The best landlord software and tools for small landlords

How to choose, by the size of your portfolio

The right setup has more to do with how many doors you have than with which app has the longest feature list. Here’s how we’d think about it.

One to four units

Keep it simple and keep it cheap. A free app like TurboTenant, Avail or Innago will list your unit, take applications, run screening and collect rent by bank transfer. Pair it with Stessa or Baselane for the books, both of which are free and pull in bank transactions for you, and you’ve covered most of the job for $0 a month.

What you give up: some polish, and your tenants pay a couple of dollars per payment. If that bothers you, TurboTenant Pro removes the tenant ACH fee for $199 a year.

Five to twenty units

This is where a flat price starts to beat a free one. RentRedi charges $12 a month on its annual plan no matter how many units you add, and tenant ACH is $1. At 15 units that works out to well under a dollar a door.

Look hard at how each app handles late fees, partial payments and maintenance requests, because those are the jobs that eat your evenings at this size. And get your bookkeeping into a proper system now, before tax season forces it.

Twenty units and up, or managing for others

Now you want real accounting. Buildium’s Essential plan costs $62 a month and stays at that price up to at least 40 units on its own calculator. It gives you double-entry books, owner and resident portals, and trust-account support if you start managing other people’s properties.

DoorLoop is modern and capable, but its $199 monthly minimum only makes sense once you’re past roughly 40 units. AppFolio won’t take you below 50.

What we look at

Every tool is scored the same way: what it costs at 1, 5 and 20 units, whether it handles the core jobs, how quickly you can list a unit and collect a first payment, what your tenants pay, and how support and payouts hold up. Price carries the most weight because for a small landlord it usually decides the question.

We never rank a tool higher because it pays us more. Some of the tools we rank well pay us nothing at all.

The fees nobody puts on the pricing page

The monthly price is only part of the cost. Before you commit, check four things:

• Tenant payment fees. ACH fees range from $0 to $2.50 per payment across the apps we track. Card fees run about 3% to 3.5%.
• Screening fees. Applicants usually pay $30 to $55 per report. Some apps let you pay instead, which can help in a slow market.
• E-signature limits. Several plans cap e-signed leases or charge per signature.
• Bank account fees. Buildium’s Essential plan charges $99 for each business bank account you connect.

Each review on this site lists these fees with the date we last checked them.