Why did Bigger Pockets choose RentRedi?
I was excited that Bigger Pockets was partnering with what I thought would be a robust and powerful property management site for small landlords. You know one where you get the awesomeness of steessa.com and innago.com combined into one platform for free vice 2 free sites that you wish were 1 free site. I really liked the episode they put on for RentRedi. I was just really disappointed when I actually set up a few properties and tested it. If you guys have some "this software is awesome" I would really like to hear it.
That just is not the case for me when I used RentRedi, and here are my top 3 issues with their site.
1. You can upload your rental lease agreements and get them signed just like most free software out there, even zillow has this and they are on my "dont use this software for manangement list". But, you can not have editable PDFs that pull tenant, property and landlord information into the lease which is a must have if you have never had the option, that is 1 reason why I like Innago. If you have never had this option picture this. You have your lease and you have all the portions hilighet that you need to update for each tenant, Name, property address, rent ect... and instead of having to type that data in for every lease it just automatically pulls it from your property and tenant information that you have already put into the site. You verify it and send it to the new tenant to review and sign.
2. You don't have the full control over and can not customize your rental applications by specific questions you would like in your application, if you have an LLC there is no option to put a log, no options to make your lease questions required / not required ect. I like to have the option to customize the questions based on my property, some questions you would want to ask for say one state you may not want to ask in another state. Or say it is a personal property so I am renting it out in my own name vice one of my properties I would be renting out in my LLC name. Also allowing for certin questions to be required based on information provided such as if they say they have a pet then they would be required to answer the following X amount of questions vice if they didnt have a pet then the questions would be not required.
3. You don't actually have a robust expense tracking unless you pay for their 3rd party provider its not expensive but still not free. This just means that I would still be using Stessa to track all my expenses vice their third party which is not really any different than what I am doing now.
Thanks for reading the "Angry Senior Chief" comments.
The way it produces the financial statement, the categorization isn't the typical layout. I mean any accountant can make it work, but accountants wouldn't use it for themselves.
If I remember correctly they didn't have the Balance Sheet reports, but that might've changed.
CPA can work off of the Income Statement, but seeing the balance sheet can help tremendously to see how to save you on taxes. As a financial advisor & accountant, I would be able to formulate how to save on taxes and explain to you how well the business is doing.
I don't think Stessa is bad at all. They are great for the service they are providing.
@Henry Paschall
Similar experience and frustration. In addition, 1- encountered challenges with adding the next tenant; my MTRs sometimes have 1-2 future bookings. Not intuitive in how to connect the next tenant to the apartment without impacting the current tenant file.
2- tenant screening can’t be done without the legwork of setting up the tenant, connecting to apt, then request the screening. A waste of my time if screening ends in rejection. I use KeyCheck to get it done instead.
Quote from @Simon W.:Thanks so much for sharing the specifics. You're experience and being an accountant is such a value!
Quote from @Grant Shipman:
Quote from @Simon W.:
I tried rentredi and it isn't good.
It is easy to understand why BP went with them. The pricing of the Pro membership isn't really worth it. Partner with RR because their price is pretty cheap. I highly doubt 90% of the Pro subscribers here really use so much of the reports and download agreements. It is easier to convince users here to join Pro to get "premium" features on BP and also have RentRedi.
I use Buildium, AppFolio, Yardi Voyager, and QBO(do not like this one at all).
I enjoyed what you wrote. I'm currently emailing BP about why they went w/RR and they simply put me in touch w/RR, which....was a bit odd b/c I have nothing against a company doing its bet (RR), but I do have questions for a company (BP) choosing an inferior product to promote. Do you mind sharing w/you use multiple PMS's?
Well I am an accountant that started with using Yardi Enterprise (discontinued and it is ancient software). I used Yardi Voyager 6s, 7s, & Genesis and loved it. When I worked for Trump, the company was on a 20+ year old software, MDS and didn't really like it because it wasn't accounting friendly. I use different platforms due to my clients.
Right now, I am a CFO for a PM firm and uses AppFolio & QB. I personally subscribed to Buildium for my clients that are in the startup stage so they do not get killed on the subscriptions.
AppFolio with the features we are using, we easily paying $85K a year for it.
Yardi Voyager is customizable (best accounting platform hands down at least for me) rought $12K - $20K a year depending on what modules you want.
Buildium - I am paying roughly $1200/year without the additional ePay features and stuff.
QBO - I am a certified Proadvisor so I can give discounts to clients. I try to steer them away from QBO but sometimes they are already an existing subscriber and have too much info incorporated and to do the transitioning for them will be costly. Plus I use QBO for non related real estate clients.
Quote from @Simon W.:
The way it produces the financial statement, the categorization isn't the typical layout. I mean any accountant can make it work, but accountants wouldn't use it for themselves.
If I remember correctly they didn't have the Balance Sheet reports, but that might've changed.
CPA can work off of the Income Statement, but seeing the balance sheet can help tremendously to see how to save you on taxes. As a financial advisor & accountant, I would be able to formulate how to save on taxes and explain to you how well the business is doing.
I don't think Stessa is bad at all. They are great for the service they are providing.
Sorry it took so long to reply, Stessa has had a balance sheet since I have been using it. They recently have added a Schedule E, Schedule of Real Estate Owned and a Stress Test Modeling feature to their reports tab. Don't get me wrong it is great for smaller landlords with single family and small multifamily but, there short-term rental integration along with their new banking system that is now attached needs some improvement. But overall it has worked well for me.