Rental Property Software

Most property management software is geared toward rental properties, and thus are geared toward solving rental property managers’ two main challenges: keeping track of important property information and automating business activities. Rental owners must track leases, maintenance requests, income and expenses, liability insurance and many other items for a single property or unit. To scale their business, they need an efficient way to manage all this paper work and automate some of the recurring processes: for example, critical date notifications to alert them about lease expiration or delinquent payments, or vacancy planning with real-time identification of vacancies and under-utilized locations. Rental property software helps owners manage these activities and more.

Rental property software performs three main functions: tenant and lease management, maintenance management, and financial accounting and reporting. A tenant and lease management application will store vital tenant information like resident contact information, late fee reminders, work order history, and vehicles. It also helps standardize the leasing process with customizable lease forms, custom fields, and easy document distribution. Tenant and lease tracking applications can have a number of other features including:

• space management to manage the configuration of available space for move-ins and move-outs;
• resident screening to screen applicants using criteria for credit history, rent history, and income; and,
• utility metering to calculate and bill for tenant consumption of metered utilities.

A maintenance management application will help landlords track work orders, store service contracts, track purchase orders and manage their maintenance staff or workforce. Finally, some rental property management systems will have financial accounting and reporting functionality like a general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll, and more.

Have an opinion on this guide? Email the authors. We appreciate the feedback.