The Successful Landlord Blog

Recently, I was introduced to Buildium while searching for a method to accept electronic rent payments from my tenants. I signed up for the 15-day free trial and here is my experience:

Buildium’s product is a pretty slick web-based application which can be used to manage properties of any size. There are basically three editions; The Landlord Edition for smaller operations where a landlord/manager can manage a few single-family rental houses or apartment units, The Property Manager Edition which is designed to manage multiple apartment complexes, and The Association Edition which is set up to facilitate management of condominium associations.

The edition I previewed was The Landlord Edition. This package incorporates the following features:

• A simple accounting function to track rents, fees and management expenses
• The ability to keep track of leases and tenant information
• The ability to manage maintenance tasks for your properties
• Web-based components to receive rental applications, market properties for rent, accept payments and allow tenants to check their account on-line.

This application is well designed and functionally flawless. It would no-doubt be very valuable to a property owner with multiple buildings to manage. For instance, sometimes there is a property manager on site at each building of which there are multiple spread across town.

In this situation, Buildium Property Manager Edition would be perfect. Since the application is web based, there is no need to setup and maintain the infrastructure necessary to maintain multiple links into a central location where the data are stored. Instead, all that is necessary at each location is a low-grade PC with internet connectivity and Buildium’s application does the rest.

Can you tell that I’m a recovering network engineer?

For my personal situation though, I store this information using a combination of Excel spreadsheets and a full-blown accounting system (not Quickbooks), and while I do maintain somewhat of a modest information infrastructure, I feel that it is necessary due to the fact that I live in central Florida on the east coast.

The point being that a few years ago we had no less than three major hurricanes grace us with their presence. Two of those were direct hits on our area. Both times we lost power for at least ten days and went without internet connectivity for at least two weeks. While we could power our information infrastructure locally with generators, we depended on the local cable company for internet access. For us to not have access to our accounting and tenant information for that length of time in a crisis situation such as this would have been debilitating to say the least.

Also, as far as accepting electronic payments goes, which was the main goal, I’m almost sure that to use this functionality, you have to use the Buildium product. In other words, you couldn’t integrate the functionality directly into your own web site with a product like PayPal.

So, all in all, Buildium has a great, well integrated product but unfortunately it wouldn’t work for my needs.