For property owners, filling rental properties means answering phone calls, collecting move-out checks, finding new tenants and lots of paperwork. AHRN.com wants to lighten your load with these 8 Property Management apps that will make your PCS season easier.
Sure, smartphones are fun for games and looking at cat videos, but can they actually save you time and make your life easier as a landlord or property manager? Increasingly they can — with more useful services and apps coming online every month.
Here are eight of our favorite apps for landlords and property managers in 2015, along with some of their standout features.
1. RentTracker
An excellent organizational app, RentTracker helps you organize your properties, tenant information, rents received and lease expirations. It will generate year-end financial reports to help with tax preparation, and its simple user interface makes it easy. Perhaps the best part is that it syncs with other mobile devices and your website account, so it is accessible from any device, anywhere.
Cost: Free for the first three tenant records, then only $1/tenant.
2. Pendo Rent
In addition to tracking properties and payments, Pendo Rent allows for collection of rents directly from tenants from your mobile phone or tablet. With an emphasis on tracking your properties’ cash flow – and helping you improve it — Pendo Rent connects right to your bank account, and will keep your property financial data centralized.
Cost: Free
3. Homesnap
Just take a photo of any property, and Homesnap will pull up current or past MLS listing information. You can browse interior photos, past sale information, number of bedrooms and bathrooms and even public school information. Additional neighborhood data is also available, although the analysis is not as comprehensive as that offered by Zillow or Trulia.
Cost: Free
4. DIY Landlord
DIY Landlord is an Apple app that allows property managers and landlords to track not just properties and rent rolls, but allows for partial and abnormal payments as well. Photo logs for properties, expense tracking, financial reporting and a dashboard that offers a snapshot of this month’s performance all help managers stay on top of their rental units. And it’s integrated with DropBox, for automated backups and access through other devices.
Cost: Free for the first two tenant inputs, then $0.99/tenant
5. The Property
The Property is an iPad/iPhone app that helps you to organize your rental properties on your mobile device. You can manage tenants and rent agreements. Prepare and send rent invoices to tenants, track rent payments and tenants’ balance. Keep track of related expenses. Use your mobile device’s camera to add important details. Then, easily export and share your financial data with your accountant or bookkeeper.
Cost: Free lite version, one time $8.99 price for premium version with expanded capabilities
6. Evernote
Take your business paperless with the syncing power of Evernote. Free for the basic version, Evernote allows you to access records seamlessly from your desktop and mobile devices. Inside the app, you can create a notebook for each of your properties or tenants and keep your records conveniently sorted. Stay organized and on top of annual maintenance with a checklist for each property.
Cost: Free, additional premium features available
7. Google Calendar
You are likely already using Google products in some form. Google Calendar is a frequently underrated tool that can be harness to seriously increase your productivity! As a property manager, you have appointments that must be kept – with tenants, service providers and more. With Google Calendar, you can share your schedule with anyone you want: your assistant, spouse, child, or friends. Additionally, it’s mobile. When users create an event on their computer, it will be synced to all the devices on which you access Google Calendar. You can set up your calendar to send reminders that will notify you when it is time for appointments, calls or simple task deadlines. We all know we need some reminding to do our lead generation! Minimize wasted appointments by inviting people by email.. and it puts the appointment in their calendar automatically. You can also schedule video meetings, called Google Hangouts, with your clients and attach documents to the meeting directly.
Cost: Free
All of the above smartphone apps are free to download and try, although most start charging after the first few rental properties, or for the more advanced features. Try each out to see which ones work best for you, and remember: while smartphones are great for quick data access, in-depth research and tenant placement is best done on full websites.
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Meet Your Contributor:
Brian Davis is a long time landlord and the vice president of ezLandlordForms, a resource for rental forms, tenant screening reports and more. He has appeared on radio shows ranging from CBS Radio to The Wall Street Business Network, and is an avid advocate for mom-and-pop real estate investors and landlords.
I helping my daughter sell her house in Ozark, AL. It’s located right outside the Ozark Ft Rucker gate. Will we be able to use your service to do this.
Annie Sconiers
Annie – Yes you can! You can register as a home owner at https://www.ahrn.com
They really do make apps for everything. A friend of mine owns a couple of apartment complexes and she has mentioned how overwhelmed she is trying to keep up with the responsibilities of managing her properties. Maybe these apps would be a big help to her?
Walter Kowalski | https://www.sjcmanagement.com
Walter – It can definitely be a difference maker when you have access to information on the go, and a streamlined way of getting the necessary tasks done!
Another app worth considering for managing rent income and expenses is The Property app – https://property-app.com
Thank you for the suggestion, John! Is this one that you use?
I didn’t realize that there were so many property management apps. My grandfather is managing a few properties. I might have to teach him how to use these apps but, I am sure that he would love to hear about them. Thanks for sharing.
The link to The Property app website is broken.
Thanks for the heads up, John! It’s working now!
One more that should be included is Housters, which has a web site (housters.com) and Android/iOS mobile apps that are all cloud-synced. It has the basics you'd expect like tracking tenants' unpaid rent, managing to-do lists, accounting, and reporting, but also has some other goodies like tenants being able to make online rent payments to you through Housters and contractors being able to login to Housters and update your to-do list tasks that you assign to them.
That’s a great tip, Justin! We hadn’t come across that one!
I use this app its amazing.Great work!
Angela – which app is it that you use?
I think iPropertyMgr sounds like an amazing tool! All of these apps sound useful, but I think this one would be the most beneficial for my husband and me. We are looking at buying some rental properties, and would have to do some work on them to get them into the condition we want. Being able to easily work with contractors, etc., and keep track of it all through an app would be amazing!
Glad you found that suggestion useful, Veronica!
Thank you for linking to all of these apps! My husband and I are considering leasing out our townhome, and possibly investing in a couple of other properties. But I don’t really want to hire a third party to manage it for us. I think one of these apps will be just what we need to keep track of the finances.
We’ve started using Google Calendars and two of these apps. Thank you for the suggestions, I can already tell these will keep us well organized. We’re still trying to decide how we want to accept online payments, and probably won’t offer that until our website is finished in December. We really appreciated this list!
Glad you liked. Thanks for sharing your tips!
Property management can be made easier through apps, I agree. I would use them if I were a property manager. I’m all about technology as a means of productivity.
Definitely! Working smart is a great way to make life simpler
There is a lot that goes into property management and its hard to know where to start learning about it. I'm about to move into a home that is being rented to me from a service like this and I want to see how they work. This helped and I can't wait to learn more about it.
I’m so glad you found it helpful, Jorge!
Pendo Rent for the win! new design is very sleek and now they have rental applications for free!
That’s a super useful feature!
I didn’t understand that there were such a large number of property administration applications. My granddad is dealing with a couple of properties. I may need to show him how to utilize these applications at the same time, I am certain that he would love to find out about them. Much appreciated
Wow! What a helpful post! Google calendar is AMAZING, and it is such a great idea for property management. Thanks so much for sharing these!
Definitely that’s a great tip, Justin!