Property Management CRM: The Category That Charges by the Door

Property management software bills per unit, not per seat

This is the one corner of the CRM market that does not charge by the person — it charges by the door. Every product we priced on 24 September 2026 sizes its bill from the number of units under management, which makes it incomparable with an agent CRM and means your staff count barely affects the invoice.

That single difference reshapes the buying decision. Adding a leasing assistant costs nothing; taking on a forty-unit building changes your software bill immediately. Price these products against your portfolio, and re-price them whenever it grows.

Two things to read carefully on these pages

The first is the billing toggle, because on DoorLoop it did not behave as labelled during our read. The page offers Monthly and Yearly controls, and in both states every plan card was captioned "Per month. Billed yearly." with the same figures — so the monthly-billing price is not something we can report, and neither should you assume it from the yearly one.

The second is the promotional banner. DoorLoop's page carried an offer of 30% off for three months plus zero onboarding fees on select plans, with a stated end date. A three-month discount against a twelve-month decision is worth about a twenty-fifth of your first-year bill; price the plan without it.

The fees that are not in the subscription

Onboarding and per-transaction charges move the real cost more than the plan choice does at small portfolio sizes. Buildium's own estimator notes that taxes, onboarding and optional add-ons are not included in the figure it shows, and DoorLoop states that its onboarding fee is based on portfolio size — neither publishes the amount.

Rentec Direct is the outlier on transparency here. It publishes no setup fees, no term commitments and no training costs, and prints its per-transaction rates: outgoing ACH at $2.00 on Starter against $0.50 on Pro and PM, and tenant screening packages from $14.95 to $29.45 on Starter against $10 to $18 on Pro and PM.

When you need a property-management product at all

If you are managing rentals on behalf of owners, you need one — because trust accounting and owner reporting are legal and accounting obligations, not conveniences. Rentec draws that line explicitly: its PM tier is the one that adds trust accounting, owner accounting and an owner portal.

If you own the doors yourself and there are fewer than ten of them, a flat $25 a month or a general CRM plus a spreadsheet will genuinely do. And if you are a sales agent who occasionally manages a rental for a client, this is not your category at all — the agent CRM comparison is the right page.

Price it at the portfolio you will have

Because these products bill per unit, the price you are quoted today is the wrong number to compare — the right one is what the same plan costs at the portfolio you expect in eighteen months. A tier that is comfortable at ten doors can be the wrong tier at eighty.

DoorLoop's own page makes the arithmetic visible: at its default of ten units, Starter is $69 a month and captioned $6.90 a unit, Pro is $149 at $14.90 a unit and Premium is $209 at $20.90 a unit. Buildium works the same way from a unit-count input, with Essential starting at $62 a month, Growth at $192 and Premium at $400. Put your real number in both estimators before you compare anything.

The features that decide the tier

Tier choice in this category is usually forced by one feature rather than chosen on value, and it is worth knowing which one will force yours before you look at prices. Three do most of the forcing.

• Trust accounting. If you hold money on owners' behalf you need it, and it sits in the upper tier almost everywhere — Rentec Direct puts trust accounting, owner accounting and the owner portal in its PM tier specifically.
• Owner reporting. Owners who can log in and see their own statements generate dramatically fewer phone calls, and that portal is usually a paid step.
• Accounting integration. DoorLoop lists QuickBooks Online sync at its Pro tier rather than Starter, which for a bookkeeper is the whole decision.
• API access. Sitting at the top tier on DoorLoop, and the thing to check if you intend to connect anything else at all.

Transaction fees, where they are published

Per-transaction costs can exceed the subscription at small portfolios, and only one vendor we read publishes them plainly. Rentec Direct lists outgoing ACH at $2.00 on Starter against $0.50 on Pro and PM, and tenant screening packages from $14.95 to $29.45 on Starter against $10 to $18 on Pro and PM.

That is a genuine argument for the more expensive tier: on Rentec, a landlord making enough outgoing payments recovers part of the step up from the ACH rate alone. It is also the kind of figure that never appears in a feature comparison, which is why it is worth asking every vendor for its rate card in writing.

What to check before the demo ends

Three things decide whether a property-management product fits, and none of them is on a feature list. Ask to see each one performed live with realistic data rather than described.

1. Run a month-end owner statement and read it as an owner would. If you would not send it, the software is not finished.
2. Take a maintenance request from tenant submission to paid invoice in one pass, and count the places a human has to retype something.
3. Export everything. Ask what comes out, in what format, and whether the ledger history comes with it.

Where this sits next to an agent CRM

If you do both jobs — sales and management — you will probably run two systems, and that is the normal answer rather than a failure. The billing units are different, the records are different, and the person doing the work is usually different too.

Trying to make one product do both tends to mean a property-management system used as a poor CRM, because the sales pipeline is the part these products treat as an afterthought. The cheaper and more reliable arrangement is a dedicated agent CRM at $0 to $58 a seat a month alongside the per-unit product, with the handover between them being a human one. The agent-side comparison is here.