You own a house in Mobile. You have not stood in it this year.

The new step, and the part people miss

Alabama's Property Protection Act took effect October 1, 2026. It was written to stop seller impersonation, where somebody poses as the owner and sells or leases a property that is not theirs, usually without ever meeting anyone in person.

Under Section 35-21-5(a), a licensee may not enter into an agreement to sell or lease real property when the seller is unknown to the agent and is not physically present, unless that person provides government-issued identification and ownership records. The documentation is kept for five years.

Two things about that are worth saying slowly.

The full plain-English version: Alabama's Property Protection Act, what it means when you sell.

Why distance is the actual risk

This kind of fraud does not pick properties by value. It picks them by absence.

An out-of-state owner is, by definition, not driving past. Mail goes to an address somewhere else. If a tenant moves out, there can be a gap before anyone local knows. If something is filed against the title, there is no neighbor to mention it.

None of that is a criticism of remote ownership. Plenty of good Mobile rentals are owned by people who moved away and kept the house. It is a description of why the state wrote a law about it, and why the cheapest protection available to you is having somebody local who actually looks at the property.

The same logic applies after weather. A property on the Gulf Coast that nobody has walked through is a property nobody can tell you about. That is worth sorting before you need it rather than after.

What Mobile rents are actually doing

Figures for the city of Mobile as of August 2026, the most recent published.

• Average apartment rent $1,181, up 2.8% over the year.
• By size: 1 bedroom $1,020, 2 bedroom $1,216, 3 bedroom $1,592.
• A separate rent index reads $1,280, up 3.9%, measuring a different mix of properties.

Rents are rising steadily, not dramatically. That matters for a specific reason: a modest rent increase can be entirely consumed by one turnover, one insurance renewal or one major repair. Which brings up the number most owners have never actually seen.

Gross rent is not income

Most owners can tell you the rent. Far fewer can tell you what they keep.

What comes out first: vacancy days between tenants, turnover cost, insurance, repairs, and the management fee if there is one. The honest number is what is left after all of it, across a full year rather than a good month.

From a distance that is harder to see, because the costs arrive as individual invoices spread across the year while the rent arrives as a tidy monthly number. One looks like a pattern. The other looks like bad luck, repeatedly.

Your three options

• Keep running it yourself. Costs you every call and every coordination problem from several hundred miles away. Buys you every dollar that comes in and total control.
• Hand it to a manager. Costs a share of the rent. Buys you somebody local who answers the phone, handles the vendor, and is responsible for knowing what Alabama requires of a landlord.
• Sell it. Costs you the income permanently, which is not a small thing. Buys back your capital and closes the decision.

We manage property, so we have an obvious interest in the middle one. Which is exactly why the only useful thing we can offer is the three numbers, and a straight answer about which one your own figures point to.

Questions we get from out-of-state owners