Drowning in spreadsheets or managing a handful of applications and notifications as a landlord can be overwhelming. That can lead to wondering if there is a better way to manage a just a few properties; is software really worth it for small landlords? In this video, Rentec Direct experts Kaycee and Brentnie dive into one landlord’s big question and what software is an excellent option for those just getting started.
If you own a few investment properties as a diy landlord, you know that it can feel like a full-time job on top of your busy schedule. Between balancing spreadsheets and marketing rental vacancies, this passive income source doesn’t feel quite as passive as you might have expected. If you have a busy schedule or a full-time job and you own rental properties on the side, software can help you get your time back.
In this video, Rentec Direct’s Brentnie and Kaycee will discuss common issues that can arise from spreadsheet tracking and cover how to manage the sometimes overwhelming search for the right software for your needs as a small landlord. With tips and tricks drawn from years of experience in the rental and software industries, these two experts will give you the confidence you need to find the perfect fit to reduce stress and save you time as a small landlord.
Do You Need Landlord Software For a Few Rentals? – Video Transcript
Brentnie:
Hello everyone, this is Brentnie and Kaycee from Rentec Direct, and we are rental experts here to talk to you about landlord questions again today. So today we saw a question on a forum specifically asking about software, and that is an area that we actually have a lot of expertise,
Kaycee:
is a great question for us.
Brentnie:
So this question is asking: “What software/tools do you actually use to manage your rental properties? Looking for recommendations. I’m currently managing three rental properties, and honestly, I’m drowning in spreadsheets. I’ve got separate files for rent tracking, expense logs, tenant info, maintenance requests, and I’m constantly worried I’m missing something come tax time. I’ve tried looking at property management software, but there’s just so many options, and I can’t tell which ones are actually worth it versus just overpriced junk.”
Kaycee:
Oh my gosh. So when I first heard this question, I cringed hearing all the stuff that was being tracked in spreadsheets. So, what is he saying? He has separate files for rent tracking, expense logs, tenant info, maintenance requests, and that’s exactly why software exists, to help keep it all organized. So you’re not using formulas or search tools within a spreadsheet. You can just have software that shows you everything.
So when I think of property management software, that’s what it’s designed to do. You put your rental property in, and you can put your tenant in, and then set up when you want rent payments to be collected, when late fees get automatically charged to a tenant, and when notifications go out to a tenant. There are ways for a tenant to submit maintenance requests. So it’s all in one database and platform with automatic notifications. I think that’s what is going to be the most helpful part of the software, especially when you’re at, 1 to less than 10 properties, because you can really keep very transparent bird’s-eye view of what’s going on in your rental properties.
When you have multiple properties, multiple tenants, multiple forms of payments coming at you, it’s really about tracking those late fees, late payments, and maintenance requests and making sure you’re following up, because that is one of the goals of a landlord: good communication, positive landlord-tenant relationships. When maintenance requests come in, you want to be able to know which property it’s attached to and what the status of it is. Have I already contacted a vendor for it? Did I tell the tenant that I contacted a vendor? So that’s where software can really come in and help you out. Even this Redditor is saying, “I have too much going on.” So, what’s the value of software, and how do I even pick out of the ones that are out there? Do you want to speak a little bit on that?
Choosing Software That Will Grow With You
Brentnie:
Yeah, there are a lot of options out there. One thing that was standing out to me is this person is actually very organized, because it’s—this person knows, “Okay, I need to be keeping track of all these things,” and there is a lot of organization there. But everything is very manual. And this person’s probably wasting a lot of time just in the weeds of all of these tasks when there are software options out there that were designed specifically for landlords.
And so, with choosing, one of the things that is important, I think, for software, because we’re in this world where we have AI, we have all of these options, we have investor-led new software options just popping up all over the place, is honestly the long-term viability of the software that you’re getting into, because it can be kind of arduous to move from the spreadsheet tracking, which is a little bit complicated but working, and then moving to a software option that maybe won’t be here in a little while. I think one of the things to be looking at is, like, what software options are out there that are designed specifically for their needs as a landlord.
And what’s interesting with us as Rentec Direct is that this story is kind of our founder, Nathan Miller’s story, where he was tracking with spreadsheets—but 20 years ago—and realizing this isn’t efficient, this isn’t going to be helpful. And Rentec was born out of that need.
You’re also going to be looking at things like customer service, because there’s so many options out there that honestly may be great tools, but they maybe aren’t designed for a smaller landlord with a smaller portfolio. This person hasn’t really expressed whether or not they want to grow their portfolio in the future. That’s another reason to get software: if you are planning on growing, you really want to get those tools in place now to be getting familiar with your software option.
How Software Simplifies Taxes and Helps You Pick the Right Fit
Kaycee:
So this person is tracking rent payments, maintenance, thinking about tax info, tenant info, and having all of that be in one spot and then automated and interconnected is kind of where I think this can help someone who’s working in spreadsheets and checking their bank account every month to make sure rent comes in. But if it can just be in one system where, like, you get a rental application, and that information on the rental application automatically feeds into your software. So all the tenant data is right there. And then the rent info, rent payments come in, it’s connected to your bank account. You can input your receipts for property expenses.
So then, come tax time, you—there’s one report that I can think of in Rentec Direct that’s like your income and expense report that literally is beautiful, because it says, like, here’s the rental income, here are your expenses, here’s a breakdown of your expenses over the year. So you can take that expense category and use it for your write-offs as a landlord, because there’s lots of great tax benefits as a landlord, but you just definitely need to be able to categorize it appropriately. So as long as you’re keeping track within your software throughout the year, you can find all those valuable things. Versus a spreadsheet, you’re going to have the spreadsheet of your expenses that you’ve been tracking throughout the year. And then you need to take that and actually put it into your tax document and create your report off of that spreadsheet, versus if it’s already kind of a click of a button because you’ve been inputting the information throughout the year. I think those are kind of the values of how the software’s features can play into someone who’s looking at why I would use spreadsheets versus software when I only have a couple of properties.
And, in terms of choosing it, you’re kind of touching on this. Like, what are you looking at when there’s so much software out there, and how do you narrow it down to the three that you wanna have a demo with to actually evaluate? And I think cost is always going to be top of mind, especially with less than 10 properties—you’re really looking at that property management cost and how much that’s going to cut into your rental income, expenses and rental income profit. But then, also, is customer service an important value to you? Do you want to be able to call someone at the company and being like, I need help figuring out this feature, or my renter said they paid and I don’t see it in my software, like, what happened, and having someone be able to, like, walk you through where’s the money at in my software, or what’s the maintenance issue that they reported, now I can’t find it? So, are those customer service tools important to you, that you can help make the decision? And then, you were mentioning, like, there’s lots of features that can be in a property management software and lots of features for a huge property management company that maybe a landlord doesn’t need.
And some players out there in the property management space were designed for property managers that have 10,000 properties and 10,000 units. And it’s designed to be separated in ways that are really good for apartment management, but you might not need those features for just one or two properties that you’re self-managing. So that can be a way to kind of weed out different players in the property management software space. And then, longevity: 5, 10, 15, 20 years, 30 years, or is it a brand-new property management software that popped up and got $80 million worth of funding that now they’re trying to spend on advertising just in order to get a lot of clients, but then they’re not going to exist in a year or two because they ran out of their funding money? So those are all things that I look at when I’m evaluating any type of software product that I’m going to invest my time and energy in. It’s not just the cost, but also how much that software is going to help me in terms of the people working there, and how long it’s going to be around with my data inside of it. And then, system security. I can think of all these, like, little things just being in the software space of what could be important in terms of evaluating which ones are great and bad, or could be helpful or not helpful, for someone with fewer rental units.
The Hidden Tasks Software Can Help Landlords With
Brentnie:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that, kind of going back to software versus Excel, I think this person knows that they are ready for a software program. I think that they’re very aware, or they wouldn’t have come up kind of feeling this tension and this panic. But beyond just tracking the things that they have mentioned, there are additional tasks that this person’s not even considering that software’s going to help with.
I’m thinking, like, marketing your properties, tenant turnover, all of those tasks that can be really stressful if you’re doing it manually. And that’s another place where software can step in and make those tasks a lot easier beyond, ‘yes, okay, I have the numbers, I have the data for my day-to-day rent’, but there’s a lot of other tasks that are involved in the rental process. Software is designed to help with more than just the meat of the accounting.
And good software is going to hopefully help you write your listing in general. It’s going to be able to syndicate that listing onto all the popular websites. Having to do that yourself and then put it on each of those websites individually, that takes a lot of time. And then, doing that per property every time that you need to do it, that’s just compounding. And so there are tasks here that they’re not even necessarily thinking about in their day-to-day that are going to need software in order to save them a lot of time.
Kaycee:
Yeah, and that’s what we think of, like, property management software being, like, it’s one system, one login that you can get access to all these tools. So you’re not signing in, creating an account with, like, Zillow and rentals and different rental listing sites. You just have one account that can, like, get your information out to lots of them, and you’re not signing up for a direct peer-to-peer payment system like using Zelle or Venmo. You can actually use your property management software to collect rent, and it feeds right into your bank account.
So the idea is, like, one account, one login that takes care of everything. So you’re not kind of piecemealing all these solutions together. And I’m thinking of a software company that can help you be approachable and grow with you.
Rentec Starter for Landlords Just Getting Started
Like, let’s say I want to use software; these are my certain needs. It’s an affordable price point, like Rentec Starter, just at $25 a month. So it doesn’t eat into that rental income. But as you grow, that’s where you can access, like, the more features that you need. It gets priced per unit instead of some of these other software companies. The entry-level starting software, no matter how many units you have, can be $200 a month. And if you only have one rental and you’re collecting $1,000 a month, spending $200 a month on property management software really wouldn’t make sense for your bottom line. That kind of makes sense if you’re collecting $10,000 a month and paying a $200 property management software fee.
So, having something where it’s $25 a month to get access to all of this cost-saving benefit. A lot of landlords have other full-time jobs, other responsibilities. They’re investing in real estate as a way to do get passive income. So let’s make the work of being a landlord as passive as possible by coming up with tools and systems that are automated and make rental management as easy as possible, because the real work comes in when you’re trying to manage those landlord-tenant relationships.
And that’s what I always think you should be investing in: those relationships that can’t be automated through AI, through any other tools, because you’re using that real human interaction, and then also giving yourself the space to invest in more front properties if you want to see that rental property grow. So I think approaching your property management software search with prioritizing what you want, the features that you want, how much you want to spend, and what values of the company you want to evaluate—whether that’s longevity, ownership status, or customer service. Those are great ways to kind of narrow down your search and find what’s going to work best for you and your rental management system.
Growing With Confidence as a Landlord
Brentnie:
Yes, I love something that you touched on. You talked about being able to grow. Rentec Starter, it’s developed exactly for that reason, to be approachable when you really don’t have a ton of income going in because you are under that 10-property mark. But you have tools that you’re learning, that you are going to be able to grow with. You will know how to use Rentec, and you’ll feel confident in it.
Being able to feel confident that, if you want to get 500 properties one day, that you are going to have a system that is going to completely accommodate your needs that you already know how to use, that’s F offer a lot of peace of mind. So that’s another thing to be evaluating, regardless of what system you use: just that it’s going to meet your needs as you grow your portfolio, if that’s a goal of yours.