Stessa and RentRedi are two of the top solutions in the rapidly evolving world of property management software. Each has a suite of tools to help landlords simplify critical tasks, such as tenant screening, rent collection, income and expense tracking, financial reporting, and more. 

What exactly does each platform offer, and how do they stack up from the perspective of residential property owners and real estate investors?

This in-depth comparison dives into both services’ key features, strengths, and weaknesses. Let’s begin with this brief overview table, summarizing the main offerings of these two platforms:

How Stessa and RentRedi work

Both Stessa and RentRedi offer unique solutions tailored to landlords’ needs. 

Stessa is designed for residential real estate investors and provides comprehensive accounting tools that track income, expenses, and key performance metrics across all properties. It also offers an added benefit of free landlord bank accounts for each rental. 

RentRedi is a multifaceted platform featuring tools for listing and marketing properties, tenant screening, rent collection, and maintenance requests, meant to streamline the entire rental management process.

Stessa overview

Stessa, a Roofstock company, gives residential real estate investors a specialized accounting platform to track the performance of their properties. It efficiently categorizes income and expenditure transactions according to the IRS Schedule E and generates financial summaries with minimal effort, eliminating physical documents and paperwork.

Stessa serves both novice landlords and seasoned investors, handling an unlimited number of properties. With an emphasis on working to enhance your investments, the software integrates with your financial accounts and property management applications, instantly offering you a detailed fiscal snapshot of your portfolio.

Stessa’s features encompass tenant applications and screening, eSigning (available with the paid Stessa Pro plan), rent collection, landlord banking, and document storage. Its mobile applications for iOS and Android ensure you stay linked to your portfolio from virtually anywhere and offer an automated receipt scanning function, which is especially useful during tax season.

Pricing structure

Stessa’s tiered pricing model accommodates a variety of needs and budgets:

You can always start with the Essentials plan and upgrade to a paid plan as your portfolio expands and your needs evolve.

Features summary

• Automated income and expense tracking: Organizes and categorizes transactions automatically from connected bank, lender, credit card, and property management accounts with no extra fee or add-on required.
• Real-time performance metrics: Get 24/7 visibility into your portfolio’s performance.
• Financial reporting: Generate income statements, net cash flow reports, balance sheets (with the paid Stessa Pro plan), and more.
• Property management integration: Connect to your property management software for a complete portfolio summary.
• Online rent collection: Collect rent via ACH payments, credit cards, or debit cards.
• Landlord banking: Open an FDIC-insured checking account for each property and seamlessly integrate it with Stessa’s financial tracking features.
• Unlimited properties: Add an unlimited number of properties.
• Collaborative access: Invite other investors with different access levels.
• Data security: Use industry-leading encryption to keep your data safe and secure.
• Insurance quotes: Get insurance quotes and policies for rental properties within Stessa from Steadily, a tech-enabled national landlord insurance provider.
• Tax resources: Access a suite of tax resources created in partnership with The Real Estate CPA.
• Rental applications and tenant screening: Use Stessa’s tenant screening tool and free rental applications.
• Legal forms and templates: 60+ legal docs and eSigning via DocuSign.
• Maintenance tracking: Tenants can submit maintenance requests directly in Stessa – no more texts or phone calls.

Pros

• Stessa boasts many unique benefits, making it a robust and comprehensive tool for residential real estate investors. It delivers a holistic snapshot of your investment portfolio, a feature many landlords appreciate.
• By offering real-time performance indicators and automated income and expense monitoring, Stessa equips property owners with a precise understanding of their financial status at any given moment. This crystal-clear transparency is crucial to decision-making and strategizing future investments.
• The platform’s user-friendly capability to directly interface with your property management software and financial accounts saves you the significant time and labor of manual data entry. The unlimited properties feature is especially beneficial for those managing multiple properties in several states. 
• Stessa’s free rent collection service does away with the need for add-ons, making rental payments easier for both tenants and landlords. The built-in eSigning rental application and screening tools add another layer of ease, simplifying the tenant selection process.

• Accessing tax resources and landlord insurance quotes within the platform helps you tackle the more advanced aspects of property ownership, such as tax filing and securing adequate coverage against risks.
• Lastly, Stessa users can connect and network in an active community forum, which allows real estate investors to exchange skills, knowledge, and interests.

Cons

• If you prefer to use tools like QuickBooks or Xero to track income and expenses, Stessa does not offer any direct integrations

RentRedi overview

RentRedi is an all-in-one property management software with user-friendly features for landlords and tenants.

Founded to focus on simplifying rental management, the company offers an affordable web portal and mobile app to screen tenants, receive rent payments, and manage property maintenance virtually anywhere. 

While many of these features are common to other property management systems, RentRedi aims to set itself apart by putting landlords first. 

Pricing structure

RentRedi offers 3 pricing plans. With each plan, you can use its tools for as many rentals, tenants, and team members as you like. Here’s the cost for each of RentRedi’s plans: 

• Start: $5 per month
• Grow: $29.95 per month (or $12 per month when paying annually)
• Pro: Custom pricing upon request

The main features you get access to in Grow that you don’t get with the Start plan include online applications, tenant screening, income verification, listings for vacant units, lease signatures, document storage, maintenance requests and tracking, and human support. 

Features summary

• Rent collection and accounting: Alongside multiple payment options, landlords can link bank accounts to individual properties, facilitating rent collection and financial tracking. There’s also an option to export rent payments directly to spreadsheets or QuickBooks Online.
• Tenant screening (Grow and Pro plan only): Certified TransUnion reports offer detailed credit, criminal, and eviction information. The screening includes background checks, and tenants pay $39.99 per application.
• Applications (Grow and Pro plan only): Included pre-qualification questions help landlords quickly determine if an applicant meets their criteria. Landlords can invite potential tenants to apply directly from their dashboard and monitor the status of pending, accepted, and rejected applications.
• Maintenance requests and coordination (Grow and Pro plan only): The platform provides a tenant maintenance request portal. Tenants receive automatic maintenance status updates, and you can manage work orders with your vendors.
• Listings and marketing (Grow and Pro plan only): RentRedi syndicates listings to Zillow and Realtor.com, and each listing can include virtual tour options accompanied by a professionally designed, free marketing page.

Pros

• Includes many of the features landlords need to run the day-to-day operations of their rental property business.
• Robust maintenance request and tracking portal that also includes vendor management.
• Tenant portal and app available on base plan.

Cons

• $5 per month plan is very basic and doesn’t offer features like tenant screening, maintenance portal, listing vacant units, signing leases or storing documents.
• To get access to those features, you need to upgrade to the $29.95 per month plan.
• While landlords can conveniently collect rent payments from tenants online, they can take up to 5 business days to become available. Additionally, if tenants choose to make their rent payments through the mobile app, the landlords’ funds could be on hold for as long as 7 business days before they’re accessible.

The final verdict

Stessa and RentRedi both offer a range of user-friendly tools designed to simplify the landlord’s job. 

A significant advantage of Stessa is its robust free plan that offers more functionality than even RentRedi’s base paid plan.

The Stessa platform provides automated income and expense tracking, instant reports for tax season, and real-time performance metrics. Tailored to rental property owners, Stessa offers vital real estate metrics crucial for informed investment decision-making.

Stessa also provides advanced portfolio optimization tools and banking services, including FDIC-insured accounts with a competitive APY and a cash management debit card. Its subscription option, Stessa Pro, has even more advanced features like budgeting, project expense tracking, eSigning, maintenance tracking, unlimited receipt scanning, and full data export.

Though both platforms cater to residential landlords, Stessa’s focus on financial and asset management, plus its banking options, might make it the preferred choice for novice and sophisticated real estate investors.

Visit the website to learn more about how Stessa helps rental owners and operators manage their portfolios like the pros.

*Stessa is not a bank. Stessa is a financial technology company. Terms and conditions, features and pricing are subject to change. This article, and the Stessa Blog in general, is intended for informational and educational purposes only, and is not investment, tax, financial planning, financial, legal, or real estate advice.