Property Management in Virginia, Washington DC & Maryland

Levaru provides commercial property management across Washington DC, Maryland, and Northern Virginia from our headquarters in Alexandria. We manage office, retail, industrial, and multifamily properties, and we back every management agreement with our own facility crews rather than a rolodex of subcontractors.

That structure changes how a building runs. The technician who answers your tenant’s 2 a.m. water call works for the same company that produces your monthly financial package, so nothing falls into the gap between “the manager” and “the vendor.”

What does a commercial property manager do?

A commercial property manager runs the building as a business: collecting rent, paying and supervising vendors, maintaining the asset, keeping tenants informed and satisfied, and reporting financial results to the owner every month. The manager is the single point of accountability between the owner, the tenants, and everyone who touches the property.

In practice that means someone abstracts every lease, bills rent and escalations correctly, chases delinquencies before they age, estimates and reconciles operating expense recoveries, walks the property on a schedule, plans the annual budget, and handles the emergency calls. When any of those tasks is skipped, the owner finds out months later in the form of a dispute, a deferred repair, or a surprise on the year-end statement.

A property manager’s real product is a building that runs without the owner thinking about it, documented well enough that the owner can verify everything at any time.

Full-service scope: what we take off your desk

Financial reporting and budgeting

We maintain the books for each property, produce a monthly financial package, and build an annual operating and capital budget with you before the fiscal year starts. Mid-year, we reforecast when reality diverges from plan, so recovery billings and owner distributions stay grounded in current numbers.

Rent collection and receivables

Rent is billed on time, escalations are applied per the lease, and delinquencies are worked from day one: reminder, call, notice, and, when necessary, coordination with counsel. You see the aged receivables report every month, so collections are never a black box.

CAM and operating expense recoveries

We set CAM estimates at budget time, bill them monthly, and reconcile them after year end against actual expenses, gross-up provisions, caps, and exclusions in each lease. Clean reconciliation work is where management earns its fee; sloppy work is where tenant relationships and owner income both leak. Our lease administration team handles this discipline for managed buildings and as a standalone service.

Vendor management

Every recurring contract gets a written scope, competitive bids at renewal, insurance verification, and performance checks against the scope. Because Levaru also operates its own facility management division, we know what labor, materials, and response times actually cost, and we bid vendors against that knowledge rather than against last year’s invoice.

Tenant relations

Tenants get a real point of contact, a portal for service requests, and honest answers about timing. Move-ins and move-outs follow a checklist. Lease questions get resolved from the abstract, not from memory. Most tenant frustration in commercial buildings is not about rent; it is about silence, and we remove the silence.

Inspections

We inspect on a documented schedule: exterior, roof areas, mechanical rooms, common areas, vacant suites, and life-safety basics. Findings become work orders with photos, and photos live in your portal permanently. An inspection that produces no record did not happen.

One accountable team for management and maintenance

Most management firms manage paper and subcontract the physical work. The result is a familiar loop: tenant calls manager, manager calls vendor, vendor schedules for next week, nobody owns the outcome.

We built Levaru the other way. Property management and facility services live in one company, so the person dispatching the work order and the person performing it share a system, a schedule, and a boss. Preventive maintenance is planned with the budget, not bolted on after equipment fails. Emergency response is our own 24/7 operation, not an answering service forwarding voicemails.

For the owner, the practical differences are shorter downtime, fewer markup layers on routine work, and one accountable party when something goes wrong. For the tenant, it means the building simply works, which is the cheapest retention program that exists.

Commercial property management across Washington DC, Maryland, and Northern Virginia

We work where we can physically show up. Our core service area is Alexandria, Arlington, Fairfax, and Tysons in Northern Virginia; Washington DC; and Bethesda, Rockville, and Baltimore in Maryland, with coverage throughout the broader DMV.

That footprint is a deliberate operating decision. Snow contracts, jurisdiction-specific inspections, and after-hours emergencies all punish managers who stretch beyond their reach. Keeping the portfolio inside a drivable region means our crews and managers know the buildings, the inspectors, and the roads.

Each jurisdiction brings its own requirements, from DC’s regulatory environment to Virginia and Maryland statutory frameworks for community associations. We manage to the local rulebook, not a generic national checklist.

Property types we manage

Office. Multi-tenant and single-tenant office buildings, where recoveries, HVAC performance, and lobby-level service quality drive both retention and NOI.

Retail. Shopping centers and street retail, where CAM structures are more complex, co-tenancy and percentage rent clauses matter, and site condition is part of every tenant’s brand.

Industrial and warehouse. Lower touch on the interior, higher stakes on roofs, docks, paving, and lease compliance around maintenance responsibilities.

Multifamily. Leasing velocity, turnover cost control, and resident service, typically priced per unit rather than as a percentage of commercial rent.

Dedicated pages cover our commercial property management practice and our HOA and condo management service for community associations and their boards.

The monthly owner package

Every owner receives a standard reporting package on a fixed calendar day. It includes:

• Income statement with budget variance and plain-language notes on anything material
• Rent roll and aged receivables
• General ledger and bank reconciliation
• Copies of paid invoices above your approval threshold
• Work order summary with completion photos
• Leasing activity, delinquency status, and upcoming lease expirations
• Capital items on the horizon, with rough timing and cost context

The package is built so a non-accountant can read it in fifteen minutes and an accountant can audit it without calling us. Quarterly, we review the budget-to-actual picture with you and adjust the plan rather than explaining variances after the year is gone.

Rule of thumb: if your monthly report cannot answer what happened, what it cost, and what is coming next, you are paying for rent collection, not property management.

A digital twin for owners who are not on site

Every building we manage is documented on Levaru’s own technology platform. Work orders carry before-and-after photos. Equipment wears QR-coded asset tags tied to its service history. Preventive maintenance runs on a schedule you can see, not a promise.

The piece owners use most is the 3D walkthrough: a browser-based model of each floor with an interactive floor plan, alongside 360-degree photo documentation of conditions. An owner in another state, or a board member who cannot attend a site visit, can walk the property from a laptop and see exactly what we see.

This is not marketing gloss; it is how we keep ourselves honest. When the condition of every corridor and mechanical room is visible to the client, deferred maintenance has nowhere to hide.

The platform is included with management at no extra cost: no software licenses, no per-seat fees, nothing bolted onto the management fee. It exists because we need it to run buildings well — client visibility comes free with that.

How commercial property management fees are structured

You will see four common structures in the DMV market:

Percentage of collected rent. The standard for commercial assets. It aligns the manager with occupancy and collections, and it is usually paired with a monthly minimum so small buildings still get real attention.

Per unit, per month. The norm for multifamily, where unit count predicts workload better than rent level does.

Per door or per home. Common for community associations, scaled to the number of homes and the service level the board selects.

Flat monthly fee. Sensible for single-tenant net-leased buildings where the workload is steady and narrow.

What moves the number: property type and size, tenant count, lease complexity, required on-site staffing, the condition of the books at takeover, and how much construction or project oversight the plan calls for. Leasing commissions and construction management are typically separate line items, and you should expect any manager to put every fee in the agreement rather than in the invoices.

We quote after seeing the property and the rent roll, not before. A fee quoted sight unseen is a fee that will be renegotiated later.

How Levaru compares to national management platforms

Owners weighing a regional manager against a national one can see the honest, model-vs-model breakdown in our Levaru vs. JLL guide, our JLL, CBRE, and Cushman & Wakefield alternatives guides, and the in-house vs. outsourced math behind the decision.

Getting started

Takeover follows a fixed checklist: leases and abstracts, vendor contracts, keys and codes, bank and ledger setup, tenant introduction letters, a full photo and 3D baseline of the property, and a first-90-days plan you approve before we execute it.

Transitions from another manager are normal and we handle the awkward parts: chasing missing documents, reconciling inherited ledgers, and telling you plainly what we found. The baseline documentation matters most here, because it fixes the property’s condition on day one and every change after that is on the record.

Call +1 (703) 646-8300 or write info@levaru.co, and we will walk the property with you and put a specific scope and fee in writing.