Real Estate Software Roundup (long)

Goals, Business Plans & Entities
2yFollow

Real Estate Software Roundup (long)

Jason Turgeon
Realtor · Boston, MA · Member since 2019 · 244 posts · 275 votes

I've been trying to find the solution to managing real estate with online software for quite a while now. I've tried a lot of products, and haven't found quite the right fit. But I figured I could share some experiences that might help others. And I also figured I could create a thread where other people could share their experiences.

First off, there are a surprising number of real estate software platforms out there. 

There are a lot of platforms in part because there are a lot of types of customers. Here are a few potential types:

* House hackers trying to figure out how to do accounting (I fall into this category, as I live in one unit of a 2-unit property)

* Real estate agents who need accounting software, or transaction management software, or marketing software (I also fall into this category)

* Landlords who self-manage and want something to help them with marketing, tenant management, accepting rents, etc., and also need bookkeeping/accounting software. (I also fall into this group)

* Landlords who have a property manager where most of the accounting and all of the tenant management is done by the PM, but they still need some general accounting software to reconcile things like capital projects, mortgage payments, etc. (yes, this also describes me)

* Investors who want to analyze prospective deals, quickly calculate mortgage payments and other expenses, etc. (I think almost everyone on the forums here falls into this group, including me)

* Property managers who need to manage many units for many landlords. I'm not in this group and don't want to be, and I won't be doing a deep dive into this kind of software.

* and then of course all the software that is geared at more specialized real estate professionals, most of which I won't be looking at here. 

I fall into 5 of the categories I described above, which is probably a bit more than most people. But it's not unusual at all for someone to fit in 2-3 of these. Lots of people invest and house hack, or have a related side business like being an agent, or have a mix of self-managed properties and properties that are professionally managed. And finding just the right software bundle to help in your unique circumstances can be challenging.

With so many types of customers, there are a lot of software vendors out there trying to help them (or make a buck off of them). It can be hard to lump them all together, but here are some of the general buckets I have seen, and companies that fit into them. This list is by no means exhaustive, and you're welcome to add companies I missed or add your experiences in the comments. Following this list, I'll give my reviews of a few of the platforms I've tried (as separate comments added over the coming days).

* General accounting platforms: This includes Quickbooks/Quickbooks Online (the 800 pound gorilla), and competitors like Wave, Zoho Books, etc. These are generalized accounting packages that while powerful, are also confusing and rarely offer specific tools that are helpful to real estate investors. 

* Landlord/real estate specific accounting platforms: This includes companies like REI Hub, Rentastic, and RentalHero

* Platforms for landlords who self-manage: This is a little hard to pin down, but I would say it includes all the myriad platforms that offer help marketing a property, signing basic leases, communicating with tenants, accepting rent via ACH, basic document storgage, etc. I'm including things like RentRedi (tied to Bigger Pockets), the old Cozy.co (now part of apartments.com), TurboTenant, Innago, Lease Protector, Zillow Rental Manager, etc., in this group. Several of these are now partnering with REI Hub to offer accounting as an add-on service.

* Tools for investors who want to evaluate deals: Here you have probably the most crowded sector of the market. Literally dozens of companies are vying for your business here, everything from the Bigger Pockets deal analyzer to Roofstock spreadsheets to mortgagecalculator.org's surprisingly robust tools to DealCheck to ... well, there are just too many to list. I won't do a deep dive here, but I included it because some of the other tools I'm looking at like Rentastic offer a deal calculator as part of their bundle. Personally, I am fine keeping my deal analyzer separate from the management of the properties I already own, but I suppose there is some value to one-stop-shopping.

* Platforms that try to be all things to all people: This category is mostly Stessa and Baselane, both of which offer landlord accounting, self-management tools, as well as high interest cash management accounts. I would also put Avail.co and Rentec Direct in here since they do everything except for the high interest cash management account management.

* Tools for Real Estate agents that overlap in some of the landlord areas: I include here things like RealtyZam (parent company of RentalHero), Dotloop (an agent-only form-filling and signing tool that offers industry-specific services to help with basic tenant management like lease signing and secure document management), and Homes.com. 

* General form fillers and document signing/management platforms with a real estate vertical market. This includes the frighteningly long list of platforms that want you to give them a monthly fee to help you fill, sign, and manage PDFs. Docusign, Adobe, Zoho, Jotform, HelloSign, PandaDoc, and (so, so many) others. 

* Tools for professional property managers: This includes Appfolio, Propertyware, Buildium, and quite a few others. As I am not a professional property manager and don't want to be one, I won't spend much time on these. But I have been on the client side of these 3 and can make some general comments.

What a mess. 

With so many types of customers, and with customers routinely falling into more than one group, and so many companies marketing themselves to real estate investors and landlords, it's hard to find just the right mix of software.

Here's where I stand now:

$970/year to Quickbooks Online, a platform I detest, to do a mediocre job managing my books. 

$400/year to Dotloop, a platform that hasn't seen a significant UI improvement in years, to help manage my real estate agent transactions

Logins with 7 accounts across 4 banks (2 of which are also lenders), 2 additional lenders, 2 major credit card issuers, and a property management company using appfolio, and no centralized place to manage them all. 

Tenants paying rent by Venmo every month, which creates additional work to keep track of it all. 

More money than I care to say out loud to a CPA who takes the piles and piles of reports and documents I generate from all this, plus my W2 and my wife's W2, and turns it into something that the IRS will accept. I'm sure he'd be happier if I could consolidate this quite a bit, and it might save me some money if I can save him some time. 

In my attempt to simplify things, I have tried a lot of tools: Quickbooks Online, REI Hub, Stessa, Baselane, Wave, Docusign, Jotform, Dotloop, Homes.com, Cozy.co (now apartments.com), plus client-side experiences with property managers using Appfolio, Buildium, and Propertyware. I'm sure I've forgotten a few.

What I found out:

From the perspective of a real estate agent who needs to track expenses, a small-time landlord with 2 self-managed units, a house hacker, a landlord with 4 units under professional management, and an investor who analyzes deals, plus a guy who occasionally is lucky enough to have a little cash to put aside and wants the best return possible while it sits in the bank, is there one tool that will rule them all? Read on below as I review (as separate comments to this thread over the next several days) the tools I've tried and give my honest opinion on what worked, what didn't, and why. And feel free to chime in with your own experiences and tools or categories of tools I might have missed. 

9Reply
350 views

Most Popular Reply

John McDonald
Member since 2023 · 158 posts · 96 votes
2y

Hi @Jason Turgeon. It's clear that you've spent a LOT of time reviewing software. I think this post will be helpful for newbies coming into the space, but also for vendors looking for unbiased feedback and shortcomings in their products. 

Thank you for taking the time to review and post your thoughts. 

Cheers!

2Reply
See this reply in the discussion

36 Replies

Jump to latestLatest
  • Jason Turgeon
    OP
    Realtor · Boston, MA · Member since 2019 · 244 posts · 275 votes
    2y

    Quickbooks Online Review (with notes about Wave and Zoho Books):

    tl;dr: even though it's widely used by real estate professionals, it's not great for us. It's also expensive, locks you in, difficult to use, and the support is very poor. It is good at receipt handling, though.

    Longer version:

    When most Americans first need an accounting software package, the one they will probably turn to is some version of Quicken or Quickbooks. The accounting giant dominates the industry, and in certain applications can be very good at what it does. If you are running a retail business, have employees and contractors, do payroll, track inventory, etc., etc., it seems to be a fine tool.

    But if you are a real estate investor with a few properties to track, it's really painful. I started using Quickbooks online several years ago when I found myself with 2 schedule C businesses to track (my real estate agent gig and a very successful year as a freelance artist) plus an LLC to manage rentals, my owner-occupied duplex, and another property not in the LLC. I tried a variety of options but reluctantly ended up with Quickbooks. And for years, I've regretted it.

    While Quickbooks is great at the schedule C stuff and using it made my accountants happy, my list of grievances is long. First, it's abysmal at tracking mortgages. It forces users to manually split mortgage payments into various components every month, has a painful process to start new mortgages and close out existing ones, and generally has a miserable process for handling everything around loans and amortization. 

    Second, it has continual sync issues with my various banks, so I spend many long and tedious hours reconciling my statements looking for missing transactions. My account balances literally never match what Quickbooks has in its register, so every time I fire it up I have to decide if I want to spend a few hours doing bookkeeping or just ignore it and wait. Usually I wait, and every few months I sacrifice a weekend day to the bookkeeping gods. There is nothing at all quick about keeping books with quickbooks. 

    Third, receipt matching is also problematic at best. And there is no function at all to import transactions from my property management companies, so I need to keep a separate set of books for things I pay and then have my accountant manually reconcile my books with the property management statements at tax time.

    Fourth, it's incredibly complicated and hard to learn, but the customer support is very limited and rarely helpful. Pretty much every time I use it, I end up with one tab with quickbooks and 4 or 5 tabs of help articles and google searches and quickbooks forums threads trying to figure out how to do things that seem pretty standard and should be easy, like booking a credit card refund.

    Fifth, once you start using it you'll find they make it exceedingly difficult to leave. There's no way to export all your data out of Quickbooks online if you want to stop paying. You can download spreadsheets and run PDF reports, but receipts and search functions and the rules that you used to assign transactions are all gone. You get one year of read-only access after you cancel your account. But since the IRS can look back up to 7 years for an audit, that's not really helpful, and the IRS is also rumored to not be satisfied with spreadsheet downloads. As I am contemplating leaving Quickbooks, it seems that the best strategy for me is to pay them one month a year for the next 7 years so that I can keep my data available in the event of an audit. It's borderline extortion.

    Finally, it's shockingly expensive. Because I needed to track expenses in various ways (across both properties and two different schedule C incomes), I had to use what Quickbooks calls "properties," "classes," and "projects," and using all of these bumped me into the highest and most expensive tier, currently $970/year with the annual payment discount. But even the lowest tier is much more expensive than most of the other options above. 

    As much as I am looking forward to getting away from Quickbooks, there are a few pros worth mentioning. First, the UI is pretty good on both web and app versions. The receipt handling process is head and shoulders above everyone else, with OCR that pulls data out of the receipts and pre-populates your transaction, the ability to send in receipts by email, and the ability to snap (or email) receipts now and book them later, so you don't have to stop and enter a whole transaction at the gas pump or in line at the hardware store. And finally, Quickbooks isn't going anywhere, so there are no worries about it going out of business or getting sold or merged and having the product go downhill.

    A quick note about Wave, Zoho, and other Quickbooks competitors. They all have various pros and cons and I tried a couple of them briefly several years ago. But they all suffer from the same over-arching problem that Quickbooks has, which is that they aren't tailored for our business and can't handle some of the unique bookkeeping aspects we have like needing to split mortgage payments and import transactions from a property manager. 

    1Reply
  • Jason Turgeon
    OP
    Realtor · Boston, MA · Member since 2019 · 244 posts · 275 votes
    2y

    Stessa Review:

    tl;dr: Stessa offers incredible potential but doesn't execute on it. I really wanted to use it but was forced to seek another platform due to software bugs, banking challenges, lack of support for schedule C businesses, and spotty customer support. Unfortunately, I can't recommend it to anyone.

    Longer review:

    Stessa is heavily advertised here on BP. I tried it a few years ago and thought it had potential, but it wasn't quite mature enough to handle my needs so I went back to Quickbooks.

    But earlier this year, they hit me with a very tempting offer: 5.06% interest on any cash I held in their cash management accounts, operated through Blue Ridge National Bank and FDIC insured, as long as I paid them $192/year for the pro version. At 5% interest, it only takes a few thousand dollars in the bank to cover the cost, and if I could free myself from QBO I would be saving hundreds of dollars a year. And their idea of unlimited free "virtual" accounts means I could finally have a unique bank account for each property, plus easily manage security deposits in their own dedicated accounts. And even better, transactions made with their cash management account would instantly sync with my books, so I wouldn't have the constant reconciliation errors I get with QBO.

    Plus, the accounting system seemed easier, I would be able to switch my self-managed tenants away from Venmo to ACH payments, I could simplify my life by leaving apartments.com for tenant screening and marketing...it seemed too good to be true. I took the plunge and handed over my credit card and prepared to start moving funds over to their cash management accounts.

    Right away, I ran into problems.

    First, the don't use Plaid, the industry standard bank account importing vendor, to sync bank accounts for transactions (somewhat confusingly, they do use plaid to verify ACH transactions, but you have to go through a different platform to get there). So of the 4 separate banks I am currently using, 2 would not sync at all (one gave an error, the other wasn't even available as an option). If I was just using their cash management accounts and abandoned my other accounts, this wouldn't matter. So I attempted to press on, figuring I would manually import transactions. But this alone is a major flaw in their system.

    Next, I ran into immediate issues with the cash management accounts, which were the whole reason I came over to Stessa in the first place. Getting cash in is bizarrely difficult. They have very low limits (by real estate investment standards) for check deposits with the app, and the app is the only way to deposit. They also cap ACH transfers in at $5000/month, so if you're in a high-rent market you might not even be able to accept all your rents from a multi-family property through their system. And it took a full week for the check I deposited to clear, and even longer for the ACH payment I transferred from one of my accounts to show up. They did not, at the time of my trial, offer any check-writing capabilities, so paying bills is nigh on impossible unless you find a vendor that will take a virtual debit card or ACH payments. Good luck paying Joe the Plumber that way. Their ACH limits are comically low, at $500/day and $4000/month. So you'd better hope that you don't need to replace a roof or HVAC system, because you can't pay with a check and can't make an ACH payment over $500. You CAN wire money out for $5, but only after contacting their customer support email. More on that below.

    Given the immediate headaches I ran into with the cash management, I decided to close my accounts and get my money back out. This turned out to be even harder than getting the money in. Those low ACH limits, lack of check-writing ability, etc., meant that my money was trapped there unless I paid to wire the money back out to my original bank. Their outbound wire fees are only $5, but my regular bank charges $30 for an incoming wire and I had two separate accounts to manage so the total fees to get my money out were going to be $70. That's unconscionable.

    I will note that last night, after I was able to plead my case with customer service via chat and get most (but not all, yet) of my money out via increased ACH limits, they sent out an email saying that they are breaking up with Blue Ridge bank and moving to a new banking partner that will offer checks and match the interest rate. So clearly I'm not the only one who was frustrated. Maybe in a few months things will improve, but for right now I can't recommend anyone use the cash management services at Stessa.

    On to customer service: they offer it via a chatbot or an email address only. Maybe that's fine for accounting software, but it's not great for a bank, especially when you have thousands of dollars sitting in limbo for over a week. Repeated emails to their support email went unanswered. After you deal with the chatbot you can get to a real agent via chat, but replies can take up to 24 hours. In my week of trying to get Stessa working, I dealt with 3 separate agents. Only one of them (shout out to Christopher!) was helpful, and even with him it took several days to get my issues resolved. But he did at least refund me the fee for my pro account, bump up my ACH withdrawal limits high enough that I could get my money out over a few days instead of a few months, and follow up with me. Still, you shouldn't have to cross your fingers that you get the good agent on chat when you need help with banking.

    As far as the actual accounting services, there are more problems. I was willing to overlook them for access to the 5% cash management income, but they're significant. First, this is not a true double-entry accounting platform and that causes issues that are above my pay grade to explain. Let's just say your accountant will probably scowl at you, or worse. Second, there's no way to customize the accounting categories (called the chart of accounts in most accounting software), so you can't wedge in a schedule C side business. And although they have a workaround for owner-occupied properties (aka "house hacks"), it's fairly clumsy. Plus, they don't offer an automatic split for mortgage payments based on an amortization schedule. So like Quickbooks, you have to manually enter details about each of your mortages every month. 

    One last issue/bug is the appfolio integration. My property manager uses Appfolio, so this was a selling point for me. But like so many other things with Stessa, it doesn't work. I was able to connect, and Stessa imported my leases. But even after almost two weeks, every time I look at the connections page it still just has the spinning wheel and a message to check back later. Other users report the same issue on their forums. 

    Finally, it's worth noting that Stessa also makes money by selling you services like landlord insurance. Some people are OK with that, but I don't love that they have so much financial information about me and are selling it to third parties. 

    1Reply
  • Jason Turgeon
    OP
    Realtor · Boston, MA · Member since 2019 · 244 posts · 275 votes
    2y

    Baselane mini-review:

    tl;dr Baselane is very, very similar to Stessa. I did a small test drive, not enough for a full review. Important note: this is a completely free service. In software, if the service is free, then you are the product, not the client. They are selling your information (sensitive financial info!), and possibly your tenants' info, to 3rd parties that are aggressively marketed to you. Make sure you understand the implications of this.

    Slightly longer review:

    I didn't get all the way into Baselane. They are very similar to Stessa in that they offer an all-in-one package including a high-yield cash management account and ACH payments from your tenants. They even use the same bank (Blue Ridge Bank) for their cash management accounts, although as of last night Stessa is moving away from Blue Ridge. Similar to Stessa, they have low limits for cash in and out and other related problems, so I while I did a minor test of setting up a couple of units and importing one bank account, I ultimately decided not to go further.

    Their initial setup is quite a bit different from Stessa. They try to get you set up with a cash management account from the very beginning, instead of as an add-on, and push their tenant management at you. The bookkeeping is almost an afterthought. They are more transparent than Stessa about their banking limits before you sign up, and having learned from my mishaps with Stessa I took a good hard look at those limits and decided to bounce. Their cash management is offering a lower yield than Stessa (currently 4.66% vs 5.06%), but they don't charge a monthly fee (stessa is $20/month or $192/year) so depending on how much cash you manage it can be a bit of a wash.

    Baselane uses Plaid to connect to external accounts, so I was able to connect the one problematic account I tried that wouldn't connect with Stessa's service. I didn't try the second one but it should also work. Using Plaid for everything is a big point in their favor.

    Unlike Stessa, Baselane doesn't have any feature that I could find to bring in transactions from an outside property manager. That limits this to landlords who are entirely self-managed. 

    Like Stessa and QBO, Baselane doesn't take care of splitting properly amortized mortgage and escrow payments, so that's still a manual process. I also found that there were bugs in the property setup page when I tried to enter my mortgage information. I eventually got it working, but it took me 5 or 6 tries and did not inspire me to add additional properties.

    Importantly, Baselane doesn't charge a fee. It makes all of its money by selling you products, and presumably by selling data about you. That makes me very nervous. It's also the approach Stessa originally took, but when it didn't produce enough revenue Stessa added a monthly fee and caught a lot of users off guard.

    I didn't get far enough into the weeds to try out their customer service, but like Stessa it is mostly based on email and chat.

    Overall, Baselane is a lot like Stessa in its pros and cons. You might want to consider it but it wasn't for me.

    0Reply
  • Sean O'KeefePro Member
    CPA | Accepting new clients | 50 States · Member since 2022 · 1k+ posts · 870 votes
    2y

    @Jason Turgeon this is great. 
    Could you also include digb.com in your review? 

    Curious to see how you think it stacks up against the competition. Also would love the feedback :) 

    [email protected]628-241-0888
    0Reply
  • Jason Turgeon
    OP
    Realtor · Boston, MA · Member since 2019 · 244 posts · 275 votes
    2y

    @Sean O'Keefe I hadn't heard of it before. I'll take a look, but am not sure I'll go all the way through the process of trying it out. Interesting concept, for sure.

    0Reply
  • Sean O'KeefePro Member
    CPA | Accepting new clients | 50 States · Member since 2022 · 1k+ posts · 870 votes
    2y
    Quote from @Jason Turgeon:

    @Sean O'Keefe I hadn't heard of it before. I'll take a look, but am not sure I'll go all the way through the process of trying it out. Interesting concept, for sure.


    Great, thanks. I thought the purpose of this thread was to evaluate real estate software...? You've looked at Quickboos, Stessa, but not Digb? Who's next on the list? What's the criteria for selecting? 

    [email protected]628-241-0888
    0Reply
  • Jason Turgeon
    OP
    Realtor · Boston, MA · Member since 2019 · 244 posts · 275 votes
    2y

    @Sean O'Keefe It's just my reviews of products I have actually tried out, with some discussion of products I haven't tried that are similar. I'm just a regular investor wandering around in the wilderness trying to find a solution that works for my specific needs, and I'm reporting out what I'm seeing. I'm not monetizing this in any way, and I only have a limited amount of time I can devote to this project, so I won't be able to review every one of the dozens of different products on the market.

    What's next is probably a review of REI Hub, which is likely to be the product I settle on based on my initial experiences with them. From a quick look at your feature chart it looks like this would be analogous to your self-service package at $19/month. I can certainly see the value in your ability to connect people to real estate CPAs and could have used that service a few years ago, but I now have someone I have been working with for several years and am very happy with the advice and service I am getting from them.

    After I do that review I may do some sort of brief feature reviews of some of the other platforms and will be happy to do something like that for yours but it's not likely to be as in depth as the ones I have done so far.

    I'm hopeful that other people will jump in to share their experiences with some of these platforms so we can crowdsource more in-depth reviews and get a broader range of perspectives. And people in your position (I know there are several RE software platform CEOs/Founders on these forums) are welcome to come in and discuss their products, as long as they disclose their affiliations.

    1Reply
  • Sean O'KeefePro Member
    CPA | Accepting new clients | 50 States · Member since 2022 · 1k+ posts · 870 votes
    2y
    Quote from @Jason Turgeon:

    @Sean O'Keefe It's just my reviews of products I have actually tried out, with some discussion of products I haven't tried that are similar. I'm just a regular investor wandering around in the wilderness trying to find a solution that works for my specific needs, and I'm reporting out what I'm seeing. I'm not monetizing this in any way, and I only have a limited amount of time I can devote to this project, so I won't be able to review every one of the dozens of different products on the market.

    What's next is probably a review of REI Hub, which is likely to be the product I settle on based on my initial experiences with them. From a quick look at your feature chart it looks like this would be analogous to your self-service package at $19/month. I can certainly see the value in your ability to connect people to real estate CPAs and could have used that service a few years ago, but I now have someone I have been working with for several years and am very happy with the advice and service I am getting from them.

    After I do that review I may do some sort of brief feature reviews of some of the other platforms and will be happy to do something like that for yours but it's not likely to be as in depth as the ones I have done so far.

    I'm hopeful that other people will jump in to share their experiences with some of these platforms so we can crowdsource more in-depth reviews and get a broader range of perspectives. And people in your position (I know there are several RE software platform CEOs/Founders on these forums) are welcome to come in and discuss their products, as long as they disclose their affiliations.


     This is great! Thanks for sharing. 

    [email protected]628-241-0888
    0Reply
  • Jason Turgeon
    OP
    Realtor · Boston, MA · Member since 2019 · 244 posts · 275 votes
    2y

    @Sean O'Keefe Just a heads up that I tried to sign up for your service through the website over a month ago and never got any contact back. I've settled on my software package so I'm just going to do a few more reviews of the products I tried out and call it a day. I will say for the benefit of public discussion that your product looks compelling but the inability to just sign up for a free trial without filling out a form and waiting for a callback really puts you at a disadvantage to almost every competitor. Might be something to consider changing.

    3Reply
  • Jason Turgeon
    OP
    Realtor · Boston, MA · Member since 2019 · 244 posts · 275 votes
    2y

    Continuing the software roundup after a couple of months of staring at all these tabs in my browser.

    One of those tabs was Avail.Co, which is a product offered by Realtor.com. I did not bother trying it out as I have found that most of the products Realtor.com offers are pretty bare bones and don't offer enough customization for my needs, but it is worth listing here as an option. 

    The product offers two tiers, free and "plus." The plus tier is $7/property/month, which makes it among the cheapest if you only have a couple of units but quickly makes it among the most expensive if you have more than a handful. For this reason alone, I would suggest you skip it unless you really don't intend to grow beyond 3-4 doors. Once you get to 5-6 properties it is in the price range of some much more sophisticated and scalable packages that can do everything it does and more. 

    But if you just want a very simple solution, don't intend to grow a lot, and don't need the things the plus package offers, the free version might be worth checking out. 

    https://www.avail.co/

    0Reply
  • John McDonald
    Member since 2023 · 158 posts · 96 votes
    2y

    Hi @Jason Turgeon. It's clear that you've spent a LOT of time reviewing software. I think this post will be helpful for newbies coming into the space, but also for vendors looking for unbiased feedback and shortcomings in their products. 

    Thank you for taking the time to review and post your thoughts. 

    Cheers!

    2Reply
  • Jason Turgeon
    OP
    Realtor · Boston, MA · Member since 2019 · 244 posts · 275 votes
    2y

    Next up in my roundup are RentalHero and RealtyZam, two more products that I looked at but did not sign up for. These are both offered by the same company.

    RealtyZam is accounting software built for real estate agents. If you're an agent, it offers a decent looking feature set and very attractive pricing. Free until you have booked either 2 transactions or $3000 of income, then $138.56/year (roughly 2 months free vs monthly) or $14/month. It does all the usual accounting stuff, like data imports, receipt imaging, etc. 

    The same company, having noticed that lots of its clients are also landlords, offers a companion piece of software called RentalHero. The product looks similar, but is tailored to landlords and property management expenses. Pricing is also similar, but is only offered at the $129/year tier for unlimited units. It is only for accounting, although it does offer a messaging feature for tenants. If you're just looking for real estate property accounting software, this is definitely one that should be on your list to check out.

    So why didn't I do a full trial of these? Because I wanted one system to keep track of all my business expenses, including my house hack, my properties under management, my self-managed property, and my realtor income. This pair of products would require two separate systems. I don't want to be switching back and forth. If they were to merge them into a single product, I would have taken a very hard look at it, as the pricing is great and the products look pretty well designed. But since there ARE other comparably priced solutions that didn't make me maintain two separate accounts and logins, I went with one of those.

    0Reply
  • Jason Turgeon
    OP
    Realtor · Boston, MA · Member since 2019 · 244 posts · 275 votes
    2y

    For the sake of completeness, I will mention that there is a product called Apartmentify on the market. It has a very bare bones web page and the product itself is only available as an app for either Android or Apple devices. There is no charge.

    I cannot fathom using only an app to do all my accounting. Some things just require a full keyboard and screen. And I am also highly suspicious of all products that are completely free. As the saying goes, with free products you're not the customer, you're the product. 

    But hey, it exists and maybe someone out there wants to try it out and post a review to this thread. https://www.apartmentify.com/

    0Reply
  • Jason Turgeon
    OP
    Realtor · Boston, MA · Member since 2019 · 244 posts · 275 votes
    2y

    Next up on the list of products I looked at but didn't sign up for is RentBlazr. https://rentblazr.com/

    This is another product that focuses solely on rental accounting. It's not clear from the website what they do for data imports from banks. Other than that, they do all the same stuff most of the competition in this space does. One nice feature is that they have a receipt scanner that extracts info from the receipts, not just a static photo for compliance purposes. Quickbooks also has this and it can be a real time saver, although my receipts are often so crumpled and barely legible that the OCR software can't cope.

    I didn't try this because it appears to be quite a new product, and I want something both mature and that will be around for a while. They offer a free tier for up to 10 properties. If you have more than that, you have to upgrade...but they just say "coming soon" for details on how much that upgrade will cost. I'd say this is still in beta.

    To be brutally honest, it's hard to see how a product like this will be able to compete with so many other well-established products offering nearly identical services out there. There's nothing wrong with it on the surface, but other than the free pricing for small landlords there's nothing to compel you to use it. And since it can't stay without revenue forever, I'd be hesitant to sign up just because it's free for me right now. Either it will turn into a data-mining operation or have to start charging.

    0Reply
  • Jason Turgeon
    OP
    Realtor · Boston, MA · Member since 2019 · 244 posts · 275 votes
    2y

    Doorloop is next on the list of products I looked at but did not try out. https://www.doorloop.com/

    Doorloop seems to be quite mature and full featured. It does property management, accepts payments, imports bank feeds and does accounting, automates listings, etc., etc. Beyond just being targeted at residential landlords, they also market Doorloop to HOAs, student rentals, self-storage, commercial property management, and other groups that aren't as well served by the competition. It has all the usual bells and whistles and seems like it would work well. It also has some more sophisticated things that most others don't, like Zapier integration. If you're running a big shop and want to go all-in on automation and creating systems, this might be a selling point for you.

    So why didn't I try it out?

    For one thing, it is very expensive. The cheapest tier is $49/month, billed yearly. For smaller operators like me, that doesn't make sense. If you're running a larger portfolio, it might make sense. For another, they offer quickbooks integration as a major selling point. Since my whole reason for this deep dive into real estate accounting software was to get AWAY from quickbooks, that raises some red flags for me about the way the product handles accounting. But I can see that there are probably some larger operations out there that are married to quickbooks and this could help them. It's just not something I need or want to pay for.

    0Reply
  • Jason Turgeon
    OP
    Realtor · Boston, MA · Member since 2019 · 244 posts · 275 votes
    2y

    For our friends managing properties in the UK, I'll point out Apartemo: https://apartemo.com

    Since I am not in the UK, I didn't spend any time looking at it, but maybe this will help someone on that side of the pond.

    1Reply
  • Jason Turgeon
    OP
    Realtor · Boston, MA · Member since 2019 · 244 posts · 275 votes
    2y

    Next up is a quick review of TenantCloud (https://www.tenantcloud.com/). I got pretty excited about this one as it seemed to have most of the features I wanted, at a decent price point, and seems to be fairly robust and well-supported. 

    But I was stopped dead in my tracks once I signed in. Their accounting feature, which is the primary reason I was coming to it, does not have any ability to import transactions from connected bank accounts via Plaid or other sources. To put it another way, you have to manually enter every transaction. This is, as far as I know, the only one of the many, many real estate accounting software packages I've tried that is this far behind in tech integration. It took me so much by surprise that I thought I was doing something wrong and I spent a bunch of time digging around in support pages and toggling my adblocker settings. But no, it's just not something they offer. 

    So while TenantCloud has a lot of other seemingly good features and a decent price point, there was not sense in trying any of that other stuff out. I simply can't recommend anyone use this for real estate accounting when there are so many products out there that do it better and faster. 

    0Reply
  • Jason Turgeon
    OP
    Realtor · Boston, MA · Member since 2019 · 244 posts · 275 votes
    2y

    Besides my hatred of quickbooks, another of my motivations for my ill-fated and short-lived switch to Stessa was to get access to their high-interest checking accounts. I figured I could make a few thousand dollars a year in interest and simplify my accounting. Sadly, it didn't work out, but there are some other products out there offering a similar idea.

    One of them is a relatively new product called Tellus (https://www.tellusapp.com/). The product, as you can tell from the URL, is an app-only property management/cash management/lending app. It was intriguing enough for me to try out, but definitely not right for me to keep using.

    Tellus is free, and offers eye-popping returns on your cash. But be careful! They do offer FDIC insured accounts, but they only offer the advertised rates on the first $2500 of your money with them. This sort of ruins the appeal if you have more funds you want to safely earn interest on.

    Fear not! They also have a "boost" account, where they promise rates of at least 6% and as high as 8%. They really, really, really want you to put money in this boost account. This is the place where they make their money. I have more than one property that isn't earning me 8%, so this seems pretty attractive on the surface. But of course, there is no free lunch. The "boost" account is NOT FDIC insured. They are taking your money and using it to buy real estate with. It's "secured by balance sheet," which if you dig far enough into the questions leads to this statement: "Tellus earns its money by providing wholesale business-purpose residential real estate loans. Tellus wholesale business-purpose residential real estate loans are typically 6-18 month loans. We hold these wholesale business-purpose residential real estate loans on our balance sheet, and they generate a predictable stream of income for us. Our property management ecosystem provides both a distribution pipeline for these wholesale business-purpose residential real estate loans and proprietary data that help us predict cash flow and home values so we can better manage the risk of our loan portfolio."

    This being a real estate investment website, you might be totally OK with lending some Bay Area startup your cash and letting them make whatever kind of loan they want with it. But I am not. If I am going to make non-FDIC insured investments, I want a whole lot more info about the types of investments and the people making those investments than Tellus gives out. But this is a personal choice, and I'm not going to tell you not to try it out. Just go in with your eyes wide open.

    They claim the money in boost accounts is "100% liquid" and pays interest daily, which strikes me as vaguely within the realm of a Ponzi scheme. There's no way you can be 100% liquid and ALSO be invested in 6-18 wholesale business-purpose residential real estate loans. It's simply not possible. Which means that the possibility of a bank run or other catastrophe is there, and there's no FDIC to bail you out, dear investor. Again, go in with your eyes wide open.

    Without the carrot of earning lots of money on my free cash to entice me, the property management aspects of the app were just OK. It's not that it's poorly done. It's that I really don't want to manage my properties, and especially to do all my accounting, via an app. With no desktop version, it wasn't good enough to keep me on as a user. But I believe that, on paper, this app does actually do most of the stuff I said I wanted in a property management product.

    All that said, if you are comfortable using an app for everything, and/or if you have a pot of money you wouldn't mind rolling the dice on to earn 6-8% interest, by all means give it a shot. I don't think this is a bad product, necessarily. It's just not for me. 

    0Reply
  • Paul Raymond WoodBusiness Member
    Realtor · Northwest Wisconsin · Member since 2024 · 9 posts · 1 vote
    2y
    Quote from @Jason Turgeon:

    @Sean O'Keefe It's just my reviews of products I have actually tried out, with some discussion of products I haven't tried that are similar. I'm just a regular investor wandering around in the wilderness trying to find a solution that works for my specific needs, and I'm reporting out what I'm seeing. I'm not monetizing this in any way, and I only have a limited amount of time I can devote to this project, so I won't be able to review every one of the dozens of different products on the market.

    What's next is probably a review of REI Hub, which is likely to be the product I settle on based on my initial experiences with them. From a quick look at your feature chart it looks like this would be analogous to your self-service package at $19/month. I can certainly see the value in your ability to connect people to real estate CPAs and could have used that service a few years ago, but I now have someone I have been working with for several years and am very happy with the advice and service I am getting from them.

    After I do that review I may do some sort of brief feature reviews of some of the other platforms and will be happy to do something like that for yours but it's not likely to be as in depth as the ones I have done so far.

    I'm hopeful that other people will jump in to share their experiences with some of these platforms so we can crowdsource more in-depth reviews and get a broader range of perspectives. And people in your position (I know there are several RE software platform CEOs/Founders on these forums) are welcome to come in and discuss their products, as long as they disclose their affiliations.


    Did you end up settling on REI Hub and if so what has been your experience so far? I read most of this thread, but didn't see your review on this. Looking to get something set up before my tax guy yells at me next year lol. In particular, I'm looking for a solution(s) for the landlord with property manager scenario you described above.

    REAL Broker LLC - 3 Rivers Team 512 Reviews
    WebsiteView Page
    0Reply
  • Jason Turgeon
    OP
    Realtor · Boston, MA · Member since 2019 · 244 posts · 275 votes
    2y

    @Paul Raymond Wood yes, for now I have settled on REIHub. It's generally very good, with some areas where they could improve. I've been meaning to come back around and finish off these reviews, but now it's tax season so I have been spending my limited free time actually doing bookkeeping. 

    For the landlord with property manager scenario, it works pretty well but only imports transactions from appfolio's monthly PDF. It happens that my PM uses appfolio so this works for me, but if your PM is on any of the many other platforms you'd have to figure out how to do manual downloads and uploads of your transactions, which is a bit of a drawback. But I haven't found any other accounting software that offers imports from other platforms, so it's sort of a moot point. 

    I'd say to give it a shot and see if you like it. I will say that their customer service is exceptional, so if you are trying it out and find something confusing, just send them a note and they'll get right back to you. 

    0Reply
  • Jason Turgeon
    OP
    Realtor · Boston, MA · Member since 2019 · 244 posts · 275 votes
    2y

    It's been a while since I added anything to this overly-long roundup. I'm still trying to clear out a few tabs I've now had open for 6 months and wanted to complete this project.

    One of those open tabs has been TurboTenant (https://www.turbotenant.com/). I didn't try it out, but at first glance it seems pretty good. It has a free-forever tier, which is nice. Then it has two equally priced tiers at about $100/year, each of which offers a few features. Or get all the features rolled into one for $129/year, with no cap on the number of units. One feature that seems to be missing is any kind of maintenance request/ticket tracking.

    Unfortunately, these prices don't include full accounting. So while you can do all the property management stuff, including marketing, screening, leasing and esignatures, and accepting ACH payments with no fees to your tenants (in the paid versions), accounting is a pay-per-unit add-on. They use the excellent app REIHub for accounting, which is great, but the pricing is abysmal. It's way cheaper to pay REIHub directly and not have it integrated. But then you are managing two different systems.

    As it stands, it's hard to recommend TurboTenant, since the pricing with the accounting features gets so steep, so fast, and you also don't get the property management features of competitors. For the price, you can probably do better. If they can get the price including accounting down and add more features, that might change in the future.

    1Reply
  • Jason Turgeon
    OP
    Realtor · Boston, MA · Member since 2019 · 244 posts · 275 votes
    2y

    Next up is LandlordStudio (https://www.landlordstudio.com/). This is another one I looked at but didn't try out.

    To be honest, this one nearly won me over, and probably deserves an honorable mention. There's a limited service free tier for up to 3 properties, and if your tenants pay by ACH they'll let you add more properties for free. Or if you want the full featured version, it starts out at $12/month for 3 properties and each additional one is $1/month. For people with fewer than a dozen doors, this isn't bad. As you get bigger, there might be better deals out there.

    This seems to have most of the commonly used features. Market the property, screen tenants, collect rent, handle maintenance requests, and do accounting. And on the accounting side, this is one of the only services that has a proper receipt-scanning feature that will pull out relevant details and properly fill them in on a new transaction, rather than have you sitting there at the gas pump manually entering data from the receipt with your thumbs. That's a really great feature and is one of the only things I miss from Quickbooks. It uses Plaid for bank account import, which is great. And it has a really robust knowledge base and FAQ.

    Unfortunately, it's missing some key features for me, and some features that might matter to others. It doesn't appear to offer any kind of leasing or e-signature options. That's not a big deal to me, but it will be to many people. More important, it doesn't offer the ability to break your properties down into portolios, so my LLC properties will be mixed in with my personally owned properties, and I don't have a way to create a separate portfolio for my real estate agent side hustle.

    To make matters worse, their accounting "by itself does not track assets, depreciation of specific assets, or generate a balance sheet. If you're looking for more advanced accounting functionality, please consider using our Xero accounting software integration." That's straight from their FAQs. Well, the last thing I want is to integrate with Xero or anything else. For me that's an immediate dealbreaker.

    Still, I can see how for some people out there this might not be a big deal, and the rest of the feature set is pretty robust. This might be the best available option for many people reading this thread.

    1Reply
  • Jason Turgeon
    OP
    Realtor · Boston, MA · Member since 2019 · 244 posts · 275 votes
    2y

    Next up is Renter Insight (https://www.renterinsight.com/). 

    This one is interesting. It has a ton of features at a great price. I suspect some people here will really like what it has to offer, and I don't want to sell it short. I liked what I saw enough that I signed up for the free trial. But unfortunately, it doesn't have what I need. 

    It offers a lot of the same services as others, but at a reasonable price. $25/month for 20 units, 33% off if you pay annually, and $1 month (monthly) or 75c/month (annually) for each unit over 20. It handles marketing, listing, screening, payments, maintenance requests, and tenant communications, and appears to do all that quite well. It also offers accounting and even mentions e-signatures. Could this be the holy grail I've been searching for? 

    Unfortunately, no. The biggest issue is that although it offers accounting, it has no bank account import at all. Nada, zero, zilch. So you'll have to manually enter everything. There's no receipt management, no depreciation of assets, not even any specific reports for taxes. It's a real shame, because this otherwise looks great. 

    Besides the lack of imports, it doesn't seem to handle portfolios well. It does allow me to tag different owners (my LLC vs properties in my own name, for instance), but I couldn't figure out how to run reports specific to each, nor could I figure out how I might use this to track my realtor side-hustle, deal with my owner-occupied duplex, etc.

    But in spite of the sadness around the accounting, there's something about this package that I really liked. Maybe it's that it is clearly a mature product. Maybe it's the more friendly pricing than many of the competitors. I canceled my free trial, but if your needs are different than mine, you might want to consider giving it a shot. Hopefully they will improve their accounting. With proper bank account imports, portfolio level management, reporting, etc., this could be the one to beat. 

    0Reply
  • Jason Turgeon
    OP
    Realtor · Boston, MA · Member since 2019 · 244 posts · 275 votes
    2y

    When first started this series, the owner of the firm messaged me here on Bigger Pockets and asked if I'd do a review. I'm a little embarrassed that it took me this long, since he seems like a genuinely nice guy, and it's good to review products from Bigger Pockets members. Plus, the product itself is 17 years old, which is eons in the software field, so it's nice to not be using a startup.

    Unfortunately I signed up for the free trial and then didn't take notes, and now that I am getting around to the review the features are mostly shut off for me since I canceled several months ago to avoid paying. But I'll note that they use the same technology that QuickBooks uses for their bank account sync, so they probably have some of the same issues I had with my smaller banks and oddball credit union lenders. If you're using a bigger bank, then this is probably fine. But if you, like me, use local banks to get better terms, you might find yourself wishing you had a service that used Plaid for its bank account integration.

    Other than that, it looks like a pretty robust offering, but at a higher price point than many of us need. The basic package is $45/month for property owners, and another $10/month for property managers, each of which gets you 10 properties. After that, it's more or less $1/unit/month, except that they come in $10 increments. So this is definitely targeted at larger operators. But it's got a decent feature set if you're in that category, including all the usual property management stuff plus integrations with dropbox esignatures and form fillers, ACH payments to vendors, and a few other nice touches. If you have graduated from the smaller scale stuff and are ready to scale, I would definitely put this one on your list to check out. 

    I don't think this would work as well for people like me who are owner-occupants and want to track side businesses and have other property managers sending them receipts, but I could be wrong. But I also don't think I'm the target market for this, so it's not a knock on them.

    0Reply
  • Jason Turgeon
    OP
    Realtor · Boston, MA · Member since 2019 · 244 posts · 275 votes
    2y

    I'll do a brief mention here of a product called Innago (https://innago.com/). They have many of the same features as other products I've reviewed here, but there are two main flaws that would steer me away from recommending them or even trying them out.

    First, they are an entirely free service. If you've read this far, you know that I am highly skeptical of any free software. Not only are they planning to provide this service by selling you products, there's also the very real likelihood that they'll end up like Stessa and have to come around and start charging in the future when the original business plan doesn't work out.

    Second, they base their accounting around Quickbooks integration. Quickbooks is terrible at real estate accounting, that's why I started this whole series. Enough said.

    0Reply
Join the conversationCreate a free account to reply, vote on answers and follow this thread.
Log InJoin for Free