Best PM software for a small commercial portfolio (under 20 units) — nobody has answe

[Ryan Stomel]

I manage a small commercial portfolio — mix of retail, one industrial, and a couple of office suites. Under 20 units total, all NNN or modified gross leases. I've been on a spreadsheet + QuickBooks combo and it works until CAM reconciliation season, at which point it turns into a nightmare.

I've spent weeks looking at the usual options and the gap is pretty clear:

Yardi / MRI — massive overkill for my size, priced for institutional operators, and implementation alone is a multi-month project. Not a fit.

AppFolio — primarily residential. Their commercial module is an afterthought. CAM tracking is manual, lease structure flexibility is limited, and support confirms they focus on multifamily.

Buildium / DoorLoop / Rent Manager — Same issue. These are built for units-based residential PM. They can technically hold a commercial lease but they're not designed for NNN reimbursements, escalation clauses, or year-end reconciliation.

RealPage — Enterprise only, pricing not publicly available, minimum portfolio size requirements.

What I actually need:

- Clean rent roll with NNN/gross/modified gross lease structures

- CAM estimate tracking per tenant (budget vs. actual)

- Year-end reconciliation workflow

- Rent escalation reminders

- QuickBooks integration

- Maintenance tracking

- Not priced for a 500-unit institutional operator

Has anyone found something that actually fits this profile? We've been testing PigJet (pigjet.com) which was built specifically for this segment — small/mid CRE operators with commercial leases — and it's the closest fit we've seen. Curious if others have found alternatives or have experience with tools at this scale.

For what it’s worth I compared the main options here if useful: https://pigjet.com/blog/best-commercial-property-management-software-small-landlords

[Rachid Abadli]

Ryan, this is a real gap, and you're not imagining it. I'm on the residential side, but I've talked to enough small commercial operators to know that the sub-50-unit NNN space is genuinely underserved by software.

The core problem is that residential PM software thinks in terms of units and monthly rent, while commercial PM software assumes 500+ unit portfolios with dedicated accounting teams. If you're a 15-unit operator doing your own CAM reconciliation in Excel, neither world was built for you.

Nicholas's advice about workflow is the most important thing in this thread. Before you pick software, nail down:

1. Lease abstracts — Every lease summarized on a single page: base rent, escalation schedule, CAM pool, expense stops, and options. If you don't have these, no software will save you from reconciliation headaches.
2. Quarterly preliminary reconciliation — This is the move. If you're only reconciling annually, you're guaranteed a January nightmare. Quarterly check-ins—even rough ones—turn year-end into a confirmation exercise instead of a discovery process.
3. GL structure that maps to CAM pools — Most reconciliation pain comes from expenses that weren't categorized correctly throughout the year, not from the math itself.

On the software side, I don't have direct experience with PigJet, but the fact that it keeps coming up in these discussions says something. Yardi Breeze Premier at roughly $400/month is real money for a small portfolio, but if it saves you 20+ hours during reconciliation season, the math works.

One question: are your leases mostly standard NNN, or do you have a mix of modified gross leases? That changes the recommendation significantly because modified gross reconciliation is a very different animal.