Choosing, migrating or building the property software your portfolio size actually needs. Most of this advice is about not overbuying — the major platforms are excellent and are priced for businesses ten times larger than most independent landlords.
The three bands
The right answer depends almost entirely on unit count, and the transitions are sharper than people expect.
Roughly under ten units
Per-unit pricing on the major platforms is usually poor value here. A well-built spreadsheet plus two or three automations will beat it, and cost a fraction. The thing to fix is not the software — it is that the record is not trustworthy. Get the ledger reconciling automatically and most of the pain goes away.
Roughly ten to fifty units
The calculation flips. Tenant portals, proper accounting and maintenance workflows start earning their fee, and running this many units on a spreadsheet becomes a genuine risk rather than a mild inefficiency. This is the band where a platform is usually right and the question becomes which one.
Above fifty units
You are choosing between platforms rather than deciding whether to have one, and the decision turns on accounting depth, reporting and how well it handles your specific mix. This is also where migration cost starts to dominate the comparison.
What we help with
- Selection. Working out which band you are actually in and shortlisting accordingly. This usually takes one conversation, not a procurement process.
- Migration. Moving without losing history. The records that matter most — payment history, maintenance timelines, notices — are the ones migrations most often drop, because they are the hardest to map.
- Filling the gaps. Every platform leaves something out that a particular owner needs. Often the fix is a small automation alongside the platform rather than a different platform.
- Building, when nothing fits. Rarely the right answer, and occasionally it is — see BarebonesPM for the reasoning we applied to our own portfolio.
The mistake we see most
Buying the platform before fixing the process. Software does not impose a process; it encodes whichever one you already have. If maintenance requests currently arrive across three channels and get triaged by whoever sees them first, moving that into a platform produces the same chaos with a nicer interface and a monthly bill.
The second most common is migrating without a plan for the history, and discovering at the first dispute that everything before the cutover is in a CSV nobody can search.
What to actually compare
Feature grids are close to useless for this decision, because every platform in a category has every headline feature. The differences that matter are in how they behave, and they only surface once you are committed. The ones worth asking about before you sign:
- How does the accounting actually work? Specifically: does it produce something your accountant will accept without a reconciliation exercise every quarter, and can it handle an owner who holds properties in more than one entity? This is the single most common source of regret.
- What does a partial payment do? Real tenants pay late, short, in two instalments, and occasionally from someone else’s account. Platforms differ enormously in how gracefully they represent that, and a system that cannot express “paid $900 of $1,400 on the 3rd” will quietly corrupt your ledger.
- Can you get your data out? Not “is there an export button” — what does the export actually contain? Maintenance history and notice records are frequently absent, and those are exactly what you need in a dispute.
- What does it cost at your next size? Per-unit pricing is fine at ten units and can be startling at forty. Model the bill at the portfolio you expect in two years, not the one you have.
- What happens on a phone? Most tenant interaction is mobile. A portal that technically exists but is unpleasant to use produces the same phone calls you were trying to eliminate.
None of these appear on a comparison page, which is rather the point of asking someone who has migrated portfolios rather than reading the marketing.
Migration, honestly
The build-up to a migration is dominated by the new system. The pain afterwards is almost always about the old one.
Current balances migrate cleanly — every platform imports those. What tends not to survive is everything that gives those balances context: the payment history behind them, the maintenance timeline for each unit, the notices served and when, and the correspondence attached to any of it. Six months later, when a tenant disputes a deposit deduction, that is precisely the material you need.
So we plan the history first and the balances second, which is the reverse of how migrations are usually scoped. Sometimes that means keeping the old system readable for a period rather than switching it off on the cutover date. It is a small ongoing cost against a large and very badly-timed risk.
Common questions
Will you tell us to buy your software?
Only if you are in the band it was built for, which is a small one. We built it because the commercial products priced out portfolios of our size — not because we think they are bad products. Above ten units we will generally point you at one of them.
Do you take referral commissions from platforms?
No. It is worth asking anyone who advises you on software procurement, because plenty do and it changes the advice.
Can you help if we have already chosen badly?
Yes, and the answer is not always to switch. Sometimes the cheaper fix is to keep the platform and automate around the two things it does badly for you. Switching costs more than people remember.
Further reading
Buildium vs AppFolio vs a spreadsheet — whether either platform earns its cost at ten units, and the four behaviour questions worth asking before you sign.
Work out which band you are in
Tell us how many units you run and what you use today. Usually one conversation is enough to say whether you should buy, stay, or fix the process first. More at CAO Real Estate & PropTech, or get in touch.