Property management companies in South Carolina by county

South Carolina had 1,020 property management companies with paid employees in 2023, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's County Business Patterns (CBP). Of those, 832 are residential property managers (NAICS 531311) and 188 are nonresidential property managers (531312), which handle office, retail and industrial property. Together they reported 8,011 employees in the March pay period and $420.5 million in annual payroll.

Scaled to the Vintage 2024 population estimate of 5,478,831, the state has 1.86 property management offices per 10,000 residents, or one for every 5,371 people. Across all U.S. counties the two codes total 76,832 offices, a rate of 2.26 and one office for every 4,427 people. South Carolina is about 18 percent below the national rate, with residential managers at 1.52 per 10,000 (U.S. 1.76) and nonresidential at 0.34 (U.S. 0.50).

The Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook reports 460,400 property, real estate and community association manager jobs in 2025, a median pay of $69,990 in May 2025, and projected growth of 4 percent from 2025 to 2035. It also reports that 31 percent of these managers are self-employed, a group CBP does not count.

Charleston County has the highest density of property management companies, at 4.85 per 10,000 residents, followed by Beaufort (4.31), Horry (3.70) and Georgetown (3.18). These four coastal counties hold 470 offices, 46.1 percent of the state total, while they are home to 20.3 percent of the state's residents. The coast's tourism economy, with its vacation rentals and second homes, is the likely driver of that concentration, though CBP does not break offices out by property type.

Horry County's managers are also the largest on average: 153 offices employing 1,692 people, about 11 per office, compared with 7.9 statewide. Greenville (125 offices, 2.19 per 10,000) and Richland (88 offices, 2.04) are the inland leaders.

The Upstate and the Charleston suburbs are adding residents far faster than property management offices. South Carolina added 360,579 residents from April 2020 to July 2024. Comparing each county's numeric population change with its current office count shows where new households, and the rental homes and investors that follow them, are least served.

Spartanburg County added 41,259 residents and has 34 property management offices, or about 1,214 new residents per existing office. Berkeley (1,380) and Lancaster (1,422) are even more stretched. In Charleston, by contrast, the ratio is about 108 new residents per office, and in Beaufort about 169.

• 16 counties have no published count: Abbeville, Allendale, Bamberg, Barnwell, Calhoun, Chester, Chesterfield, Edgefield, Fairfield, Hampton, Laurens, Lee, McCormick, Marlboro, Orangeburg and Saluda. CBP publishes a cell only with three or more establishments, so each has zero, one or two.
• Orangeburg (83,129 residents) and Laurens (70,545) are the largest counties without a published count.
• Edgefield grew 14.9 percent and also has no published count.

Most are small. 63.3 percent of South Carolina property management offices have fewer than five employees, close to the national share of 64.3 percent. 19.7 percent have five to nine employees and 4.2 percent have 20 or more. The average office has 7.9 employees, pulled up by large residential managers on the coast.

A small team managing dozens or hundreds of doors spends much of its day on communication: maintenance requests, showing inquiries, rent reminders, lease renewals and owner updates. How that work is handled decides how many units a team can manage well.

Look at where new residents are arriving relative to existing managers. Counties like Spartanburg, Berkeley and Lancaster are adding households quickly with few local management companies, which means individual landlords and small investors there may have limited options.

The opposite pattern holds on the coast. In Charleston and Beaufort, new residents per existing office are low, so growth comes from winning owners away from other managers or from adding services such as short-term rental management, association management or commercial work. That is a sales and reputation problem more than a coverage problem, and it rewards companies that can show owners clear numbers on occupancy, turnover time and maintenance costs.

• Coastal managers in Charleston, Beaufort and Horry compete for owners in crowded markets. Clear owner reporting, published service terms and strong tenant reviews help win management contracts.
• Managers near Spartanburg, Berkeley, Lancaster or Anderson can expand by building a page for each community served and making it easy for owners to request a rental analysis.
• Commercial managers have the thinnest supply relative to the U.S. (0.34 versus 0.50 per 10,000), especially outside Charleston and Greenville.
• Growing door count without adding staff depends on how maintenance requests, showings and renewals are handled. Map those workflows before taking on a new market.

Supply and growth data shows where to look for new owners; operations data shows whether the team can absorb them. Monvell's Operations and Communications teams help property managers set up tenant and owner communication, maintenance intake and follow-up that scale with door count.

Dataset: U.S. Census Bureau County Business Patterns 2023, county file (cbp23co.txt), NAICS 531311 (residential property managers) and 531312 (nonresidential property managers). CBP covers establishments with paid employees; employment is for the pay period including March 12 and payroll is annual. CBP data from 2017 to 2023 use 2017 NAICS codes.

Population: Census Bureau Vintage 2024 county estimates (co-est2024-alldata.csv). Population change is POPESTIMATE2024 minus ESTIMATESBASE2020; growth is that change divided by ESTIMATESBASE2020. New residents per office divides the change by the 2023 office count. The U.S. population is the sum of the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Method: we filtered CBP to South Carolina (state FIPS 45), summed the two codes per county, joined population by county FIPS and computed offices per 10,000 residents for all 46 counties. U.S. rates sum the same codes across every county record. Size shares sum the published size class columns; cells marked N are excluded and shown as not allocated.

Limits: CBP excludes self-employed managers and owner-managed rentals, counts locations rather than companies, and does not include real estate brokerages that also manage rentals (those are coded 531210). Each code is suppressed separately below three establishments, so small-county totals are undercounts. Employment and payroll carry disclosure noise. Vintage 2025 population estimates are now available; we used Vintage 2024 to stay closer to the 2023 business data.