All Forum Posts by: Jason Turgeon

Next up is a quick review of TenantCloud (https://www.tenantcloud.com/). I got pretty excited about this one as it seemed to have most of the features I wanted, at a decent price point, and seems to be fairly robust and well-supported. 

But I was stopped dead in my tracks once I signed in. Their accounting feature, which is the primary reason I was coming to it, does not have any ability to import transactions from connected bank accounts via Plaid or other sources. To put it another way, you have to manually enter every transaction. This is, as far as I know, the only one of the many, many real estate accounting software packages I've tried that is this far behind in tech integration. It took me so much by surprise that I thought I was doing something wrong and I spent a bunch of time digging around in support pages and toggling my adblocker settings. But no, it's just not something they offer. 

So while TenantCloud has a lot of other seemingly good features and a decent price point, there was not sense in trying any of that other stuff out. I simply can't recommend anyone use this for real estate accounting when there are so many products out there that do it better and faster. 

For our friends managing properties in the UK, I'll point out Apartemo: https://apartemo.com

Since I am not in the UK, I didn't spend any time looking at it, but maybe this will help someone on that side of the pond.

Doorloop is next on the list of products I looked at but did not try out. https://www.doorloop.com/

Doorloop seems to be quite mature and full featured. It does property management, accepts payments, imports bank feeds and does accounting, automates listings, etc., etc. Beyond just being targeted at residential landlords, they also market Doorloop to HOAs, student rentals, self-storage, commercial property management, and other groups that aren't as well served by the competition. It has all the usual bells and whistles and seems like it would work well. It also has some more sophisticated things that most others don't, like Zapier integration. If you're running a big shop and want to go all-in on automation and creating systems, this might be a selling point for you.

So why didn't I try it out?

For one thing, it is very expensive. The cheapest tier is $49/month, billed yearly. For smaller operators like me, that doesn't make sense. If you're running a larger portfolio, it might make sense. For another, they offer quickbooks integration as a major selling point. Since my whole reason for this deep dive into real estate accounting software was to get AWAY from quickbooks, that raises some red flags for me about the way the product handles accounting. But I can see that there are probably some larger operations out there that are married to quickbooks and this could help them. It's just not something I need or want to pay for.

Next up on the list of products I looked at but didn't sign up for is RentBlazr. https://rentblazr.com/

This is another product that focuses solely on rental accounting. It's not clear from the website what they do for data imports from banks. Other than that, they do all the same stuff most of the competition in this space does. One nice feature is that they have a receipt scanner that extracts info from the receipts, not just a static photo for compliance purposes. Quickbooks also has this and it can be a real time saver, although my receipts are often so crumpled and barely legible that the OCR software can't cope.

I didn't try this because it appears to be quite a new product, and I want something both mature and that will be around for a while. They offer a free tier for up to 10 properties. If you have more than that, you have to upgrade...but they just say "coming soon" for details on how much that upgrade will cost. I'd say this is still in beta.

To be brutally honest, it's hard to see how a product like this will be able to compete with so many other well-established products offering nearly identical services out there. There's nothing wrong with it on the surface, but other than the free pricing for small landlords there's nothing to compel you to use it. And since it can't stay without revenue forever, I'd be hesitant to sign up just because it's free for me right now. Either it will turn into a data-mining operation or have to start charging.

For the sake of completeness, I will mention that there is a product called Apartmentify on the market. It has a very bare bones web page and the product itself is only available as an app for either Android or Apple devices. There is no charge.

I cannot fathom using only an app to do all my accounting. Some things just require a full keyboard and screen. And I am also highly suspicious of all products that are completely free. As the saying goes, with free products you're not the customer, you're the product. 

But hey, it exists and maybe someone out there wants to try it out and post a review to this thread. https://www.apartmentify.com/

Next up in my roundup are RentalHero and RealtyZam, two more products that I looked at but did not sign up for. These are both offered by the same company.

RealtyZam is accounting software built for real estate agents. If you're an agent, it offers a decent looking feature set and very attractive pricing. Free until you have booked either 2 transactions or $3000 of income, then $138.56/year (roughly 2 months free vs monthly) or $14/month. It does all the usual accounting stuff, like data imports, receipt imaging, etc. 

The same company, having noticed that lots of its clients are also landlords, offers a companion piece of software called RentalHero. The product looks similar, but is tailored to landlords and property management expenses. Pricing is also similar, but is only offered at the $129/year tier for unlimited units. It is only for accounting, although it does offer a messaging feature for tenants. If you're just looking for real estate property accounting software, this is definitely one that should be on your list to check out.

So why didn't I do a full trial of these? Because I wanted one system to keep track of all my business expenses, including my house hack, my properties under management, my self-managed property, and my realtor income. This pair of products would require two separate systems. I don't want to be switching back and forth. If they were to merge them into a single product, I would have taken a very hard look at it, as the pricing is great and the products look pretty well designed. But since there ARE other comparably priced solutions that didn't make me maintain two separate accounts and logins, I went with one of those.

Continuing the software roundup after a couple of months of staring at all these tabs in my browser.

One of those tabs was Avail.Co, which is a product offered by Realtor.com. I did not bother trying it out as I have found that most of the products Realtor.com offers are pretty bare bones and don't offer enough customization for my needs, but it is worth listing here as an option. 

The product offers two tiers, free and "plus." The plus tier is $7/property/month, which makes it among the cheapest if you only have a couple of units but quickly makes it among the most expensive if you have more than a handful. For this reason alone, I would suggest you skip it unless you really don't intend to grow beyond 3-4 doors. Once you get to 5-6 properties it is in the price range of some much more sophisticated and scalable packages that can do everything it does and more. 

But if you just want a very simple solution, don't intend to grow a lot, and don't need the things the plus package offers, the free version might be worth checking out. 

https://www.avail.co/

@Sean O'Keefe Just a heads up that I tried to sign up for your service through the website over a month ago and never got any contact back. I've settled on my software package so I'm just going to do a few more reviews of the products I tried out and call it a day. I will say for the benefit of public discussion that your product looks compelling but the inability to just sign up for a free trial without filling out a form and waiting for a callback really puts you at a disadvantage to almost every competitor. Might be something to consider changing.

@Sean O'Keefe It's just my reviews of products I have actually tried out, with some discussion of products I haven't tried that are similar. I'm just a regular investor wandering around in the wilderness trying to find a solution that works for my specific needs, and I'm reporting out what I'm seeing. I'm not monetizing this in any way, and I only have a limited amount of time I can devote to this project, so I won't be able to review every one of the dozens of different products on the market.

What's next is probably a review of REI Hub, which is likely to be the product I settle on based on my initial experiences with them. From a quick look at your feature chart it looks like this would be analogous to your self-service package at $19/month. I can certainly see the value in your ability to connect people to real estate CPAs and could have used that service a few years ago, but I now have someone I have been working with for several years and am very happy with the advice and service I am getting from them.

After I do that review I may do some sort of brief feature reviews of some of the other platforms and will be happy to do something like that for yours but it's not likely to be as in depth as the ones I have done so far.

I'm hopeful that other people will jump in to share their experiences with some of these platforms so we can crowdsource more in-depth reviews and get a broader range of perspectives. And people in your position (I know there are several RE software platform CEOs/Founders on these forums) are welcome to come in and discuss their products, as long as they disclose their affiliations.

@Sean O'Keefe I hadn't heard of it before. I'll take a look, but am not sure I'll go all the way through the process of trying it out. Interesting concept, for sure.