As a landlord, there are a lot of things to worry about. You have to find tenants, make sure your tenants pay rent on time, respond to maintenance requests, and more. For most landlords, these responsibilities are in addition to a full-time job.
Fortunately for you, there is software that can help make renting easy and save you time. Not all software platforms are created equal, though.
In this post, we will explain the key differences between Rentalutions and Cozy.
Scope of Services
Rentalutions and Cozy both offer products that help landlords complete stages of the landlord journey. At Rentalutions, we help landlords complete every step of the full landlord journey:
Our software helps you find tenants, screen tenants, sign leases, collect rent, and manage maintenance. Our tools are designed to save you time and make you an even more professional, efficient landlord.
Cozy currently offers similar features; however, they do not offer leasing or maintenance features.
Below, we’ll do a complete feature-by-feature comparison of Rentalutions and Cozy. We’ll also compare pricing further below.
Rental Listings
Both Rentalutions and Cozy allow you to build a rental listing and syndicate to listing sites. The key difference is which sites you can post your listing to. The location of your listing is crucial; it impacts how many tenants will see your listing and reply to it.
We syndicate your listings to Zillow, Trulia, PadMapper, Apartments.com, Apartment List, Walk Score, and HotPads. These are the top listing sites for tenants to use, which guarantees you maximum exposure to the best tenants. Our landlords receive 16 leads on average within two weeks of listing their property.
Cozy syndicates your listing to Realtor.com and Doorsteps.com. That’s two sites compared to the seven sites you can post on with Rentalutions. Cozy also doesn’t offer tenant lead management. If you’ve been a landlord for a while, then you know that managing tenant leads can be stressful. With Rentalutions, you can manage tenants who reach out to you. You’ll have a list of the tenants’ names, emails, and the message they sent to you in their inquiry. You can reply to their inquiries directly in your account.
Rental Applications
With Cozy, you can only invite a tenant to apply directly from the listing. This requires you to create a listing first, before having a tenant apply.
With Rentalutions, you can invite tenants to fill out an application at any point, as long as you have their name and email address. In other words, if you didn’t create a listing with us, you can still invite tenants to apply. We make sure that you can enter our product at any stage in your rental process and still be able to make progress where it matters most for you.
As tenants complete our rental application, they are asked to fill out references with email addresses. We automatically send an email to their references asking them to fill out a short questionnaire on the tenant. We automatically send these responses directly to you. This allows you to hear feedback from tenants’ prior landlords without doing any additional work.
Cozy currently offers a similar testimonial feature. However, their product lets the tenant choose whether the “Request a Testimonial” box is checked or unchecked. If the tenant leaves the box unchecked, then you will not receive any information from prior landlords without manually contacting the prior landlord yourself.
Credit, Background, and Eviction Reports
Both Rentalutions and Cozy offer credit, background, and eviction checks. This allows you to check not only tenants’ financial and criminal histories, but also eviction histories. Finding out that a tenant has a prior eviction indicates the tenant likely has a past of not paying rent or not taking care of the property. Requiring all three of these reports will help you find good tenants.
At Rentalutions, you can request any combination of these reports. Here’s the pricing breakdown:
Credit Report — $25
Background Check — $20
Eviction Check- $15
All Reports Bundled — $45 (best deal)
This fee can be paid by you or your tenants. As you may notice, we prioritize providing flexibility to our landlords and tenants. That way, you’re not locked into any set way of doing things. You have the power to run your rental business exactly the way you want.
Online Rental Lease
Our online rental lease is state-specific and includes every necessary rule, regulation, clause, and addendum that you’ll need as a professional landlord. You and your tenants can digitally sign from the comfort of your own homes. You won’t have to find a template online, research state laws, or contact a lawyer. This saves you time and energy, not to mention your lease will be online where it is securely backed up, accessible anytime, and it’s a part of your account with every other important aspect of your rental business.
Cozy doesn’t currently offer online legal contracts.
Online Rent Collection
With Rentalutions, tenants choose whether they want automatic payments to be turned on or off. This provides your tenants the ability to automatically pay, if that’s what they prefer.
With Rentalutions, you can add multiple bank accounts, which allows you to deposit a security deposit in one account and rent payments in another account. This is especially important if you live in a city where it’s legally required to keep rent and deposits separate. Cozy offers a similar feature that allows landlords to add multiple bank accounts.
Maintenance
Once you find and screen tenants, sign a lease, and start collecting rent, the process doesn’t end there. As you probably already know, maintenance is a huge aspect of being a landlord. Cozy does not currently offer the ability to submit and track maintenance issues.
Tenants can submit maintenance tickets with photos and a description of the issue when you use Rentalutions. You can reply to your tenant in your account and get the issue resolved faster. This provides your tenant an excellent experience (making them more willing to renew the lease), plus, you’ll keep your property in tip-top shape.
Extra Features
Both Rentalutions and Cozy offer reports to help you set your rent price. They’re both priced at $19.99. Our Rent Analysis Report is a six-page report that provides a rent estimate for your property, rent benchmarks for your area, county rent trends, and more. If you refer other landlords to Rentalutions, you can receive this report for free.
We also offer payment reports each year to our landlords because we understand how important it is to be prepared for tax season. Cozy similarly allows you to export your payment data as an excel file.
Pricing
Cozy is a free online tool, whereas Rentalutions is a professional business tool. As usual, when you pay more, you get more value. When you use Rentalutions to manage your rental property, you save time, get more flexibility, and more features.
Check out our pricing plans here.
Customer Support
We offer customer support seven days per week. Whether you reach out via email, live chat, or by phone, you’ll receive a prompt response from a real person. You can reach us at support@rentalutions.com or by giving us a call at (312) 508–3786.
We also offer an extensive help center that can answer any initial questions you may have.
Rentalutions is Built for DIY Landlords
Since day one, we’ve stayed focused on empowering DIY landlords.
In fact, our product is built by a team of landlords. We understand the rental process inside and out, which means we know exactly how to add value to your business.
Sign up today to join the 30,000+ landlords who are using Rentalutions to find and screen tenants, sign online leases, collect rent, and manage maintenance all in one place.
Article was updated on 8.8.17.
Originally published at Rentalutions.
