Bri Leichliter kicked off the sale of her property management company with a text message. No price, no deck, no banker. Just this, sent to three brokers over Labor Day weekend: "Hey, decided I'm selling. There will be an NDA in your inbox by 5:00 p.m. tomorrow. I'm planning on making a decision at the end of the month."
That's it. That's how you sell a 220-door business.
I've known Bri for a couple of years, so I had a front-row seat to this whole thing as it happened. When she came on the podcast, I wanted to get the real story, not the LinkedIn version. She built a residential PM company in Cincinnati from zero starting in 2021, scaled it to 215–220 doors and about $750–800K in revenue with a team of seven, and sold the PM division last October. Roughly four years, start to finish.
There's a lot of talk in our industry about selling. There are very few people who've actually done it and will tell you what it was like. Bri will. Here's what stuck with me.
You Probably Don't Need a Broker (If You're This Size)
Bri never seriously considered hiring a business broker. Her logic was simple: the company was too small to give a piece away. "It just wasn't worth it to give a piece away when I'm just trying to get a relatively nominal number."
So she did the prep work herself. Early in 2025 she started planting seeds: she called me, mentioned it to a few operators at our Ohio PM dinner, and quietly had her attorney draft an NDA to keep in her back pocket. No timeline, no price. Just getting ready.
Then, when she decided to actually pull the trigger, she went to the three brokers she'd already identified. Three separate texts (not a group thread, on purpose). She wanted competition. First come, first serve, bring your highest and best. And she was honest about the field: if none of them responded, she'd take it public.
The reason she left the price off is worth underlining. She'd already done her homework (looked at the comps, PM Standards, the resources available) and knew her range: the number she'd love, and the number she'd take. That number wasn't something she landed on alone. She talked it through with her family and her boyfriend, Jake, and anchored it to what would actually make the sale worth it for their life. The price came out of her life goals as much as any comp.
Structure the Deal Around Your Tax Bill
This was the part I found most useful, and it's the part most operators underthink.
Bri didn't take a big wire at closing. She structured the sale as an installment sale: four total payments. And she built the timing around her CPA's advice, not around getting cash fast.
Because the closing landed so near year-end, she arranged for the first installment to hit in that same calendar year. Her income was going to drop in 2026, so pulling that payment into the higher-income year was deliberate. She estimated it could save tens of thousands in income tax. The final payment, the true-up, is released in 2027, again for tax reasons.
On structure: the first two payments were based on the door count at closing, with one wrinkle. She and the buyer separated out what they called "transitional units," properties already listed for sale that everyone knew would fall off. It made no sense for the buyer to pay full freight for doors that weren't going to stick, so those got priced differently.
And here's a distinction worth learning: there was no clawback clause, but there was a true-up. The second and third payments run the actual retained door counts, with a dollar value assigned per door, and adjust from there. A true-up settles up based on what actually happened rather than penalizing the seller after the fact. If you're heading into a sale, know the difference before you're at the table.
The Handoff Broke Where the People Were
The deal wasn't the hard part. The transition was.
Bri closed with a notary on October 10th, but management didn't transfer until November 1st. Her attorney thought she was crazy for the gap: "why can't you just do it tomorrow?" But attorneys don't run PM companies. Onboarding a book of business is onboarding a book of business, whether you're buying it or selling it. During that October window, she kept collecting revenue and kept paying every expense: payroll, software, all of it. Clean break: whoever gets the revenue owns the costs.
The break point was the tech stack. Bri ran on Buildium, Property Meld, LeadSimple, Rent Engine, and Slack. The buyer ran AppFolio and TurboTenant. Completely different worlds. So on November 1st, her staff (the ones who came along with the sale) were expected to show up and operate a brand-new system on day one. Plug-and-play. Start today, know it today.
That's the one thing she'd redo. Her words: "You can't expect everyone to just go start working for someone and have no training as they're getting into it." If she could run it back, she'd keep everything the same for the first 90 days, get her people trained on the new system while the old one still ran, then plan a real cutover. Instead she got three weeks where staff, owners, and tenants were all learning at once. It worked out, but it was rough, and it was avoidable.
The Wire Doesn't Feel Like You Think It Will
I asked Bri what it felt like to sign the docs and see the first wire hit. Her answer surprised me.
Signing brought no relief. She still had a mountain of work: closing out the year's books, transitioning ledgers, zeroing out the trust account, which didn't transfer. The first wire landed January 5th, and yes, it's gratifying to watch that number appear. But the relief didn't come from the money. It came in that same stretch, as her actual daily workload finally dropped off.
The genuinely hard part was emotional, and she was open about it in a way our industry rarely is. She built every client relationship one-on-one: no BDM, no acquisitions, no inherited book. Handing those relationships to someone else was personal. She's still project-managing a handful of renovation closeouts for the buyer, but without control of the funds or the payment timing she used to own, which strained some contractor relationships and made her feel, in her word, helpless. She had exactly one meltdown in the whole process. Not in a meeting. Just the weight of watching something she built from nothing move out of her hands.
And there was one specific grief I didn't expect: her systems. She'd been building processes in LeadSimple since 2022, and a lot of that work is now unused, replaced by the buyer's stack. "That was a little bit soul crushing, because that was part of the building." She got the outcome she wanted. She just didn't want the craft behind it to evaporate.
Jake put the whole thing in perspective for her. When she asked what he thought the company was worth, he said, "Zero. You could sell it for zero and I'd be happy. Because it's not worth your mental health." He'd watched what the business cost her. That's the part of this we don't talk about enough at conferences, where everyone's showing off door counts and how little they supposedly work. Get into the smaller circles and the truth comes out: it's hard, it's lonely, and if you feel that way, you are 0% alone.
The Takeaway
The cleanest thing Bri did wasn't the text message or the tax timing, though both were sharp. It was knowing her BATNA cold. Her worst case was hiring an expensive leadership role and continuing to run a profitable, debt-free business. Her best case was a buyer. When the downside is "I keep making money," you can negotiate from a place of total calm, and it shows in every decision she made.
If you're thinking about selling someday, start acting like it now: get the NDA drafted, learn the difference between a clawback and a true-up, talk to your CPA about timing before you're up against a deadline, and (please) build a real transition plan for your people. The deal will take care of itself. The handoff won't.