Real life experience of transition from one property management software to another
Hi BP Fam,
I wanted to take some time to talk about our experience moving property management software platforms.
We have used Doorloop since we started in real estate back in 2023. We are still babies on some level, but we have grown from 4 units to 19 now. We are still very small, but we manage all of our own rentals. We do long term buy and hold so I really don't have much to say for those doing mid term or STR.
Overall, Doorloop was adequate. They added functionality throughout our time with them. This came at a cost as well. There was AI integration, API access and even website building/design for those that didn't have a website. There were a number of reasons that we moved on from Doorloop. I was paying for an elevated level, I believe we were mid tier, but at this level we were still paying 200 per month for the services. The listing for available rentals was easy, but I will say that our current tenants were found by listing with Avail for free. The accounting was a nightmare for us, but in transparency we use quickbooks for our bookkeeping. The accounting function within doorloop was not great. We have our own LLC and a partnership on a property and this was not easy to organize and track in doorloop. Based on the price and what we were using, we started looking elsewhere.
We looked at Rentvine, TenantCloud, Turbotenant, and Baselane. Baselane and Rentvine seemed to have the best accounting integration in their platform, but Baselane lacked the tenant maintenance and rentvine was way too expensive for the size of our operation. Our experience with TenantCloud was poor from the beginning, and seemed overpriced for what we were getting. Doorloop customer service for the level we were paying for was poor as well, we often had to wait for over an hour for responses, then if we didn't respond right away after waiting for so long online, we would be shoved back into a queue. Based on that and the initial poor experience with the customer service of tenantcloud, that was an immediate 'no'.
We chose Turbotenant. Currently we have units that are coming available so we are in the midst of trying to fill the units and we are still paying for Doorloop as we transition to Turbotenant. A couple things I will say right off. Turbotenant is way cheaper. We pay only 400 for the year. The platform looks similar to Doorloop. The application process is less cumbersome, but it also seems less tailored, which I struggle with. There is a flat $45 fee for applicants, but I don't like this because we had a $35 fee that compensates us for our time for admin and research into applicants backgrounds, phone calls, verification, etc. You can't recoup any of that if there are applicants that you end up having to turn away and that is lost time, lost money. This may not be important to some, for me, it matters, but I balance that at the amount of money I am saving. They have a prescreener function and the listing page is easy and though we have used Avail again for additional advertisement, the majority of our leads come in through the listing through turbotenant. There is a messenger function within the platform which is helpful and a calender scheduler for viewings, none of these are available in doorloop, at least not that I had seen.
The accounting aspect isn't that great, but payment seems to be straight forward. We will still be using QBO for our bookkeeping, though I had seen last year turbotenant had purchased Azibo, which has been referenced as a financial software, I am wondering if there will be improvements and integrations to their platform.
We are slowly adding the usage of a couple units with Turbotenant and working out the kinks before we roll this out to the rest of our tenants. We feel this will be a better platform for our tenants and though I wish there was a little more AI integration and API access to allow for use of maintenance agents that I have built, the fact that we are saving over 1800 dollars per year for the same level of customer service and same level of PM software, I have to say that though there may be areas where doorloop is better, overall, this isn't balanced by the amount of money we are gaining by dropping their service.
I will say the trend we have seen is that these platforms are increasingly using AI for their Landlord level customer service, and this is of course is not a surprise as this is happening across all spectrums. That said, our experience thusfar, that although most of the customer service with turbotenant has been way more responsive and the ability to get a human, even if it is on the other end of a keyboard, is way better.
I hope this helps and if someone has more questions, I will do what I can to help.
Matt and Erin