The landlord operating pattern is distinct from both residential real-estate sales and large-portfolio property management. A landlord running 5 to 50 units needs tenant-prospect pipeline, lease documentation, renewal cadence, maintenance request tracking, and rent-reminder flow in one tool without paying for enterprise property-management features that do not apply. Strkr is the CRM for that specific profile.
Landlord operations have a pain shape. The six items below are the ones Strkr customers describe when they come looking for a CRM that fits a landlord profile rather than an enterprise property-management profile.
Most landlords running 5 to 50 units operate on a Google Sheet or Excel workbook with tenant names, lease dates, and rent amounts, plus a Gmail folder with the application PDFs, lease agreements, and inspection photos. The system works until it does not. A missed renewal, a lost deposit receipt, or a maintenance request buried in email becomes a operational failure every 6 to 12 months.
The property-management software market serves portfolios of 500 units and up with pricing, feature complexity, and onboarding that match. A landlord with 15 units pays for seats, modules, and setup fees that do not apply to the operating pattern. The gap between spreadsheet and enterprise PM software is where most independent landlords live.
Zillow Rental Manager, Apartments.com, Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace. The rental-ad channels produce prospective-tenant leads with no CRM behind them. Landlords either triage leads manually through email or lose the lead because the response window is 2 to 24 hours and the manual process does not keep up.
Lease renewal is the single most important landlord-operational conversation and it is the one that gets lost most often. The right conversation starts 60 to 90 days before lease end: new rent, new terms, any changes. Most landlords either start the conversation late (which creates vacancy risk) or forget specific tenants until the renewal is already overdue (which creates a renewal under duress).
Maintenance requests arrive by text, email, phone call, and portal entry with no consistent intake surface. The tenant, the unit, the issue, the vendor, the status: all of it lives in separate threads. Keeping track of what is open, what is closed, what is pending vendor response, and what the trailing-month maintenance spend was takes manual aggregation nobody has time for.
Lease documents, rental applications, inspection photos, deposit receipts, pet records, insurance certificates, and vendor invoices accumulate across email, Dropbox, Google Drive, phone camera rolls, and physical folders. Pulling together the complete tenant file for a dispute, an insurance claim, or a tax filing turns into a 2-day scavenger hunt.
The landlord setup is lean. Contacts for tenants and prospects, a custom Unit object, a Lease object, a Maintenance Ticket object, and specific Flows for the rhythms that matter. Below is the shape most landlords ship with.
Tenants and prospective tenants both live on the Contact object with custom fields for current unit, lease start, lease end, current rent, deposit held, pet status, insurance expiration, and emergency contact. Prospective tenants carry additional fields for desired move-in date, desired unit type, budget range, and application status.
The Unit custom object carries address, unit identifier, bedroom and bathroom count, square footage, current tenant, current lease, maintenance history, and occupancy status. The Unit record is the center of the operation; everything else (tenants, leases, tickets, documents) relates back to a unit.
Each lease is a record with start date, end date, monthly rent, deposit amount, pet addendum, parking addendum, and renewal status. The lease record drives the renewal Flow (60-day and 30-day reminders) and the rent-increase calculation. Historical leases stay attached to the unit as a renewal history.
Maintenance tickets land through a tenant portal (branded form linked from the rental agreement), through a tenant-facing email alias, or through direct creation by the landlord after a tenant text or call. Each ticket carries unit, tenant, issue type, priority, vendor assignment, status, and cost. The ticket surface replaces the scattered-text-threads pattern.
Every document attaches to the tenant, lease, or unit record: rental application, approved application, lease agreement, lease amendments, move-in inspection, move-out inspection, deposit receipt, insurance certificate, pet documentation, correspondence record. The document library replaces the email-plus-Dropbox-plus-phone-roll pattern.
Flows automate the cadences: 60-day renewal reminder, 30-day renewal reminder, monthly rent reminder (5 days before due), late-rent reminder (3 days after due), insurance-expiration reminder (14 days before expiration), inspection scheduling (quarterly for pet units, annually otherwise).
The prospective-tenant pipeline runs on a flow: lead capture from the rental-ad channel, screening questions, application packet, approval decision, lease signing, move-in.
Each rental-ad channel forwards inquiries to a email alias or captures through a Strkr web form. The incoming lead creates a Prospective Tenant contact with channel attribution, requested unit, desired move-in date, and specific message content preserved. The lead-source attribution feeds back into which channels produce the best tenants.
An automated screening Flow sends 4 to 6 pre-application questions (desired move-in date, employment status, income range, pet status, number of occupants, smoking status) within 15 minutes of the lead landing. Prospects who respond become active applicants; prospects who do not respond within 48 hours fall off the pipeline without manual followup.
Qualifying prospects receive the full application packet with background check authorization, income verification request, previous landlord references, and co-signer paperwork if applicable. The checklist is standardized per unit type and the application status is tracked (submitted, under review, approved, declined, withdrawn) on the Contact record.
The approval decision triggers lease generation (standardized lease template with specific unit, rent, and term pre-filled), DocuSign send for landlord and tenant signature, and the deposit-collection reminder. Lease execution creates the Lease record, moves the Contact from Prospective Tenant to Tenant, and marks the Unit as occupied.
Lead-source attribution runs natively: Zillow produces X leads at Y application rate at Z approval rate, Apartments.com produces different metrics, Facebook Marketplace produces different metrics. The reporting answers which channels are worth the paid promotion spend and which are not.
The pipeline shape fits a landlord with 3 to 15 units: 2 to 8 active prospects at a time, 10 to 30 prospects per month, 1 to 5 approvals per month. The lightweight pipeline is deliberately not an enterprise property-management multi-site pipeline; it is a landlord-specific operational cadence.
The ongoing-tenant operations run on four specific Flow cadences.
Monthly rent reminder Flow sends a friendly reminder 5 days before due with the amount, payment methods, and the unit address referenced. A late-rent followup fires 3 days after due with the payment-method link again and a contact option for payment arrangements. Both messages are templated and tenant-friendly.
Maintenance tickets flow from tenant intake through vendor assignment (plumber, electrician, HVAC, general handyman) to status updates (quoted, scheduled, in progress, completed, closed). The tenant receives automated status updates at each stage without manual landlord intervention, which reduces the tenant-call volume on open tickets.
The 60-day renewal Flow fires exactly 60 days before lease end with a renewal-option conversation: proposed new rent, proposed new terms, response-by date. A 30-day followup fires if the tenant has not responded. The pattern avoids the vacancy risk from a late conversation and the renewal-under-duress problem from a missed conversation.
Inspection Flows schedule the required inspections: annual for standard units, quarterly for pet units, pre-renewal for all units. The Flow handles scheduling, 24-hour-notice compliance for the jurisdiction, and the move-in and move-out inspection documentation that drives deposit decisions.
| Feature | Strkr | Enterprise property management |
|---|---|---|
| Target portfolio size | Landlords with 5 to 50 units | Property managers with 100 plus units |
| Pricing basis | Per seat with full product | Per unit with module-based pricing |
| Monthly cost at 20 units | One or two seats | 100 to 300 dollars per month plus modules |
| Setup | Self-serve, hours to days | Onboarding engagement, weeks |
| Rental-ad lead capture | Email aliases plus forms, native | Integration add-on |
| Lease documents | DocuSign and document library per unit | Native portal with templates |
| Maintenance tracking | Tickets, vendor assignment, tenant updates | Deep property-management workflow |
| Rent payment | Reminder flows, external payment | Native rent collection with ACH fees |
| Reporting | Cross-object including lead source and renewal rate | Property-management operational reports |
A landlord with 14 units across 7 duplexes migrated from a Google Sheet and Gmail to Strkr over 2 weekends. 14 Unit records, 14 current Tenant contacts, 14 active Lease records, 2 Prospective Tenant records in-flight, 6 open maintenance tickets, and the document library for every active lease moved in. The 60-day renewal Flow caught 2 renewals that would have been late under the previous system.
A 32-unit landlord with a mix of single-family and small-multifamily properties was paying 180 dollars per month to AppFolio for a product designed for 500-plus-unit portfolios. The move to Strkr dropped the monthly cost significantly, cut the setup complexity, and kept the maintenance-tracking and renewal cadence they actually used. The AppFolio-specific rent-collection ACH flow moved to a separate payment tool.
An 8-unit landlord running Zillow, Apartments.com, and Facebook Marketplace rental ads tracked each channel through Strkr for 6 months. Zillow produced the most inquiries, Apartments.com produced the highest approval rate, Facebook Marketplace produced the most problematic applicants. The data drove a decision to pause Facebook Marketplace promotion and double the Apartments.com featured-listing spend.
Start a 14-day Strkr trial with the landlord template: tenant and prospective-tenant records, Unit custom object, Lease tracking, maintenance tickets, document library per unit, and the renewal-plus-rent-reminder Flows. Right-sized for 5 to 50 units without enterprise overhead.
No. Strkr is a CRM configured for the landlord operating pattern. Native rent collection with ACH processing, deep accounting ledgers per unit, and the property-management-specific regulatory workflows that AppFolio, Buildium, and Yardi handle are not Strkr features. Strkr handles the tenant-relationship, prospective-tenant pipeline, lease documentation, maintenance tracking, and renewal cadence side of the operation. Rent collection typically runs on a separate tool (Zelle, Venmo, specialty rent-payment service) with the reminder flows coming from Strkr.
Strkr fits landlords with 5 to 50 units cleanly. Below 5 units the setup overhead is often more than a spreadsheet justifies (though some landlords with 3-unit portfolios still prefer the organization). Above 50 to 100 units, the needs typically shift toward dedicated property-management software with deeper accounting, maintenance-workflow, and compliance features. The 5 to 50 unit range is the sweet spot where Strkr delivers meaningfully more than a spreadsheet without the enterprise overhead.
Rental-ad channels can forward inquiries to a email alias (e.g. leads@yourdomain.com) that Strkr monitors and parses into Prospective Tenant records. Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist inquiries typically come through the user interface and require either a email forward from the landlord inbox or copy-paste intake. Zillow Rental Manager has limited API access; most landlords use the email-forward pattern with high reliability.
Strkr stores lease documents in the unit-specific document library and integrates with DocuSign for signature collection. The lease template itself is landlord-provided or sourced from a legal-template provider; Strkr does not provide a jurisdictionally-compliant lease template because the specifics vary by state, city, and property type. Many landlords use a template from their real-estate attorney or a jurisdiction-specific resource and store it on Strkr for every lease.
Yes. Maintenance tickets carry vendor assignment, scheduling, cost tracking, and status flow. The vendor list is a Company object with contact info, service area, trade specialty, and historical performance (average response time, average cost, tenant feedback). Vendor dispatching happens through the ticket surface: ticket created, vendor assigned, tenant notified, work completed, invoice attached, ticket closed. Trailing-period maintenance-cost reporting runs natively.
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