For rentals including STR/MTR’s what tech tools are you using?

[Ify (Bobby) Anizoba]

Hey everyone 👋🏾

Curious to know, what tech tools, apps, or platforms are you currently using to manage your rental properties?

From accounting and rent collection to maintenance, tenant screening, or even deal analysis, there are so many tools out there now. I’d love to hear what’s working (or not working) for you.

Are you mostly in spreadsheets, or have you switched to a full rental management platform?

Let’s build a solid list for everyone to learn from.

Drop your go-to tech tools below! 🛠️📱💻

[David Orr]

I have a controversial opinion on QuickBooks for rental property owners.  In my opinion, QuickBooks is not a good way to track finances for rental properties. (Unless the property is in a partnership, in which case you actually need accounting software like QB, but even then, Wave is free and does everything you need.) For rental property owners, QuickBooks is difficult to learn, difficult to configure for rentals, and still not well suited for the task. Many property owners end up hiring a bookkeeper to deal with it when they could easily categorize their income and expenses themselves with software better suited for the task. 

There are rental management tools like Stessa, Baselane, Innago, and many others that include income/expense tracking that handles all the accounting tasks and reporting you really need for rentals. These tools are much easier to use than QB (even for those of us with QB expertise). Plus, they handle online rent collection (a necessity if you don't have a property manager!) with auto-pay options, automatic late fees, and reminders, lease signing, security deposit collection, etc. And they're cheap or free.

Stessa is a great option, it's very well designed.  But Baselane is my current personal favorite, because it does pretty much everything Stessa does, but doesn't require that you use a special bank account for rent collection like Stessa does.