You don't need AppFolio. You need a system.
Property management software costs $1-3 per unit per month. For a 10-unit portfolio, that's $120-360/year just to track tenants and rent. For smaller landlords, that's overkill. A well-structured Notion workspace handles everything you need — for free.
The four databases every landlord needs
1. Properties — One row per property or unit. Fields: address, unit number, bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage, purchase price, current market value, monthly mortgage, insurance cost, and status (occupied/vacant/maintenance).
2. Tenants — One row per tenant. Fields: name, phone, email, lease start, lease end, monthly rent, security deposit, emergency contact, and a relation to their property. When you click into a tenant, you see their payment history. When you click into a property, you see its tenants.
3. Rent payments — One row per payment. Fields: tenant (relation), amount, date due, date paid, status (Paid/Late/Partial/Unpaid), and payment method. A formula calculates days overdue. A rollup on the tenant record shows total paid and any outstanding balance.
4. Maintenance — One row per request. Fields: property (relation), description, priority (Emergency/High/Medium/Low), vendor assigned, cost, date reported, date resolved, and status. This replaces the text thread with your handyman and gives you a searchable history of every repair.
The views that matter
- Occupancy dashboard — Gallery view of all properties, filtered by status. Red for vacant, green for occupied.
- Rent this month — Table view filtered to current month, sorted by status. See who's paid and who hasn't at a glance.
- Leases expiring soon — Filtered view showing leases ending within 60 days. Your renewal pipeline.
- Maintenance queue — Kanban board: Reported → Assigned → In Progress → Complete.
The shortcut
Building this from scratch takes 3-5 hours if you know Notion well. The Rental Property Manager template has all four databases, all views, plus a vendor directory and income/expense tracker — ready to duplicate and start using immediately. $39, one time, no monthly fees.