Tenant Screening Apps?? Tellus, Cozy, SmartMove....

[Randy Ferguson]

New to tenant screening and the whole landlording process in general.

Tellus, Cozy, SmartMove, etc....who is using what and what makes one better than another?

[Connie Chan]

Hey @Randy Ferguson. I'm a Tellus user and happy to tell you about my experience. I haven't used all of the features they have yet (it's quite a lot of stuff they handle) but so far so good. I use it for rent collection, chat with tenants, expense logging, financial reports. They also have free listings and screening but I haven't used those yet -- my mother has and she said it was easy. The key thing I'd say that makes me like Tellus is that it's a mobile app so I can reply to my tenants wherever I am. My job requires some travel so being able to just handle a task on my phone is helpful. But the mobile part feels best when I'm at home depot or something and I can just take a photo of receipts and throw it away. 

Plus I get rent reminders, and also notifications is rent is late. It's thoughtful about the details, for example just rent collection you can block partial payments, assign a diff bank account for each property, collect late fees either which can be reoccuring or one time, etc. If you're new to landlording, I recommend using a system to keep your records in place. I used to do things with spreadsheets but I'd lose receipts, or forget to get them from my husband's car, or forget to check my bank account, you get the picture. Software really helps in getting organized.