A $29 a month renewal workflow kept two tenants I would have lost

14 units across three small buildings. My actual problem was never leads, it was that I found out someone was leaving when they told me they were leaving, usually 30 days out, and then I ate a turn in the wrong month.

So I stopped shopping for investor CRMs and used a cheap general one, $29 a month. Six weeks of evenings. One record per unit with lease start, lease end, rent, and last three maintenance items. One automation: at 120 days before lease end it makes me a task to walk the unit and decide, at 95 days it drafts the renewal letter for me to send myself, at 60 days it flags anything with no response.

Last cycle 11 leases came up. Previous year I renewed 8 of 11. This year 10 of 11, and the one that left gave me 80 days of warning, so I had it leased before the keys came back. My 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 broke it: I imported my tenant list twice while learning the thing, so a handful of records were duplicated, and when the 95 day step first fired one tenant got the same message four times in an hour. She was decent about it. I now have a rule that nothing sends to a tenant automatically, it drafts and waits for me. That single change is what I would keep above everything else.

One caution. Renewal and non-renewal notice periods are set by state and sometimes by city, so I had the actual notice language and timing looked at by an attorney here before I put it in a template. The software doesn't know your state.