MHP Tech Stack? Feedback on software for new operator

mobile home university
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I’m hoping to close on my first park soon and am trying to figure out what technology to implement to make my life easier. Hoping to get things right from day one and be set for the future. Below is my current thinking. If people have strong opinions or would go a different direction please share. And if you think I’m missing some key stuff please feel free to comment on that as well. Thanks in advance.

Property Management & Accounting: Rent Manager
Text/Calling: OpenPhone
Website: Carrd
Project Management: Monday.com
CRM: Hubspot? What do people use for? I will be looking to do some infill so maybe it would be helpful for leads
Other: Metron Water Meters

What am I missing? General thoughts?

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Don’t over think it for your first deal. Rent Manager / Buildium / other PM software I’d recommend for sure. Websites/CRMs/phones will come later… can get a vanity number from Number Barn very cheap.

We’ve bought from sellers who run hundreds of units using a ledger notebook (and others that have run that many without a notebook!) so I’ve learned to try to keep things as simple as possible.

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Congrats on your deal, I am in the same boat.

@westewart what is number barn?

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I think you are overthinking it and you are selecting software that is overkill. Of course if your first park is 800 units and you will have a staff of 12, then your list is appropriate. My first park started with Excel, Google Voice, and an email account.

After Excel, we migrated to Buildium which is more modern and easier than Rent Manager. Managing vendors and tenants is easier in Buildium. For example, you can natively pay vendors through EFT, but you have to use a 3rd party in Rent Manager, and EFT is not automatic. We ultimately switched to Rent Manager because we had to restrict banking from certain people in a way that Buildium would not allow.

Any text or calling will work, but Buildium and Rent Manager have texting built in so this is not necessary. Unless you have more than one property an 100s of lots, you can use something as simple as Google Voice. If you have many employees on different extensions around the world, you can use 8x8 or RingCentral.

Website can be hosted by anybody - Wix, Wordpress, GoDaddy, Google, etc. In my opinion they are all the same.

Project management can be your native Apple Tasks if it is just you. Otherwise, you can use Monday, Asana, Google, Trello, ClickUp as they are all somewhat the same. Of course if you are running a larger corporate office, Monday, Asana, and ClickUp will have better enterprise-level control features.

CRM is not needed unless you have many potential tenants calling that you do cannot control them all. Even Rent Manager uses the Rent Manager for their internal software sales CRM.

Metron is good, but there are others. We started buying Next Century from Flows.

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I agree that you are potentially overbuilding your software stack. You can get by with pretty inexpensive stuff like excel. I’ll give you my current setup for 18 tenants and 38 pad park.

Phone: OpenPhone (I think I made one of the original posts about them)
Website: I inherited some 3rd party tool the old owners used. Can totally get by with Wix or even Google Sites depending on your needs here
Accounting: Wave (www.waveapps.com) I do all my accounting through the free version of wave. Customers take money directly to the local bank, but I send invoices through wave as well and about half of them pay online. Wave charges 1% which I’m happy to pay.
Submetering: Metron. They have been good, haven’t had a problem with them.
PM/Notebook/Etc.: Microsoft OneNote
CRM: GoHighLevel, or similar clone (I’ve been debating on making my own GHL clone for use in the mobile home park space, but that would be a pet project for later)

Accounting is certainly missing from your list. :smiley: Hopefully that helps!
Edit: Correction as Rent Manager will handle accounting.

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Yes, accounting is missing, but if he goes with Rent Manager or Buildium that is full GAAP accounting. If anybody is interested, you would be welcome to put your units in our Rent Manager and have Owner access. We would do the bookkeeping, rent collection (your bank), and the customer service phone, email, and texting. For those starting out, it might be one less headache as you are learning the business.