A $29 a month renewal workflow can keep two tenants a year on a 14 unit portfolio

Here is a small operations case worth studying. Take an operator with 14 units across three small buildings. For an operator at that size the expensive problem is finding out someone is leaving when they say they are leaving, usually 30 days out, and then eating a turn in the wrong month. Leads were never the constraint. The fix is to stop shopping for investor CRMs and use a cheap general one, $29 a month, with about six weeks of evenings to set it up. One record per unit with lease start, lease end, rent, and the last three maintenance items. One automation: at 120 days before lease end it creates a task to walk the unit and decide, at 95 days it drafts the renewal letter for the operator to send, at 60 days it flags anything with no response. Say 11 leases come up in a cycle. The previous year the operator renewed 8 of 11. With the workflow running, 10 of 11, and the one that leaves gives 80 days of warning, so the unit is leased before the keys come back. An average turn runs about $1,900 in paint, cleaning and small repairs, plus 20 something vacant days each. Two turns avoided is real money against a $348 annual tool cost. The part that nearly breaks it: importing the tenant list twice while learning the tool duplicates a handful of records, and when the 95 day step first fires one tenant gets the same message four times in an hour. The rule that follows is that nothing sends to a tenant automatically. It drafts and waits for a human. That single change is the one to keep above everything else. One caution. Renewal and non-renewal notice periods are set by state and sometimes by city, so the actual notice language and timing should be reviewed by a local attorney before it goes into a template. The software does not know your state.