established only for that purpose at a regulated bank, or be bonded with the superior court clerk, and the tenant must be told in writing where it is held. Before the deposit is accepted, the tenant must receive a complete written list of existing damage and be allowed to inspect the unit to check that the list is accurate, with both parties signing it. And at move-out, the unit must be inspected within three business days of lease termination, with a written list of damage and estimated dollar values — the tenant may then inspect within five business days.
Getting this wrong is expensive in a specific, quantified way. The state handbook says plainly that a landlord who owns more than ten units or uses a management agent can be liable for three times a wrongfully withheld deposit, plus attorney's fees. So every deposit we hold goes into escrow. Every move-in and move-out is inspected, itemized, and photographed. That is not a premium feature. It is the floor, and a manager who treats it casually is handing your tenant a treble-damages claim.
Two more rules apply to every Georgia landlord regardless of portfolio size. A security deposit cannot exceed two months' rent. And the deposit must be returned within thirty days of lease termination or the date the tenant leaves, whichever is later — with an itemized notice of any damage withheld inside that same window.
Out-of-State Owners and Georgia's 2025 Broker Requirement
If you own the property from another state, one 2025 change is worth knowing about. House Bill 399 created O.C.G.A. § 44-7-25, which says that a landlord who is not a resident of Georgia and who owns or operates single-family or duplex residential rental property here shall employ a broker licensed under Chapter 40 of Title 43. There is no unit threshold anywhere in the section — it turns on where the landlord lives, not on how many doors they own.
The section does two things. Subsection (a) states the requirement, and lets the broker sit outside Georgia only if that broker employs at least one person located in this state who is responsible for receiving, coordinating, managing, and responding to tenant communications about maintenance and other issues. Subsection (b) switches off two of the self-management exemptions in § 43-40-29(a) — paragraphs (7) and (8) — for these owners, which is the route many out-of-state owners previously used to run a property themselves.
It is worth being equally precise about what the statute does not say. It contains no penalty clause of its own. It does not define residency for an LLC or trust that holds title. It does not prescribe a form of agreement or any filing with the state. The consequences that do exist come from the surrounding license law: § 43-40-30 makes acting in the capacity of a licensee without a license unlawful, and § 43-40-24(a) bars an unlicensed person from suing in Georgia courts to collect compensation for acts covered by that chapter — a bar pointed at an unlicensed manager chasing a fee, not at a landlord collecting rent.
For most owners in this position the practical answer is an ordinary one: a written management agreement with a Georgia-licensed brokerage, and a real local operation answering the phone. That is what this service is, and we work through a licensed Georgia brokerage. We are not attorneys and none of this is legal advice — if your property is held in an entity, or you are unsure whether the section describes you at all, that is a question for a Georgia attorney. Our resource guide on the requirement walks through the text section by section, including the parts we could not verify.
Rent, Delinquency, and Evictions — Done the Legal Way
Rent is due on the 1st. Our workflow starts before it is late: automated reminders, online payment, and a dated late-notice sequence that begins the day the grace period ends. Most delinquencies resolve inside the first week, for the unglamorous reason that somebody actually followed up.
When they do not, Georgia's process is specific and completely unforgiving of shortcuts. Self-help eviction is illegal here. No lock changes, no removing belongings, no cutting utilities — the state handbook states that a landlord may not knowingly suspend heat, cooling, light, or water before the judge's final decision, and a lease clause claiming the landlord can evict without going to court is itself unlawful. Before filing a dispossessory for nonpayment, the landlord must give the tenant at least three business days' written notice to pay the back rent.
From there it is a court matter. A dispossessory affidavit is filed in magistrate court in the county where the property sits — Fulton, DeKalb, Cobb, Gwinnett, Clayton, Henry, Douglas, and Rockdale each run their own calendars and their own habits, and knowing them is half the job. The tenant has seven days from service to answer. A tenant can also defeat a nonpayment case by tendering everything owed plus court costs, though only once in any twelve-month period.
We coordinate all of it and work alongside a Georgia landlord-tenant attorney for the filing itself. We are licensed Realtors, not lawyers, and eviction is precisely the point where an owner should have counsel. What we contribute is a clean file — dated notices, a complete ledger, signed inspection records, documented communication — so a case never fails on paperwork.
Maintenance Without the 9pm Phone Call
Rentals degrade quietly. A slow supply-line leak becomes subfloor replacement. A skipped HVAC service becomes a July condenser failure at peak pricing. Deferred exterior paint becomes rot around the window frames. Owners who do well treat maintenance as scheduled spending rather than emergency spending, and the difference shows up in the sale price years later.
Tenants submit requests through a portal, so nothing important lives in somebody's text thread. We triage, dispatch a vetted and insured vendor, and handle anything below your approval threshold without calling you. Above it, you get the quote, the photos, and a recommendation. Emergencies — water, gas, no heat, no power, anything unsafe — get handled first and reported immediately, because that is what emergency means.
We inspect on a schedule rather than only when someone complains. Photo-documented interior and exterior reports catch lease violations, unauthorized occupants and pets, and the slow problems tenants never think to report. Georgia places the duty to maintain the structure and keep electrical, plumbing, heating, and cooling in working order on the landlord, and a tenant who is ignored has real remedies, including repair-and-deduct and a damages claim. Responding fast is simultaneously the right thing and the cheap thing.
What It Costs
Long-term management is priced differently from short-term management, and it moves with the property. A single-family home in Grant Park and a fourplex in Clarkston are not the same job, and pretending otherwise with one headline number would just mean quietly making it up somewhere else.
So we do not publish a percentage we would have to walk back on the phone. You get your exact fee structure — management, leasing, renewal, and anything else that could ever appear — quoted up front, in writing, before you sign anything. Nothing shows up later that was not in that document.
Ask every manager you are comparing us against for the same thing in writing. Ask specifically about the leasing fee, the renewal fee, whether maintenance invoices carry a markup, whether inspections are billed separately, and what happens if a tenant they placed breaks the lease in month three. The answers to those five questions tell you far more about your real cost than the advertised rate does.
Where We Manage Across Metro Atlanta
We manage long-term rentals across the metro: intown Atlanta from Grant Park and Kirkwood through West End, Adair Park, and Capitol View; the eastside through Decatur, Avondale Estates, Tucker, Stone Mountain, Lithonia, and Stonecrest; the northern arc through Brookhaven, Chamblee, Doraville, Dunwoody, Sandy Springs, Roswell, Alpharetta, Milton, and Johns Creek; the Cobb corridor through Smyrna, Vinings, Mableton, Marietta, Kennesaw, and Acworth; Gwinnett from Norcross and Duluth out to Lawrenceville, Snellville, and Grayson; and the south metro through East Point, College Park, Hapeville, Union City, Fairburn, Jonesboro, Morrow, Stockbridge, and McDonough.
Local knowledge is not decoration in this business. Rent bands, tenant profiles, school-zone demand, and county magistrate practice all shift within a few miles. Being licensed in Georgia and working these specific submarkets every week is how you price a lease correctly the first time, and how you know which applicant pool a given street will actually draw before you list it.
What’s included
One rate. The whole service.
One management fee, quoted for your property in writing before you sign anything — no onboarding charge, no markup on maintenance, and no surprise line items.
- Rent-ready walkthrough and a written punch list of what the property needs to lease at the top of its band
- Professional listing photography, floor plan, and syndication across the major rental portals plus the Georgia MLS feeds
- Showing coordination, application intake, and a written screening standard applied identically to every applicant
- Income, credit, employment, prior-landlord, eviction, and public-record verification on every adult applicant
- Georgia-specific lease preparation, disclosures, and execution
- Documented move-in inspection with a signed, photographed existing-damage list before the deposit is accepted
- Security deposit held in a dedicated escrow account, with written notice to the tenant of where it is held
- Online rent collection, a dated late-notice sequence, and owner and tenant portals
- Maintenance triage and dispatch through vetted, insured Atlanta vendors, with approval thresholds you set
- Scheduled interior and exterior condition inspections with photo reports
- Monthly owner statements, year-end summaries, and 1099 handling
- Renewal negotiation, market rent review before every expiry, and dispossessory coordination with a Georgia landlord-tenant attorney when it becomes unavoidable
Where we work
Long-Term Rental Management across metro Atlanta & Georgia
We run this service in the markets below. Don’t see yours? Call (678) 938-6413 — we’re continually adding markets.
Common questions
Long-Term Rental Management — answered
How much does long-term property management cost in Atlanta?
Long-term management is priced differently from short-term management and varies with the property type, unit count, and market. Rather than advertise a number we would have to adjust, we quote your exact structure — management fee, leasing fee, renewal fee, and anything else — up front and in writing before you sign anything. When you compare managers, ask each one whether maintenance invoices carry a markup and what happens if a tenant they placed breaks the lease early. That is usually where the real difference sits.
What does a property manager actually do that I cannot do myself?
Plenty of owners can do the individual tasks. What is hard is doing all of them consistently, on time, for years, while also having a job. In practice a manager earns their fee in four places: pricing the lease correctly instead of guessing, screening to a written standard instead of by gut feel, responding to maintenance fast enough that small problems stay small, and handling the legal machinery — escrowed deposits, signed inspection lists, dated notices, dispossessory filings — without creating liability. The fourth one is where self-managing owners most often get hurt.
How do you screen tenants?
Every adult applicant goes through the same written standard: verified income against a set threshold, full credit review, rental history with prior landlords contacted directly, employment verification, and public-record review including prior evictions. The criteria are documented before the property is listed so they cannot drift based on who applies, which is both better screening and the correct Fair Housing posture. Criminal history is evaluated individually against the nature, severity, and age of the offense rather than as a blanket exclusion, consistent with the guidance Georgia's landlord-tenant handbook points landlords toward.
Who holds the security deposit, and what are Georgia's rules?
On a managed property, we do — in a dedicated escrow account, with written notice to the tenant of where it is held. That is not a preference: under Georgia law the small-landlord exemption stops applying to any unit managed by a third party for a fee, so escrow (or a bond posted with the superior court clerk) becomes mandatory. Georgia also caps the deposit at two months' rent, requires it back within thirty days of lease termination or the tenant's departure (whichever is later), and exposes landlords who use a management agent to three times any wrongfully withheld amount plus attorney's fees.
What happens if my tenant stops paying rent?
Our late-notice sequence starts the day the grace period ends, and most delinquencies clear in the first week once someone actually follows up. If it does not clear, Georgia requires at least three business days' written notice to pay the back rent before a dispossessory can be filed, then the case goes to magistrate court in the county where the property sits and the tenant has seven days from service to answer. Note that a tenant can stop a nonpayment eviction once in any twelve-month period by paying everything owed plus court costs. We coordinate the process and work with a Georgia landlord-tenant attorney on the filing.
Can I just change the locks or shut off the utilities?
No — and this is the fastest way for an owner to turn a rent problem into a lawsuit. Self-help eviction is illegal in Georgia. You cannot change locks, remove belongings, or knowingly suspend heat, cooling, light, or water before a judge issues a final decision. A lease clause that claims to let the landlord evict without going through court is itself unlawful and will not save you. The only route to possession is the court dispossessory process, and it is worth having counsel for it.
Do I need a property manager if I only own one rental?
Not necessarily — plenty of single-property owners self-manage well, particularly if they live nearby, have a reliable handyman, and enjoy the work. It stops making sense when any of three things are true: you live out of the area, the property is your largest asset and you are managing it casually, or you have already had a tenant issue you did not know how to handle. One badly documented deposit dispute or one botched eviction filing generally costs more than a year of management.
I live outside Georgia. Does the state require me to use a licensed broker?
For a specific group of owners, yes. O.C.G.A. § 44-7-25(a), created by House Bill 399 in 2025, says a landlord who is not a Georgia resident and who owns or operates single-family or duplex residential rental property in the state shall employ a broker licensed under Chapter 40 of Title 43. There is no unit threshold, so one rental house is described the same way as twenty. The section does not define what residency means for an LLC or trust that holds title, which is the most common open question and one for a Georgia attorney rather than a manager. This is general information, not legal advice.
Can my property manager be based outside Georgia?
The statute allows it, with a condition attached. Section 44-7-25(a) says the broker may or may not reside in Georgia, but if the broker does not, the broker shall employ at least one person located in this state responsible for receiving, coordinating, managing, and responding to tenant communications about maintenance and other issues. Two details get misreported: the enrolled text puts that duty on the broker rather than the owner, and it requires a person located here without saying that person must personally hold a license. Either way, it is a fair question to ask any out-of-state manager — who is your Georgia person, and what hours do they actually cover?
Can I switch my property from short-term rental to a long-term lease?
Yes, and it is one of the more common conversions we handle — usually after an HOA covenant change, a local ordinance change, or simple operator fatigue. The mechanics differ: furniture comes out or gets sold, the listing strategy changes completely, the pricing model shifts from nightly to a twelve-month band, and the compliance layer around deposits and inspections switches on. We will model both paths honestly for your specific property, including the cases where staying short-term is the better call.
Sources
Every figure on this page is linked to its original source, with the date we checked it.
- Landlords who own more than ten rental units, or who contract with a management agent, must place security deposits in a dedicated escrow account or post bond with the superior court clerk, and must tell tenants in writing where the deposit is held. Georgia Department of Community Affairs — Georgia Landlord-Tenant Handbook · Handbook revised 8-29-24; retrieved August 2026
- A Georgia security deposit cannot exceed two months' rent, and all landlords must return it within thirty days of lease termination or the date the tenant leaves, whichever is later. Georgia Department of Community Affairs — Georgia Landlord-Tenant Handbook · Handbook revised 8-29-24; retrieved August 2026
- Landlords who own more than ten units or employ a management agent must give the tenant a written list of existing damage before accepting the deposit and allow the tenant to inspect; at move-out they must inspect within three business days, and the tenant may inspect within five business days. Georgia Department of Community Affairs — Georgia Landlord-Tenant Handbook · Handbook revised 8-29-24; retrieved August 2026
- A landlord who owns more than ten units or uses a management agent can be liable for three times a wrongfully withheld security deposit plus attorney's fees. Georgia Department of Community Affairs — Georgia Landlord-Tenant Handbook · Handbook revised 8-29-24; retrieved August 2026
- Self-help eviction is illegal in Georgia; a landlord may not knowingly suspend heat, cooling, light, or water before the judge's final decision, and must give at least three business days' written notice to pay back rent before filing a dispossessory for nonpayment. The tenant has seven days from service to answer, and may use the tender defense once in a twelve-month period. Georgia Department of Community Affairs — Georgia Landlord-Tenant Handbook · Handbook revised 8-29-24; retrieved August 2026
- O.C.G.A. § 44-7-36 exempts an owner who with spouse and minor children holds ten or fewer rental units, but the exemption 'does not apply to units for which management, including rent collection, is performed by third persons, natural or otherwise, for a fee.' Official Code of Georgia Annotated § 44-7-36 (via FindLaw) · Retrieved August 2026
- Georgia law requires a real estate license to lease or rent real estate for others, collect rents, or perform property management services for a fee. Official Code of Georgia Annotated §§ 43-40-1, 43-40-30 (via FindLaw) · Retrieved August 2026
- O.C.G.A. § 44-7-25(a), created by HB 399 (2025), requires a landlord who is not a resident of Georgia and who owns or operates single-family or duplex residential rental properties in the state to employ a broker licensed under Chapter 40 of Title 43. If the broker does not reside in Georgia, the broker must employ at least one person located within the state responsible for receiving, coordinating, managing, and responding to tenant communications about maintenance and other issues. Office of the Governor of Georgia — signed text of House Bill 399 (2025) · Enrolled text read August 2026
- O.C.G.A. § 44-7-25(b) provides that the exemptions in paragraphs (7) and (8) of § 43-40-29(a) do not apply to non-resident landlords of single-family or duplex Georgia rental property. The section as enacted contains no penalty clause of its own. Office of the Governor of Georgia — signed text of House Bill 399 (2025) · Enrolled text read August 2026
- HB 399 contains no effective-date section, and under O.C.G.A. § 1-3-4(a)(1) an Act approved on or after January 1 and before July 1 of a calendar year becomes effective on July 1 of that year. Legislative trackers record the signature as May 14, 2025 and the effective date as July 1, 2025; we could not confirm the signature date on a Georgia state government page. Official Code of Georgia Annotated § 1-3-4 (via FindLaw); BillTrack50 bill history for GA HB 399 · Retrieved August 2026
- O.C.G.A. § 43-40-24(a) bars any person from bringing or maintaining an action in Georgia courts to collect compensation for the performance of acts covered by the real estate license chapter without alleging and proving they were a licensed broker when the cause of action arose. Official Code of Georgia Annotated § 43-40-24 (via FindLaw) · Retrieved August 2026
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