Landlord Software for Small Portfolios: What It Does and What to Look For

This site used to sell landlord software. It doesn’t anymore: the property-management app that lived at this address is no longer available, there is no app login here, and LoomLease is now a free lease toolkit under the same name. So this guide has nothing to sell you. It explains what the category does, what a landlord with one to ten units actually needs, and what to ask before paying anyone.

The seven jobs landlord software does

Most products bundle some or all of these:

1. Rent collection. Tenants pay online, the payment posts to their ledger, and reminders and receipts go out on a schedule.
2. Accounting. Income and expenses by property, sorted into tax categories, with a year-end report.
3. Leases. Templates, electronic signatures, stored copies and renewal reminders.
4. Screening. Applications, plus credit and background reports ordered from a screening company.
5. Maintenance. A request form with photos, a status the tenant can see, and a history for each unit.
6. Messaging. One inbox for tenant messages, sometimes with notices sent to everyone at once.
7. Documents. Storage for leases, inspections, receipts and notices.

No one with three units needs all seven. The useful question is which of these jobs you do badly today.

What one to ten units actually need

An illustrative portfolio: four units at $1,500 a month. That is 48 rent payments a year, perhaps a dozen or two repair requests, a turnover or two, and one tax return. At that size:

• Must have: a ledger for each tenant that ties to the bank, a way to collect rent that leaves a record, a rent roll you can print, and a filing system you actually use.
• Useful: online payment, a repair request form, reminders for lease end dates and deposit deadlines.
• Rarely worth paying for yet: owner portals, vendor bidding, bulk messaging, layers of user permissions.

What a spreadsheet and free tools cover

Job	Without software	Where software helps
Rent ledger	A spreadsheet, one row per charge or payment	Posts payments by itself
Receipts	The rent receipt, printed or saved as a PDF	Sends one with every payment
Late rent	The late rent notice and the late fee calculator	Reminders on a schedule
Numbers	NOI, cap rate and prorated rent on the calculators	Reports by property
Letters	The letters: notice to vacate, rent increase, late rent, receipt	Sends to several tenants at once
Repairs	A form and a log	Status tracking and photos in one place
Screening	A screening company, used directly	Ordering inside the same tool

The guide to keeping a tenant ledger sets up the spreadsheet, and the NOI calculator turns a year of it into the one number a lender asks about.

Seven questions to ask before you pay

1. Who pays the fees? Some tools are free to landlords and charge tenants for online payments or applicants for screening. Know what your tenants will see before they do.
2. How fast does rent reach your account, and who holds it in between?
3. What happens when a payment bounces? Ask who pays the payment reversal fee and when the money comes back out of your account.
4. Can late fees match your state’s law? Many states cap a late fee or require a grace period first, and a fee above the cap can be unenforceable. The late fee table has every state’s rule.
5. Is the lease template written for your state, when was it last updated, and can you use your own instead?
6. Can a co-owner or bookkeeper have their own login, with only the access they need?
7. What does it cost to leave? Look for a contract term, a cancellation fee and a charge for exporting your data.

The data you need to get back out

Find the export page before you sign up, and test it in the first week. If you leave, you want every one of these, in files you can open without the software:

• Each tenant’s ledger, with every charge, payment and credit.
• A rent roll, and income and expenses by property and category.
• Signed leases and addenda as PDFs, with the signing record.
• Move-in and move-out inspections, with their photos.
• Repair history with dates, and every message and notice sent.
• Security deposit records: amount held, where, and any deductions.

Spreadsheet files for the numbers, PDFs for anything signed. Your duty to keep records runs for years after you cancel; the software company’s does not. The guide to organizing rental documents sets the periods.

How to try one without risk

Run a trial on your real rentals, in parallel with what you do now, for one full rent cycle:

1. Set up one property, not all of them, with its real leases, rents, deposits and balances.
2. Enter a late payment. Rent of $1,500 due October 1, paid October 9, with the grace period and fee from your lease. Check the fee the tool charges against your lease and your state’s cap.
3. Record a partial payment and a bounced one, and see what the ledger and the rent roll show.
4. Submit a repair request as a tenant would, from a phone, with a photo.
5. Export everything on the last day, and open the files without the software.
6. Time yourself. Compare the hours against the month before.

If the tool gets the fee wrong, loses the partial payment or exports half your records, you have learned that for free.

When software earns its place

Rules of thumb, not laws: software starts to pay when reconciling rent takes more than an hour or two a month, when tenants keep asking to pay online, when two people run the rentals and need the same records, or when you grow past about ten units and the spreadsheet becomes the job. Until then, a steady routine matters more than any tool. The guide to rent collection and maintenance lays one out.

What happened to the LoomLease app

The property-management software that used to live at this address is no longer available, and there is no app login here. LoomLease is a free lease toolkit: six calculators, four printable letters, the landlord-tenant rules for every state with the statute behind each, a lease glossary and these guides. No accounts and nothing to subscribe to.