Property Management in Buenos Aires for Foreign Owners

Buying the apartment is the easy part. Owning it from six thousand miles away, in a country whose banking, tax, and tenancy systems you do not speak, is where most foreign investors quietly start losing money. Not to fraud. To friction. The expensas that went unpaid because no one was watching. The tenant who stopped answering. The peso rent that evaporated because nobody converted it at the right moment.

Good property management is the layer that turns an apartment into an asset. Here is what it actually involves, and what to demand from whoever you trust with the keys.

What a manager actually does here

In a functioning market, management is collecting rent and calling a plumber. In Buenos Aires it is more, because the surrounding system is more demanding.

• Tenant placement and screening. Finding a tenant who pays, and structuring a lease that holds. Since the repeal of the old rent law, lease terms are negotiable again, which is freedom and rope in equal measure.
• Rent collection and conversion. Getting paid, on time, and handling the currency question: whether rent is set in dollars or pesos, and how and when it converts. This single discipline separates a real yield from a paper one.
• Expensas and bills. Paying the building's monthly expensas, the ABL city tax, and utilities, so your unit never falls into arrears with the building's administration.
• Maintenance. A network of trades who answer the phone, and oversight so a USD 80 repair does not become a USD 800 invoice to the foreigner.
• Reporting. A statement you can read, in a language you speak, so you always know what your apartment did this month.

The currency question, because it is the whole game

A foreign owner's real return is decided less by the rent and more by what happens to the rent after it is paid. Pesos lose value; dollars do not. A manager who collects pesos and lets them sit is quietly taxing you through inflation.

The better arrangements set rent in US dollars where the tenant profile allows it (more common in furnished and short-stay lets), or convert peso rent promptly through legitimate financial channels. We handle the inbound and outbound side of this through our own banking relationships, including a remote account a foreign owner can open by power of attorney without flying down. The mechanics are in our note on the remote-account route.

Long-term, furnished, or short-stay

Your management needs depend on the strategy, and so does the yield.

Strategy	Management intensity	Typical gross yield
Long-term unfurnished	Lowest	3 to 5%
Furnished / corporate	Medium	5 to 7%
Short-stay / nightly	Highest	7%+ in the right barrio

The nightly market pays the most and asks the most: turnovers, cleaning, listings, reviews, the legal three-month rule on temporary rentals. The trade-offs are laid out in our short-term rentals investor guide. Long-term is the opposite trade: less yield, far less to manage, a tenant you barely hear from.

What it costs

Management fees in Buenos Aires typically run a percentage of collected rent, higher for furnished and short-stay because the work is greater. The number matters less than what it buys. A cheap manager who lets the unit sit empty, or lets pesos rot, costs you far more than the fee you saved. Judge the service on occupancy, on the quality of the tenant, and on whether your money arrives where you can use it.

The honest version

You can self-manage from abroad. People do. They also tend to discover, around month four, that a WhatsApp group in a language they half-read is not a control system. The apartment is an asset only while someone competent is tending it. The whole reason a foreigner buys here through a firm rather than a listing portal is that the firm is still there the day after closing, when the romance ends and the operations begin.

That is the part of this business we actually care about: not selling you a door, but keeping what is behind it working while you are on the other side of the world. When you want to talk through what your specific apartment should earn and what it would take to run it, that starts on a call.

Max.-