My first rental was a mistake.
I was 24, living in a 3-bedroom starter home I'd bought with an FHA loan because the rent on my apartment had gone up twice in 18 months. Six months in I got a job offer in another city. I did the math: either sell the house and eat closing costs, or rent it out. My dad, who's been a general contractor for 40 years, said "you can always sell it next year, but you can't un-sell it." So I put it on Craigslist for $1,150 and moved.
The tenant broke the garbage disposal the first week. I drove back on a Saturday to fix it. That's when I learned rule one: the landlord business isn't the real-estate business, it's the maintenance-coordination-plus-emotional-regulation business.
The spreadsheet era.
I moved home in 2020 and bought two more houses the same year, both fixers. By 2022 I was converting single-family houses into co-living because the unit economics were absurd: instead of $1,300/mo for a 3-bed, I was getting $700 per room, per room, with utilities bundled, furnished, with a standardized lease. Four houses, 13 rooms. Later 15.
I ran all of it on a Google Sheet called "BBR MASTER v7_FINAL_actually.xlsx." It had tabs for rent roll, a tab per house for expenses, a tab of phone numbers, and a column where I tracked whether each tenant had paid by the 5th, highlighted red, yellow, or green. When a lease ended I'd copy the row to an "archive" tab. My bookkeeper would email me every quarter asking for receipts and I'd spend a weekend re-creating them from bank statements.
It worked. Kind of. Until I missed a late fee three months in a row on one tenant because I forgot to check the tab. That tenant eventually left owing $2,400 I never collected. That was the real cost of the spreadsheet: not the 10 hours a month, but the $2,400 I gave up by being sloppy.
When I tried AppFolio.
A bigger operator I respect told me over coffee one morning that if I was running 10+ doors I needed "real software." He paid for AppFolio. So I signed up. $280/month minimum, plus a $400 setup fee, plus 3.5 weeks of onboarding calls with someone in a headset reading from a script.
Three things I'll say in AppFolio's favor: the accounting is legit, the bank reconciliation works, and the reporting is better than a spreadsheet. I'd be lying if I said otherwise.
But: my tenants logged into a portal that said AppFolio at the top. The payment receipts were branded AppFolio. The late notices came from an @appfolio.com email. I'd spent four years building a name — Property Management — and my tenants' first impression of "the landlord" was somebody else's logo. It felt like franchising a McDonald's when I'd actually been running a neighborhood diner.
On top of that, every feature that actually mattered to me — online applications, electronic lease signing, the owner statements my CPA wanted — was an add-on. By month four I was at $340/mo. I cancelled in May 2024 and went back to the spreadsheet. That was the low point.
The weekend I started building.
Here's the embarrassing part. I'm not a professional developer. I built a couple of internal tools during my last corporate job, I can move around in a codebase, but I'm not the kind of person who "ships a SaaS on a weekend" — that tweet never resonated with me.
What actually happened: on January 10th, 2026, a tenant at the Turf Ave house emailed me asking for a paid-in-full statement for her tax return. I went to the Google Sheet. The sheet was wrong. Her February rent had been logged under the wrong house. I spent ninety minutes reconciling, apologized twice, and sent the statement at midnight. I closed the laptop and said out loud, "I am not doing this in 2027."
The next morning I started Tenantory. First commit was January 11. First tenant paid rent through it on February 14 — a Stripe webhook firing correctly was my Valentine's. By March 1st all 15 rooms were on it. Property Management has not touched a spreadsheet since.
Why this works for other operators now.
A couple of operators found me through a Twitter thread I wrote in late February about the $280/mo sticker shock. They asked if they could pay me to let them use it. I said yes, awkwardly, because I hadn't designed it for anyone but myself. It turns out "designed for one guy with 15 rooms" ports surprisingly well to "a woman with 22 doors" and "a retired electrician with 8 houses." Because we have the same problems.
Tenantory is now open to anyone running 1 – 300 units. It replaces AppFolio, most of QuickBooks, DocuSign, and the line item on your ledger called "bookkeeper." It costs $39 – $99/mo depending on portfolio size. And — this is the whole point — it shows your brand, not mine. Your tenant portal says your company name. Your lease PDFs have your logo. Your emails come from your domain. Tenantory is plumbing. You're the house.