Singe Family Landlord’s Review of Buildium

If you’re a regular user, you probably know we self manage all of properties.  When getting started I wanted the ability to accept ACH payments so our tenants could pay electronically.  After much research I decided to go with Buildium.

First of all the Landlord edition is cheap, it’s only $9.99/mo for the first 10 units and $29.99/mo for 50.

There are not a lot of good reviews online from real landlords, so I figured I might as well write one.

Pros:

• Buildium allows you to accept ACH payments..
• It provides a login interface for your tenants to make maintenance requests and make payments.
• It does a fine job of tracking went the rent was received, when leases are going to expire, and tenant contact information.
• They seem to provide quite a few tutorials on how to use the system.

Cons

• Clearly, this software was not built for the single family residence landlord.  It seems to be focused on apartments, full-time property managers and Home Owner Associations.
• It has a bit of feature overload.  Full bank account tracking, etc.
• The reports do not seem to be very flexible: for example I would like to be able to print a tenant list, which it allows me to do, but I would like whatever I input in the notes field on that list somehow.
• Not everything works as it should in my mind.  For example, the name of my property management company has a logo.  It shows all stretched on the admin interface, but it displays fine on the tenant interface?  Weird…
• They also force you to click extra buttons to get reports on all your properties, I think this is an effort to make it easier for the multi-unit property managers.

Conclusion & Summary

It is kind of a love-hate relationship and at times I ever debate if I should completely turn it off.  The system is not really made for small property managers, so if you are under 10 units it’d probably not worth the extra work involved to set stuff up.

As you can tell this is a little bit of a mixed message review.  Hopefully, they will make some minor improvements along the way that will make things quicker and me much happier.

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