The Short Version
About
Who You Are Dealing With
Most property management companies are careful not to tell you who will actually be handling your property, because the honest answer is a rotating queue. This page is the opposite of that.
Get A Free Rental AnalysisCall (219) 218-6804Zach Thomas
Big Dog NWI Properties is run by Zach Thomas, and run is the right word: he is the person who answers the phone, walks the property before you sign, and reads the repair bid before you pay it.
The background is construction rather than property management, which is unusual and is the whole point. A Building Construction Management degree from Purdue, then large commercial projects for JE Dunn, Skender, Accel and Level 10: more than 1.3 million square feet in total, including a 500,000 square foot, $352 million hotel and convention center, and a 2,600-space parking garage at O Hare.
Managing work at that scale means reading scopes, comparing bids that are not written to be comparable, and knowing when a schedule is about to slip. Those are the skills that decide whether a rental, an association or a commercial building makes money, and almost nobody in local property management has them.
Three Companies, One Owner
Worth being precise about, because plenty of companies blur this deliberately.
Big Dog NWI Properties LLC
The real estate side. Residential management, HOA and condo associations, commercial buildings, and the investor list. This company, this site.
Listing Leaders Northwest
The brokerage. Zach holds his Indiana real estate license here, which is what permits managing property for other owners and representing you on a purchase or sale.
Woods Remodel-Construction
The general contracting company. Renovation and construction work across the Region. Big Dog subcontracts repairs and charges a published 15 percent to coordinate them.
What that structure does not mean is that Woods crews are your maintenance department. Big Dog coordinates subcontractors like any manager does. The difference is who reads the bid before you pay it.
Small On Purpose
The large shops win on volume: hundreds of doors, a call centre, and a portfolio manager who has never seen your building. That model works for them because averages hide individual failures. Your single-family rental is a rounding error next to their apartment complexes, and you find that out the first time something goes wrong.
A small book is the entire product here. It is why the person answering has walked your property, why we will tell you honestly when self-managing beats hiring us, and why there are limits published on this site about what we will and will not take on. Those limits are real. Associations much over sixty units, or institutional commercial portfolios, are somebody else’s job and we say so.
Questions People Ask
Who actually manages my property?
Zach Thomas. Not a portfolio manager, not a call centre, not somebody who has never seen the building. That is only possible because the number of properties taken on is deliberately small, and it is the main reason to hire a company this size rather than a large one.
Are you a real estate agent or a property manager?
Both, and they are separate things. Zach is a licensed Indiana real estate agent with Listing Leaders Northwest, which is what allows Big Dog to manage property for other owners and to represent you buying or selling. The management company and the brokerage are not the same entity, and the brokerage name appears on this site because Indiana advertising rules expect it to.
What is the relationship between Big Dog and Woods?
Two companies, one owner. Big Dog NWI Properties LLC is the real estate side: management, associations, commercial buildings and agent work. Woods Remodel-Construction is the general contracting company. Big Dog subcontracts repair work and charges a published 15 percent to coordinate it. What it does not do is pretend the two are one crew, because they are not.
Why stay small?
Because the alternative is the thing owners complain about. Volume management works by averaging: enough doors that any one of them can be handled badly without anyone noticing. A small book means the person answering the phone has walked your property. It is a deliberate limit, not a stage we are trying to grow out of quickly.
Where are you based?
640 N Rensselaer Ave, Griffith, Indiana. Lake County is the service area for management. Office hours are Monday to Friday, 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM, and there is no 24/7 call centre, which is stated plainly rather than discovered later.
Start With A Real Number
Free rental analysis, no obligation, and an honest answer about whether hiring a manager is worth it for your property.
Get A Free Rental AnalysisCall (219) 218-6804Residential management • HOA and associations • Commercial • Pricing