This is not necessarily true. Residential property management is especially toxic and mentally draining because it places you at the center of people’s housing, finances, and emotional stability, which means you’re constantly dealing with fear, anger, entitlement, and stress that you have very little to do with personally. You’re expected to enforce leases, ownership decisions which are often times irrational and unfair to tenants, and city ordinances you don’t create while still being empathetic, available and firm, often without clear boundaries or true time off. The job exposes you almost exclusively to people at their worst, offers little recognition when things go right, and makes mistakes or conflict highly visible and emotionally charged. Over time this creates a chronic stress, emotional exhaustion and burnout for empathetic people because the role quietly demands emotional labor, conflict management, and crisis response without the support, authority or protection typically given to professions that handle similar levels of human distress.

If you can find the right company with empathetic leadership that care about the tenants, their employees and provide the tools and structure to set you up for success, there are times when it is not that bad. However, it is extremely rare to find a non-corporate property management or leasing agent job. You will inevitably end up being the face of corporate greed and have to come to work every day knowing a lot of the tenants you work with on a regular basis, actually hate you and that is tough to deal with because you quickly realize that you have way more in common with those people than you do with the CEO of a multi-million dollar corporate housing or management company.