Your Community Has a Website But No Property Management Software

This page is for operators of small communities, roughly ten to fifty units, who self-manage and run no property management software at all. If you already run Yardi, RealPage, AppFolio, Entrata, or AMSI, this is not your situation and the answer is different: your site should link to the portal you already have.

For everyone else, here is the honest version. A website vendor cannot give you online rent collection, an application workflow, or a resident portal. Those are functions of management software. What a website can do is connect to whatever system you choose. So the order of operations matters, and most people discover it backwards.

Look at entry-level management software first

Before deciding you are too small for real software, check the actual entry prices, because they are lower than most people assume and the minimums are the part that matters.

Yardi Breeze publishes $1 per unit per month with a $100 per month minimum on an annual agreement, with its Premier tier at the same per-unit rate and a $400 minimum. AppFolio's pricing page states a 50 unit minimum on its entry plan and does not publish rates at all.

Read those minimums carefully against your unit count. At 100 units, a dollar per unit is a hundred dollars and the minimum is irrelevant. At 20 units, that same $100 minimum means you are effectively paying five dollars a unit. That may still be worth it, because you get the ledger, the rent roll, and the resident portal in one system. But it is a different calculation than the headline rate suggests, and nobody points it out.

If you land above roughly fifty units, entry-level management software is usually the right answer and this page has done its job.

If you are genuinely too small for that

Below the point where a management platform makes sense, you still need to collect rent somewhere, and the realistic options are the landlord-focused rent collection tools. Several are free at small unit counts. They handle rent, autopay, and often leases and maintenance requests, and your website links out to whichever one you pick, exactly the way a larger community links to its portal.

For disclosure: we own one of these tools, RentMerchant, which collects rent by bank transfer or card with autopay, e-signed leases, maintenance requests, and owner statements. We mention it because it would be strange not to, and because for an operator with no system at all it is a first system rather than a downgrade. It is also worth being clear about what it is not: it does not do unit and floor plan management, listing syndication, tenant screening, or general ledger accounting. If you need those, you need management software, not a rent collection tool.

Look at the alternatives too. Several competitors are free with no unit cap, which may suit you better, and we would rather you pick correctly than pick us.

Why this gap exists at all

Small communities fall between two markets. Enterprise property management vendors write for operators who already have software and are switching. Landlord tools write for someone with a few single-family rentals and do not use apartment-community language. A twenty-unit building with a leasing office belongs to neither group, so nobody writes for it.

The professional management data reflects the same split. In the 2021 Rental Housing Finance Survey reported by HUD, about 22 percent of small rental properties of one to four units are professionally managed, against 84 percent of properties with 150 or more units. The survey does not publish a figure for the range in between, which is exactly where these communities sit.

The order to do it in

• Pick the system first. Management software or a rent collection tool, based on your unit count and whether you need accounting.
• Then scope the website around it. Once you know the system, the site knows what to link to and where the apply and pay actions point.
• Keep the accounts in the ownership entity's name. Whatever you choose, register it to the business, not to a person. This is the same advice we give about domains, for the same reason.

If you are talking to a website vendor and they offer to build rent collection directly into the site itself, be careful. Handling rent payments means handling money and the compliance that comes with it, and a marketing site is the wrong place for it. Linking to a system built for it is the right answer at every size.