How we chose the best property management software Products designed for property management We started our search for the best property management software with a wide lens, looking at software tailored to residential and commercial properties, for managers of hundreds of units as well as part-time landlords. We preferred SaaS systems to desktop-only options, meaning that the software is managed by a third-party vendor — faster to implement and less maintenance in the long run.

Because Mac users are a minority in the business world, most real estate software companies have ignored them completely. PropertyMetrics is web-based, simple to use, affordable, and 100% tablet compatible.

We also skipped over niche software programs like those designed for vacation rentals, which require the managing of new tenants every week. Property management tools With baseline criteria set, we interviewed property managers and landlords to find out which tools they use and which tasks keep them busy every day. We learned that there are a handful of must-have features for any property management software. With this in mind, we reached out to as many companies as we could find and set up trial accounts to see which of those features they offered: Collecting rent online Almost all property management sites let you manually record and view rent payments, but the best ones enable and assist with every step of rent collection: processing rent payments online, recording payment status and history by tenant and unit, and automatically incorporating information about each payment into the site’s accounting features. Although we couldn’t actually make payments through the sites we tested without registering bank accounts, we went through every other step in the rent-payment process to ensure total functionality.

Managing maintenance requests Most property management software allows you to manually record work orders, but to earn one of our top picks, a site had to: a) let tenants request work orders online, b) let property managers assign work orders to maintenance workers, and c) let everyone involved track the process. We also favored software that lets you pay workers online and record that payment automatically and accurately for accounting purposes. To test our top picks, we made fake accounts for tenants and vendors to recreate this process from start to finish. Bringing in new tenants There’s no point in owning or managing property if there’s no one to occupy it, so we also looked at how different sites let you advertise vacancies online.

Can you generate a listing for a given unit or property with the click of a button? Can you easily publish that listing on Zillow, Trulia, and other real-estate sites? Can you screen and manage prospective tenants? The best property management software programs can answer yes to all of these questions. Bookkeeping capabilities In addition to condensing all your tasks into one place, property management software should let you accurately keep your books, generate reports, and store your important documents.

Here’s what we looked for in each of our top contenders: Accounting We wanted to find property management software that could take care of all your accounting needs — no QuickBooks or other accounting software required. All property management software lets you manually enter information about income and payments, but the best goes beyond a simple ledger and lets you receive and make payments online, code transactions for tax purposes, and perform bank reconciliations. Simcity 4 nam mod. It should also automate as much of that accounting work as possible. Reporting According to Jan Winters, an assistant commercial manager in Chicago, “Reporting out on financials is one of the tasks that commercial property managers spend the most time doing.” Budget reports, forecasting reports, delinquency reports, work-order reports, occupancy reports — your software should be able to quickly and easily answer any question that anyone might have about any aspect of the property you’re managing. Document management In addition to reports, we wanted to be able to easily create, store, and search other documents and files like leases, eviction notices, and vendor lists. If a site let us upload and store files according to tenant and unit, that was good.