What is the best Property Management Software out there?

[Andrew Dorazio]

Hi All,

I am considering expanding into the property management business and wanted some feedback on good property management software that some of you may be using as either the property manager or the client. Both perspectives would be great. Most of the software I have seen or dealt with has been home grown or very basic. Some of the things I am looking for to make a determination:

Price Structure

Functionality

Back End Support

Ability for Customization

Any advice would be great. Thanks!

Andrew

[James Wise]

@Andrew Dorazio

We have tried both Buildium and Rentec Direct. We ended up choosing Rentec Direct over Buildium as we liked the product better. I thought is was much easier to use and had a clean simple look. Rentec does have some flaws though, there are two major issues I would like to see fixed.

1. There is a property tab and a tenant tab. If like us, you have hundreds of properties and tenants you don't remember the tenants by their names. You look them up by property. In Rentec when you look up a property you see the tenants name but not their contact info. To get to their contact info you need to switch over to another tab and search again by the name that you just looked up. Doing this all day will drive you absolutely nuts. It would be much simpler if they listed the tenants number right under the tenants name when you search it by property.

2. Rentec gives you the ability to assign different property managers to each property. Very cool feature. We like to use it because we pay our agents a residual commission for every property that they sell to investors. We pay them a % of our management fee every month, we simply assign their name as the property manager to the units they sold. Perfect system except the Rentec software does not allow you to pull a report or run a search by property manager. Makes no sense to be able to assign different property managers but not be able to run a search of their properties.

Outside of those two issues I do think it's the best software on the market and I hope they will improve upon it by making those fixes.