Search for “property management CRM” and the general-purpose tools show up with templates ready to go. They look finished in the screenshots. Here is what three of them actually say on their own pages, read in September 2026, and what a landlord ends up building on top.
What the vendors’ own pages promise
Zoho. Zoho’s marketplace lists a Property Management CRM. It is built on Zoho CRM, but it is published by a partner, Mav Consulting Group, not by Zoho. The listing calls it a vertical CRM that “automates lease pipelines.” It is marked as paid, with no price on the listing.
monday.com. The property management template says it helps with finding new tenants, screening applicants, handling leases, move-ins and move-outs, and repairs. The features it lists are about work management: assign a task to someone, label it by priority, drag it between groups, and import or export Excel. The page does not mention rent collection, payments, a ledger, or deposits.
HubSpot. HubSpot’s real estate page is about selling. Contacts, pipeline stages for the sales process, email sequences, and follow-up tasks, with a free tier to start. Tenants, rent, and leases do not come up on the page.
So, fairly: all three give you a clean contact list, a board or pipeline you can shape, and tasks with owners and due dates. For a landlord with a team that already lives in one of these tools, that is a real head start.
Week one: it feels like enough
You import your tenants from the spreadsheet. You make a board with a card per unit. You add a column for rent amount and one for lease end. You set a task to call the plumber about 4A.
It works. Honestly, for about a month, it works well.
Month three: what you are building by hand
Rent that repeats
A CRM task is a one-time thing. Rent is due on the first, every month, for every unit, forever. You end up with a recurring reminder, and then a place to write down whether it came in, and then a way to note that half came in. That is a ledger, built out of cards.
The ledger itself
Charges, payments, late fees, credits, and a running balance per tenant. A board can hold numbers in columns, but it does not add them up by tenant over time, and it cannot tell you who owes what on the 5th without you checking each card. When a tenant disputes a balance, a column of numbers you typed is a weak answer.
Lease dates that should trigger something
The lease end date sits in a field. Nothing happens when it approaches unless you built an automation for it, and nothing links that date to the next lease on the same unit. Six months in, the history of unit 4A is spread across two tenants’ cards and a closed task.
Deposits
Money you hold for the tenant and may owe back, itemized, on a deadline your state sets. A number field is not accounting. At move-out you rebuild the deposit math from memory and the card’s comment thread.
A screening process that stays consistent
This is the one that can cost real money. Sales tools are designed to help you spend time on the best prospects and let the rest go cold. That instinct is exactly wrong for rental applicants. Fair housing rules expect every applicant to be handled the same way, and your records to show it. A board where you drag some inquiries forward and leave others sitting is a record too, just not the one you want. The fair housing screening criteria guide covers how to write the criteria down before the first inquiry arrives.
When a generic CRM is still the right call
If you run a property management company and your real work is signing new owners, a sales CRM fits that job. The difference between the two kinds of software is laid out in CRM vs property management software.
If you already pay for one of these tools for another business and have two units, using it for the contacts is reasonable. Keep the rent and deposits somewhere that does arithmetic.
If you are moving off one
Export the contacts before you cancel anything. monday.com’s template page lists Excel export; for the others, check the vendor’s help pages for the export path. The contact list is the part worth bringing over. LeaseRooster imports tenants, properties, units, and leases from CSV or Excel on every plan, with a preview before any record is created. An undo is there for 24 hours, meant for an import that only added new records, never one that matched or updated records you already had. Details are on the import and export page. Once the tenants are in, the tenant CRM holds them next to their leases, invoices, and work orders, which is the part you were building by hand.
One thing does not transfer: payment history. Keep the old export as your record of the months before the switch.
This is general information, not legal advice. Rules change and local ordinances vary. Confirm current requirements with your city, county, or an attorney before you act.