Property Management Software Review

OK, so you have six or 12 income properties that you manage yourself. You’ve thought about turning them over to a professional property manager, but you kind of enjoy the responsibility, and you are not sure if someone else would care as much as you do. When you bought your first income property, it was easy to file income and expenses and keep track of the lease dates. Preparing for taxes was trivial. After you bought your fourth income property, it became slightly more tedious but not unpleasant. Well now you have 10 properties, and maintaining income and expenses in Excel is becoming a chore, and tax preparation is less fun than ever before. It is probably about time that you consider some property management software options such as our TopTenREVIEWS Gold Award winner, LandlordMAX, and our TopTenREVIEWS Silver Award winner, Quicken Rental Property Manager. You might also want to read articles about property management software.

Rental Management Software Buyer’s Guide

As most of the quality brands for professional property managers go online, there are fewer good, platform-specific, property management software products for owner-landlords with small portfolios. We screened a dozen candidates and found LandlordMAX and Quicken Rental Property Manager praiseworthy for their management capabilities, accounting functions, technical features, and help and support:

Management Features
You don’t need an endless list of functions to make life easier when it comes to managing tenants and properties. Tenant management is facilitated by a few features such as the ability to email renters from inside of the property management software and the ability to generate invoices to prompt payments for rents due or late fees. A property management system that supports customizable forms makes it easy to adapt documents for specific functions. And the ability to attach an external document and associate it with a specific tenant or property is a great convenience so that everything from lease agreements to irrigation manuals remains conveniently linked and accessible. A few features to consider for facilities management are the ability to track physical details of a property, vendors and work orders.

Accounting
We recommend that you take the most time to analyze accounting features. Is the ability to write checks from within the application important to you? Is accounting on a cash basis sufficient, or does your CPA require accounting on an accrual basis with a double-entry General Ledger? Do you need to keep track of fixed assets and track their depreciation? Do you want the product to generate some approximation of a Form 1040 Schedule E tax report? Do you want the application to track mortgage amortization? How important is it that the product provides a mileage tracker utility?

Technical Features
Once you’ve screened for the operating system that you use and whether or not a single-user product will be enough if there is no networked version, it is important to notice whether or not the software can import or export the data types that you require. And if you are an Outlook user, understand which parts of Outlook the software will synchronize with.

Help & Support
How would you prefer to receive technical support from the rental property management software vendor? Is email sufficient? Are you willing to pay for telephone support? Do you prefer an online chat connection?

If you just manage one or two rental properties, you can get by with using a spreadsheet. As the number of doors under management increases from just a few, property management software will provide efficiencies that justify the purchase. With the time and energy that you will save in day-to-day management chores and end-of-year tax preparation, you just might consider adding a few more income properties to your portfolio.

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