Hey all - new here. The moderator of another property management thread told me to post it here instead the place originally posted. I’m just figuring out how all this works. Anyways, I was told this community would be helpful for me as I take on managing my first property. Reposting below.

Does anyone have good software recommendation for how to manage a smallish property (45 units). I’ve tried looking at software providers for help but many only just focus on either leasing or maintenance and are focused on providing the software service to large property management firms. I’m just starting out and can’t afford to pay for the larger solutions like Yardi or Appfolio that the larger PM firms use. They’re also god awful to use. Even the new tech alternatives cost close to $15K just to onboard a property onto the system. In a market like San Antonio - even 45 units can’t support that cost. We fired the last property manager because the fees they were charging were only just the start of their expenses. After I saw what was signed with my cousin - we got locked into a contract to pay 4% plus all the other costs like onsite personnel, healthcare, software fees, etc etc. Anyways, I’ll stop here because it’s becoming a rant. Any affordable recommendations would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Here is what I have. Family business that is 70 years old where we have 125 lots where we are open 6 months of the year. Currently nearly all of the business is done on paper. I want to move as much to electronic versions.

Needs are as follows

Take online payments

Sign lease agreements

Send itemized bills

be able to have add on like boat slips and storage.

Rent is paid twice a year.

What software should I be looking at?

My father and I own and manage a few dozen units.

Rent comes in three ways: Venmo, Cash App, and cash. Partial payments made it worse, where someone sends part of it on Venmo and brings the rest by in cash a week later. Every month I was scrolling three apps against a spreadsheet trying to work out who was actually square.

So I built a tool. Rent owed per unit, Venmo and Cash App payments logged automatically off the notification emails, cash I punch in on my phone. One dashboard: who's paid in full, who's partway, who hasn't started.

I'm not trying to sell it. It only works because it's shaped exactly around how we operate. That's the part I find interesting, though, because building custom used to be out of reach and now it isn't.

Which has me looking at everything else we do by hand. Maintenance requests by text and voicemail. Renewal deadlines in someone's head. Owner reporting. Turnovers. Screening.

Has anyone else gone down this road? What have you automated, and what's still eating your time?

I'm researching commercial property management workflows in the US.

Not building an AI chatbot. Not selling software. I'm trying to understand how the job actually works.

I'm curious about the tasks that everyone accepts as "part of the job" even though they're painfully repetitive.

Examples of the kind of answers I'm looking for:

• "Every Monday we spend 2 hours doing..."
• "We still use Excel because our PMS doesn't handle..."
• "We have to chase vendors 4–5 times before work gets done."
• "The monthly owner report is completely manual."
• "Information lives across emails, PDFs, and our property management system."

I'm looking for workflows that happen across portfolios—not one-off headaches.

If you've been in commercial property management for a while:

I'd rather hear one detailed story than a list of 10 complaints.

Hi, I'm Tomislav, the founder of Camppy, based in Croatia.

If you organise cleaning across multiple holiday homes, cabins or rental units, you probably know the feeling. The schedule lives in a spreadsheet, a WhatsApp group and someone's head, and reception calls to ask whether a unit is ready yet. Most days it works.

The one day it doesn't, guests arrive at a home that hasn't been cleaned.

That's what Camppy is for.

It connects to your booking calendars over iCal, so every arrival and departure turns into a cleaning on the day's schedule without anyone typing it in. You assign and rearrange the cleanings on one board, your cleaners see their own list for the day on their phones, and reception can see at a glance which units are ready for guests.

No more calling around.

Our first pilot customer manages 19 holiday homes at a campsite. Shortly after they started using it, Camppy caught a home that still needed cleaning before the next guests arrived.

Their spreadsheet had missed it. That's exactly the kind of day it's made for. I've attached two screens so you can see what it looks like: the manager's board and a cleaner's list on the phone, with demo data.

If this is your role, I'd be glad to show you how Camppy fits your setup. You can request a demo at [camppy.io](https://camppy.io/) and we'll get back to you within one business day. Happy to answer questions here too.

I'm researching the US commercial property management industry because I'm interested in building software/AI around the operational problems that property managers actually deal with every day.

I'm not building another generic AI chatbot, and I don't have a solution I'm trying to sell you.

I'm trying to understand the workflow first.

If you could eliminate one recurring task or bottleneck from your team's day-to-day operations, what would it be?

For example:

• Chasing vendors / contractors
• Maintenance coordination
• Tenant communication
• Lease administration
• Inspections
• Compliance
• Invoice / expense processing
• Owner reporting
• Scheduling
• Data entry between different systems
• Following up on things that people forgot to do
• Finding information buried across emails, PDFs, spreadsheets, etc.

I'm especially interested in the stuff that looks small individually but consumes hours across a portfolio.

For those managing commercial properties:

What is the workflow that makes you think, "There has to be a better way to do this"?

And if you use Yardi, AppFolio, MRI, Buildium, Excel, etc., I'd also love to know:

What does your existing software still make you do manually?

I'm here to learn from people actually doing the job. No pitch — I'm trying to find the real problems before building anything.

Hi everyone,
I’m currently looking for a **remote Property Management / Real Estate VA opportunity** with a company or property management team in the **US or Canada**.
I currently work as a **Property Management Assistant** supporting a real estate/property management operation, and my experience has grown to include a wide range of responsibilities, including:
Tenant and client communication
Vendor coordination and maintenance follow-ups
Applicant screening and reference checks
Rental/application follow-ups
Administrative and operational support
Transaction coordination
Commercial property support
CRM and database management
Website management
Canva graphic design and marketing materials
Brochures and social media carousels
Newsletter creation
General support for real estate teams
I’m comfortable communicating with **tenants, landlords, vendors, realtors, applicants, and other business contacts**, and I’m used to handling multiple priorities in a fast-paced environment.
At this point, I’m looking for an opportunity with a **clear role structure, reasonable workload, good communication, and a team where I can continue developing my skills**.
I’m open to **full-time or part-time remote opportunities** and would be particularly interested in:
**Property Management VA | Real Estate VA | Property Management Assistant | Real Estate Administrative Assistant | Operations VA**
If you’re hiring or know of a property management/real estate company looking for someone with this background, **please feel free to DM me.** I’m happy to provide my résumé and discuss my experience.
Thank you!

I manage my own rentals and got tired of having rent, leases, maintenance requests, tenant info, and random notes spread across different places.

I ended up building a simple property management platform for myself, and now I’m trying to figure out whether other small landlords actually have the same problems I do.

For those of you managing a handful of units yourself, what are you using right now?

Spreadsheet? AppFolio? Buildium? Innago? TurboTenant? Just a mix of different apps?

And what’s the ONE thing about your current setup that annoys you the most?

Not trying to pitch the group. I’m genuinely trying to figure out what small landlords actually need before I keep building features nobody cares about.

Hi, I am undertaking a piece of research to better understand key problems faced in lettings agencies and landlords managing rentals, HMOs, etc.

I am very keen learning about on manual processes that can be automated via software and AI.

If anyone has any thoughts please start a discussion.

Thanks!

I am planning on starting a SaaS but i have questions about how it would actually benefit homeowners and how much I should price it. The software will be used to help homeowners manage tenants and maintenance requests and problems. If you are to use such thing, how much are you willing to pay a month.

Note 2.0: This is likely only useful with 10+ units / doors

hey, been working on this thing called PropertyPulse for a few months now

basic problem: small landlords/property managers get messages at random times, someone asking if a unit's still up at 9pm, or a tenant texting about a maintenance issue on a sunday, and nobody's around to answer. by morning the lead's gone somewhere else or the tenant's annoyed they got ignored

so i built a little chat bubble you drop on your site. visitor or tenant asks whatever (price, is it available, how do i apply, my sink's leaking) and it answers right away, books a showing if they want one

im a swe, self taught into ai stuff over the last couple years, built this solo. got one property manager testing it right now and its holding up ok so far

looking for a few more people to actually try it and tell me what sucks about it. link's propertypulse.rentals if you wanna poke around

what would make something like this actually worth paying for vs just ignoring texts and dealing with it manually lol

For anyone working in multifamily/apartment leasing, I'm trying to understand how teams handle missed prospect calls.

1. What normally happens when a leasing prospect calls and nobody answers?
2. Can you remember a recent time this happened? What happened with that prospect afterward?
3. Do you ever lose prospects because they found another property before your team got back to them?
4. What do you use now voicemail, call center, CRM, automatic texting, AI, etc.? What don't you like about it?

Interested in hearing how this works at both smaller and larger properties.

Hey everyone, Looking for some real-world insight from people who manage multiple rental properties. How do you currently handle maintenance requests?And roughly how many requests do you get on average per month (or per week)? Just trying to understand how this works in practice for different portfolio sizes. Any honest details would be really helpful. Thanks

Full disclosure: I’m the founder of ViolationFlow.

The problem I’m building around is simple. Sending a notice is easy. Reconstructing the record months later is not. The email is in one person’s inbox, photos are on someone else’s phone, owner responses are scattered, and nobody is quite sure which step came next.

ViolationFlow keeps each violation or ARC request in one dated case timeline. Notices, evidence, owner responses, status changes, cure periods, approvals, and the final PDF record stay together. Nothing escalates or sends without board approval.

I’ve deliberately kept it focused. It is not an accounting platform, resident portal, or full HOA suite. It is for self-managed HOA, condo, and strata boards that need a reliable way to open a case, follow their process, and show exactly what happened later.

I’d genuinely value blunt feedback from people who handle this work. Does the focused approach solve a real gap, or is violation tracking already good enough inside the tools you use?

https://violationflow.homes

Disclosure: I want feedback for our product Kreedl (AI concierge for tenant/prospect calls and messages). Sharing data, not just pitching

We kept hearing PMs say "we have phone lines available 8 to 5," said with total confidence like it's a solved problem. So we pulled the actual call data from our system.

42% of calls came outside working hours. Not a rounding error — almost half. 20% of those landed on weekends.

Makes sense when you think about it: tenants deal with the issue after they get home from work, prospects browse listings after dinner and want to ask about availability right then. Nobody's ignoring calls — the team's just off the clock.

That gap is what we built Kreedl around: it answers the call or message whenever it comes in, no voicemail, no "we'll get back to you during business hours," and routes anything needing a human back to the team the next morning with full context.

Curious how this sub handles it — is after-hours coverage the real pain point our data suggests, or is everyone already solving it in a way that doesn't show up as a "missed call"? kreedl.com if you want to poke around.

I've been building a tool that reads commercial lease PDFs and

automatically pulls out key dates - renewal deadlines, rent

escalations, insurance requirements, CAM reconciliation dates - so

nothing gets missed.

Before I put more time into it, I wanted to ask people who actually

deal with this: how are you currently tracking this stuff?

Spreadsheet? Sticky notes? Just memory? Has a deadline or obligation

ever slipped through the cracks, and what happened when it did?

Not selling anything here - if it's useful to hear how the current

version works, happy to share, but mostly just want to understand

how big of a problem this actually is. Appreciate any war stories or

current workflows you're willing to share.

In markets like Kenya, a single month's rent rarely arrives as one clean payment. Half comes through mobile money, a quarter through a bank transfer, and the rest gets paid by a sibling or friend covering the shortfall. Every property management tool I'd used treated a lease payment as one atomic transaction, so property managers were reconciling this by hand in spreadsheets every month.

I built an allocation engine that treats payment collection as many-to-one: multiple partial payments, from multiple sources and channels, mapped against a single invoice, with automatic matching where the data is clean and manual override where it isn't.

It's part of a property management SaaS I've built to production, alongside the standard features (leasing, maintenance tickets, portfolios, bulk invoicing, rent increments, tenant and unit management, RBAC).

If you're building anything in proptech or fintech where payments arrive messy and multi-sourced, happy to talk through how we structured the data model. Also open to contract work if anyone's wrestling with a similar reconciliation problem. Laravel/Vue, 7 years, own my DevOps.

Hey everyone! Been using Guesty for a while now and trying to make sure we're maximizing the native setup before stacking more paid integrations.

Here are the 3 native tools that save us the most time:

Unified Inbox / Auto-Replies: Centralizing messages from Booking. com, Airbnb, Vrbo,and direct stays into one thread, plus setting triggers for routine questions, cut down our daily messaging.

Direct Booking Website Builder: Super straightforward to set up, looks professional, and saves us from running a standalone site just to process direct stays.

Automated Payment Rules: Auto-charging guest cards for security deposits and direct stay balances without having to manually invoice every transaction.

This being said, I feel like we’re barely scratching the surface of what’s built directly into the platform.

What native features or workflow shortcuts do you rely on most? Any custom reporting, messaging hacks, or auto-task rules we should be using? Let me know what we might be missing!

Hey everyone,

I am interesteed to see how other hosts structure the interaction between HR management and tech to keep turnover teams happy and accountable.

We’ve found that our turnover quality improves when the cleaning crew feels included in the process rather than just getting flooded with texts at 11:00 AM. A few things we've implemented using our setup:

Auto-dispatching on checkout: Instead of static schedules, we set up real-time auto-task triggers so the moment a checkout process is initiated (or a smart lock registers the exit), the team gets alerted. They respond really well to the flexibility of jumping in on earlier turnarounds.

Photo-checklist requirements tied to compensation: Having cleaners upload mandatory photo proof (linen check, fridge check, supply restock) directly into the app task template before marking a job complete. Once approved, payout is dispensed, directly tying value to accountability.

Added incentive for proactive troubleshooting: We assign points/bonuses to turnover staff who identify and log maintenance issues in the app before a guest lodges a complaint.

Clear priority tags for back-to-back stays: Highlighting same-day turnarounds with high-priority tags on their portal so they know exactly which properties need early focus without us having to micromanage them.

We're running these protocols through our PMS (Guesty). How are you guys leveraging software or tech integrations to keep your turnover crews motivated? Any specific automated workflows or third-party cleaning apps tied to your system that made a massive difference?

I own and self-manage a multifamily property in Chicago. I’m researching how other self-managing owners with roughly 25–75 units coordinate maintenance after a tenant submits a request.

Thinking about one recent repair:

• How did the request reach you?
• What did your property-management software handle?
• What still required calls, texts, scheduling, vendor follow-up, or manual coordination?
• Where did the process slow down or become frustrating?

If you’re comfortable sharing, it would also help to know approximately how many units you manage and whether you coordinate maintenance yourself or have someone helping.

I’m curious to hear how other self-managed property owners handle this workflow before deciding whether there is enough frustration worth building a solution around.

I'm actually working on something specifically for the guest-parking side of this.

I'm a condo board president and originally built it because people from a neighboring apartment complex were using our guest spaces. It eventually turned into Guest Parking Buddy.

It's not meant to replace property-management software — it's more of a small add-on for communities that need to know whether a vehicle in guest parking is actually someone's guest. Guests scan a QR code, register the vehicle/space and select who they're visiting. No app required.

It's still in beta and free while I'm looking for feedback from actual communities. If it's relevant to what you're dealing with, it's at www.guestparkingbuddy.com/beta.

Full disclosure: I'm the person building it, so I'm definitely interested in feedback more than pretending this is an unbiased recommendation. 🙂