Your share is 70 percent in year one and rises to 80 percent by year three, so the same business pays you more the longer you hold the community. Every business in your community counts, every year it stays.
Run your own numbers
Move the slider to the pace you think you can work at, and watch what the same group of businesses pays you as your share increases.
Read this before you read the numbers. Years two and three show what that same first-year group pays you as your share rises. They assume every one of those businesses renews and that you signed up nobody new, which is not what a real year looks like. In practice some will not renew, and you would also be adding more.
These figures are membership commission only. Resident thank-yous are not included, because they vary too much to forecast honestly.
This is a calculator, not a promise, and not an earnings claim. DLM does not guarantee any income. What you actually earn depends on how many businesses you sign up, how many stay, and how much territory your community has available. The share used for each year is the one currently published above.
You Build It. You Do Not Build It Alone.
Everything below comes with the role. None of it is something you have to create yourself.
The tools are already built
- The platform reaches your homeowners for you: mailings, text campaigns, phone outreach and door-to-door materials, funded by the memberships in your community
- Business engagement runs on the same rails. Dispatch, scheduling, reminders, records and follow-up are automated, so your day goes to people, not paperwork
- Your community roster, provider list and job history live in one dashboard that is kept for you, not by you
Training is ours to give, not yours to find
- Certification before your community is handed to you: the platform, how work is routed, how to evaluate a provider, and the rules on resident information
- Playbooks for the conversations that matter, from a first call with a business owner to a resident with a job gone wrong
- Nobody is left to work out the job on their own. If a thing works in one community, it is taught to every community
Live sessions, daily and weekly
- Daily working sessions where managers bring what they are stuck on and leave with an answer
- Weekly growth sessions on building your community: what is landing with homeowners, what is signing businesses, what the best managers are doing differently
- You are in a room of people doing the same work, not on an island
Conferences and the longer game
- Access to conferences, where the whole network meets, and the people building the biggest communities show how
- A direct line to DLM. The people who build the platform run the sessions, so what you need next is heard by the people who can build it
- As the network grows, so does what stands behind you
About the Role
A new category of work, and why it exists.
A DLM Community Manager Partner is the trusted local point of contact for the homes in their community, and the person who makes sure work actually gets done well. You know the homes. You are the first call. You connect residents to good local businesses, you verify the work, and you hold the standard.
Technology can automate the scheduling, the dispatching, the reminders, the records and the phone at two in the morning. What it cannot replace is the trusted local person who knows the residents, knows the businesses, and makes sure people are taken care of. That is not a job technology takes. It is a job technology makes possible, because automating everything else is what finally makes it workable for one person to serve a whole community properly. DLM built this role around that human layer.
This is not a traditional employment position, and that is deliberate. A traditional property manager is salaried, assigned a portfolio they do not own, and capped by a pay band someone else sets. A Community Manager Partner operates independently, builds their own community, and keeps a share of what it generates that increases each year.
Independent does not mean alone. You are backed by the same platform that runs every DLM community: the tools for reaching homeowners and businesses are built and waiting for you, the training is ours to give, and you are coached in live sessions every week from the day you start. The section below spells out exactly what is behind you.
What You Will Do
The whole role comes down to four things.
1. Know your community
- Maintain your community roster: who lives there, what the property is, what has been serviced, and what is coming due
- Be the one local person residents reach for anything to do with their home, rather than a call center or a queue
- Get ahead of the seasons. Gutters before the fall, heating before the first cold, irrigation before the freeze
2. Build the local business network
- Every trade in your community with no provider is an open seat, and filling it is both a service to residents and how you earn
- Bring in good local businesses you already know and trust
- Add homes, add businesses, deepen both. The community is something you build, and you build it with our tools, our training and our team behind you
3. Help residents get work completed
- Recommend the provider assigned to that home and trade first, by name, every time
- Give them a set window to respond: 24 hours on standard work, 30 minutes on an emergency
- If they decline, do not answer in time, or cannot meet the resident's schedule, move the job to a provider on your own approved list
- A resident who names their own provider always wins. That is recorded and never overridden
4. Protect the quality of the network
- Confirm the job was actually completed, and collect the resident's rating and comments afterward
- Escalate providers who underperform, and make sure the excellent ones show up in the record
- You are the quality control an automated system cannot be
You Are Not Limited to One Community
You start with one. You do not have to stop there.
A first community is a starting point, not a ceiling. You are given one to begin with because running a community well is a real skill and we would rather you learn it on one than struggle across four. Once you are holding it properly, you add to it. Neighborhoods, zip codes and whole communities go into your book, and everything in that book pays you on the same terms.
There are two different ways to grow, and most people only think of the first.
- Add more homes. More neighborhoods and more zip codes means more homes needing more work, and more open seats for businesses to fill.
- Go deeper where you already are. Every trade with no provider in your existing homes is an open seat right now. We carry hundreds of service categories, so a community you have held for a year almost never has all of them filled. You do not need new territory to have more to sell.
Which is why the businesses in your book are not capped by the size of the map you started with. The same homes can support many businesses, because each one is exclusive for its own trade rather than for the whole community.
Territory is granted, not claimed. Adding a community follows the same rule as getting your first one: it is given to a partner who has shown they can look after the residents already in their care. Available areas also vary by market, so what you can add depends on what is open near you.
How You Earn
A share of what you build, and it goes up every year.
Local home service businesses pay an annual membership of $120 to become the exclusive provider for the homes in a community. You earn a percentage of that annual membership for every business in your community, every year they stay.
Your percentage increases with your tenure:
- Year one: 70 percent. This is the foundation year. You are learning the platform, the community and the standard, and we are finding out who is serious.
- Year two: 75 percent. You have shown you can hold a community, and your share rises.
- Year three and beyond: 80 percent. You are running the community, and the large majority of what you generate is yours.
Read that order again, because it runs the opposite way to most companies. Usually your first year is when you are paid the most attention and the biggest share, and every year after that your percentage gets negotiated down while the company keeps more. We do the reverse on purpose. Year one is the smallest share because that is when DLM carries the platform, the training and the risk. By year three, the person doing the work in the community keeps three to four dollars out of every five.
And you keep earning every year. These are annual memberships. A business in your community that stays is a business that pays you again next year, and the year after, while you go and add more.
These percentages describe how the model works. They are not a promise of income. What you earn depends entirely on the size of the community you build and how many of its businesses renew.
Thank-yous from residents
There is a second way the role pays, and it is tied directly to how well you look after people.
After a service is completed at one of your homes, the resident is asked how it went. On that same screen they can add a thank-you for their Community Manager Partner if they want to. That money goes to you, not to the service provider and not to DLM. We pass on the full amount less the card processing fee, and we keep nothing from it. It is handled end to end by our system and lands in your account automatically, so you never have to ask, invoice, or chase anyone for it.
It happens after every completed service, so it is not a one-off. A Community Manager Partner who is genuinely useful to the people in their community, who picks up the phone and gets problems solved, will see this add up in a way that someone coasting will not.
Thank-yous are entirely voluntary and residents are never pressured or required to leave one. We do not publish a typical amount, because it depends on the service, the resident and the relationship, and we would rather set no expectation than the wrong one.
Qualifications
What we look for, and what the role genuinely requires.
- You live in or near the community you want to serve. This is a local role. Being known where you work is the whole point of it
- Comfortable talking to local business owners, because bringing good providers into your community is how you earn
- Strong communication skills, and comfortable reaching homeowners by phone and text
- Self-directed. You set your own day and your income follows what you build. The training, tools and daily sessions are behind you, but nobody stands over you
- Organized enough to keep an accurate record of homes, providers and completed work
- Reliable internet and a computer
- Experience in property management, home services, local sales, customer service or community work is a plus, and is not required
How selection works
- Apply below, or join the affiliate program and start referring businesses today.
- Show you can talk to local business owners and bring them in.
- Be selected for a community, or apply for a specific one.
- Complete certification, which covers the platform, how work is routed, how to evaluate a provider, and the rules on handling resident information.
- Receive your community and begin at the year one share, with the daily and weekly sessions from your first week.
Community Manager Partner is granted rather than claimed, because a community is a real responsibility to the residents and businesses in it.
Why Join DLM Property Management
What makes this different from the job it replaces.
- Your share goes up, not down. It rises with your tenure, year on year
- No earning ceiling set by someone else. The limit is the size of the community you build, not the top of a pay band
- Recurring, not one-time. Businesses renew annually, so what you built last year keeps paying while you add more
- You are not waiting for a seat to open. You can add homes and businesses any week you choose
- The platform carries the administration. Dispatch, messaging, scheduling and follow-up are automated, so your day goes to people and property
- Trained, coached and in the room. Full training, daily and weekly live sessions with other managers, and access to conferences where the whole network meets
- Many small recurring income lines instead of one paycheck that a single reorganization can end
- Real impact on a local economy. More work flowing to good local businesses in the place you live
If you need to step away
Life happens, and a community cannot be left without anyone looking after it. If you step away, your community is handed to another Community Manager Partner so residents and businesses keep being served without a gap, and while you are away that Community Manager Partner earns the commissions from it. The person doing the work is the person who gets paid for it.
It is not a permanent exit. You can apply to return to your community for up to two years. If it is available when you come back, you pick it up again. If someone has built it up in the meantime, we will work with you on where you restart. We would rather someone take the time they need and come back than hold on to a community they cannot serve properly.
Want to Get a Head Start?
A separate, optional program. It is not the Community Manager Partner role.
These are two different things, and it is worth being plain about which is which. Community Manager Partner is a selected role: you are given a community, and you are responsible for building and running it. The affiliate program is a referral opportunity, open to anyone right now, with no selection and no minimum.
If you would rather not wait to be selected, you can start as an affiliate in the meantime. Share your affiliate link, and when a local home service business registers and pays their annual membership, you earn 25 percent of that fee, paid by direct deposit. It is also the clearest way to show us you can do the job, so it is the normal path to being selected as a Community Manager Partner.
One thing we want to be straightforward about: affiliate commission is earned on business registrations only. If a homeowner joins DLM through your link, that genuinely helps the community, but homeowner accounts are free, so there is no fee to share a percentage of. Send your link to the contractors, landscapers, plumbers, cleaners and roofers you know, because that is what pays.
Apply Now
Tell us about yourself and the community you want to serve.