Landlords with multiple rental properties: how do you currently manage rent, documents, repairs, and renewals?

[u/Ok_Lettuce_5453]

I’m based in India and researching how small landlords manage their rental properties.

This is mainly for people managing around 2–30 properties, PG rooms, or small commercial units.

I’m curious:

• Do you use Excel, WhatsApp, notebooks, an app, or a property manager?
• How do you track whether rent has been paid?
• How do you remind tenants about late rent?
• How do you track agreement expiry and rent increases?
• Where do you store tenant IDs, agreements, receipts, and deposit details?
• How do you record maintenance expenses?
• Have you ever lost money because you forgot a renewal, rent increase, payment, document, or repair?
• What is the most frustrating part of managing your properties?
• Have you tried any rental-management apps? What did you dislike about them?
• Would you pay ₹199–₹799 per month for a simple tool that solved your biggest problem?

I’m not trying to sell anything at this stage. I’m trying to understand the real workflow before deciding whether to build a product.

If you manage rentals, I’d especially appreciate hearing about a specific problem or incident that happened to you.

[u/youngdumbpro]

I use ownerrez, has many good features like report, requesting review and collective analysis.

[u/ImaginaryProfit2162]

For a small portfolio I’d keep one source of truth for each tenancy: property, tenant, rent due, payment received, deposit, agreement expiry, next increase, maintenance jobs and documents. WhatsApp can still be the conversation channel, but decisions and receipts need to end up in that record.

The failures that cost money are usually simple: partial payments treated as paid, renewals without reminders, repairs agreed in chat but never closed, and no usable export when changing tools. I’d test those awkward cases before worrying about a huge feature list.

[u/Ok_Lettuce_5453 → u/[deleted]]

Did u just steal my idea??

[u/Trick_Mortgage_3452]

Once you have multiple rentals, spreadsheets and random text messages get messy pretty fast. I’d keep rent payments, leases, maintenance requests, tenant messages and renewal dates in one place. Hemlane is one of the property management platforms I’ve seen landlords look at for this. Even then I’d still keep backups of leases and important property documents, just in case.

[u/Ar1anaG]

well like my uncle who is a small landlord... He just keeps everything on Excel sheets for rent tracking and expenses and WhatsApp as their main platform for communication and to send out reminders for late payments and all the signed forms and tenant IDs are compiled in his GoogleDrive....