Are small landlords building better tools than they’re buying?

Question

There are some very good property management and portfolio tools on the market. My hesitation has always been the long-term subscription cost, especially when I may only need a small portion of what a larger platform provides.

Instead, over time I’ve built several tools around the specific decisions I make in my rental business.

Two that I’m particularly proud of are:

1. Market Intelligence Engine: Helps me collect and store data over time that is specific to my local market. I use that information to estimate market rents and identify changes in rental market conditions.

2. Rent Estimator: Helps me translate market information into a practical rent range for an individual property.

Neither is intended to replace property management or accounting software. They solve narrower problems that are important enough to my operation that I wanted a process tailored to how I make decisions.

Reading some recent discussions has led me to believe this is fairly common among small portfolio owners.

Have you built your own spreadsheet, AI workflow, database, tracker, calculator, or other tool that has become an important part of how you operate?

I’d be interested in seeing what other small portfolio owners have built and would be happy to share mine as well. I suspect there are some very useful tools being developed quietly by operators simply because the available software didn’t quite fit their process.

Brett Nachbor · Answer

I find this to be an interesting topic. One, because it's now easier than ever to build your own tool(s) to meet your specific needs; and as you said it @Alison Robinson, to solve a narrower problem that's important to your operation. And real estate operators share a great deal of common problems; what I don't think they share as commonly is to what degree is something a problem for them and their operation. And two, because of this I'm not sure any software out there will ever entirely fit someone's individual needs. I had previously built a simple tool for a scaling operator who had started acquiring multifamily after doing LTR's initially. He started finding himself consistently getting surprised and having to react to lender covenant type issues, contractual type requirements and other critical obligations across his portfolio. I worked on the lender side for years; he knew how effective we were at tracking and identifying these things across a huge portfolio. He didn't have an effective way to see across his whole portfolio, in one simple view, and knew he had to be out in front of it before his lender might come calling. So the tool took all of this property by property and unified it; that visibility meant he was out in front of it going forward. That tool ended up morphing into a larger, but still simple, owner level platform that unified all of this information plus much more from an asset/portfolio perspective.

Jim Johnson · Answer

The Market Intelligence Engine caught my attention. How are you collecting the local rent data over time—manually from listings, or have you found a way to automate some of that? Having your own historical data seems especially useful when the current comps are all over the place.

JD Martin · Answer

Feel free to discuss pros and cons of what you've all built, but do not share links or names of products in this thread unless you have no financial interest in them yourself or they are completely free to use without expectation of conversion to subscription or other payment. Members can contact other members on their own if they would like to share their for-profit systems with each other.

Harrison C. · Answer

I'm one of the builders too. I rent my houses in Huntsville by the bedroom, and nothing I tried treated a bedroom as its own rental, so I ended up building my own system around that.

The pieces that earned their keep:

Each room is its own lease with its own rent, deposit and dates, so one person moving out doesn't touch anyone else in the house.

The utility bill gets split by the days each resident actually lived there that month, after whatever the lease says I cover. That one alone was worth building.

Each resident gets their own door code that turns on once their move-in money is paid and stops working the day their lease ends. Nobody has to remember to change it.

Same takeaway as Ming: the normal month took a weekend, the edge cases took months. A bill that shows up after someone moved out, a mid-month turnover, a payment that bounces after the code already went out. If you build, write down every weird case you've hit in the last two years before you start, because those cases are the real work.

Alison Robinson · Answer

Jim, thanks for asking. I’ll try to be brief, although I really enjoy this tool.

A little background: when I first started renting properties, I set up automatic Zillow and Redfin email alerts for my local area. I would receive daily or weekly emails when new rental listings came on the market. Over time, that helped me develop a good feel for local rental pricing.

The problem was that when it came time to renew a lease or list one of my properties, I was still mostly looking at current listings. I had very little historical information unless I paid for a service. Zillow’s estimates often seemed high to me, and Ren-to-meter was useful, but access was limited.

The Market Intelligence Engine grew out of that problem. It captures and stores information from the rental listing emails I already receive. Instead of those observations disappearing after I read the email, I now build a historical database of rental listings specifically for my market.

That lets me look at both current comps and what I’ve actually observed over time. I find that especially helpful when the current listings are scattered or don’t seem representative of the market.

Richard (Ryszard) Cieplechowicz · Answer

The ones that last are usually the boring ones. A tracker with one row per open item, an owner, a next date and a status limited to a few set values beats a fancy dashboard nobody updates. The part people skip is history: log corrections as new lines instead of overwriting, so you can see later what changed and when.

I'd build around a handoff or decision you keep dropping, and buy software for the parts where money or the law is involved, like rent collection and accounting.

Alison Robinson · Answer

JD, I want to make sure I stay within the forum rules before sharing anything.

One of the tools I mentioned in the original post is my Rent Estimator. I built it for my own rental portfolio and have made it available as a completely free download on my website. There is no charge, subscription, or expectation of converting anyone to a paid product.

My purpose in starting the discussion was genuinely to share some of the tools I've found useful and hopefully see what other small operators have built as well.

Since the download happens to be hosted on my website, would posting a link to the free tool be permitted, or is there another way you would prefer I share it within BiggerPockets?

I wanted to ask before posting anything.

Tony Christian · Answer

Hey Alison, yes. I had the same need to create something around my own workflow instead of adapting my workflow to someone else's software. I hated using QuickBooks because it wasn't landlord specific, so I built my own. It eventually grew as I added the things I actually needed as a landlord.

I think there's real value in tools built by people who actually have the problem they're trying to solve.

Ming Yi · Answer

I am one of the builders. I self-manage five single-family homes and ran everything on spreadsheets for years. It worked until receipts lived in my camera roll, rent tracking was a separate tab, and tax time meant a full weekend of forensic accounting. I tried the big landlord platforms and they were priced like I had fifty doors when I have five. So I built my own: per-property accounting, cash flow and P&L, receipt photos that auto-fill expense entries, Schedule E reports, Stripe ACH for rent, and a tenant portal for maintenance requests. It started as a tool for my own rentals and I eventually shipped it on the App Store. Honest takeaway from building it: the boring parts eat all the time. Receipt parsing edge cases and tax exports are where commercial tools quietly earn their money, so budget double the time you think for those.

Divin Kanyama · Answer

@Alison Robinson This is a great example of building around the decisions that actually matter instead of paying for features you may never use. The real value is not only the rent estimate, but the history behind it—being able to see how local conditions and assumptions change over time. Many small operators probably have simple spreadsheets or workflows that outperform larger platforms for their specific needs. Sharing these tools and the thinking behind them could be incredibly useful, even if each owner ultimately adapts them to fit their own market and process.

Are small landlords building better tools than they’re buying?

Are small landlords building better tools than they’re buying?

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