Managing rental property is really the management of a hundred small things at once: leases and their renewal dates, rent that should arrive on the first, a leaky faucet in Unit 2B, a tenant who messaged on Sunday night, an invoice you meant to send, and a spreadsheet that no longer matches reality. Unitly exists to pull all of that into one calm, organized place.
Unitly brings property managers and tenants together on one simple platform to manage, communicate, and stay organized. Whether you own a single duplex or oversee dozens of units across several buildings, the workflow is the same, and it is built to be learned in an afternoon, not a quarter. This guide walks through exactly how Unitly works, step by step, so you can picture your own portfolio inside it before you ever create an account.
How Unitly works, in six steps
At a high level, getting up and running on Unitly follows six steps: create your account, add your properties, invite your team and tenants, manage everything from one dashboard, communicate in real time, and use the insights to grow. Each step builds on the last, and you can stop at any point and still have something useful. Here is what each one looks like in practice.
Step 1: Create your account in seconds
Everything starts with a quick sign-up. You choose whether you are a property manager or a tenant, enter your name, email, and a password, and you are in. There is no onboarding call, no credit card, and no waiting for an account to be provisioned. The two roles see two different experiences: managers land on a portfolio dashboard built for running buildings, while tenants land on a focused view of the place they rent.
This split matters more than it sounds. A lot of property software bolts a tenant experience onto a landlord tool as an afterthought. Unitly treats both sides as first-class from the first screen, which is why a tenant never has to wade through landlord features they will never use, and a manager never has to apologize for a confusing interface.
Step 2: Add your properties and units
Once you are in as a property manager, you add your buildings, units, and the details that matter, all in one place. A property holds its address and type; inside it live the individual units, each with its own bedrooms, bathrooms, rent, and occupancy status. You can add a single unit or create many at once for a larger building, so setting up a twenty-four unit property does not mean twenty-four trips through the same form.
The point of getting this structure right early is that it becomes the backbone for everything else. From here on, leases, maintenance, messaging, and listings all attach to a specific unit, which means you always know which 'leaky faucet' belongs to which apartment.
- Add properties with their address and type, then add the units inside each one.
- Capture rent, bedrooms, bathrooms, and occupancy per unit so nothing lives only in your head.
- Bulk-create units for larger buildings instead of repeating the same form.
- See your whole portfolio, with occupancy at a glance, on one dashboard.
Step 3: Invite your team and tenants
A portfolio is rarely a solo effort, so the next step is to invite the people who belong to it. You can invite team members to help manage your properties and invite tenants to connect to the unit they rent, all by email or phone. Tenants accept the invitation, confirm their identity, and instantly have a home for their lease, their maintenance requests, and their conversation with you.
Inviting a tenant is also what turns a unit from a row in your dashboard into a living relationship. Once they accept, rent reminders, maintenance updates, and announcements have a real recipient, and every message has a record. For managers with help, delegated access means a teammate can carry the day-to-day work on the units they are responsible for, without handing over the keys to your entire account.
Step 4: Manage everything in one place
This is the heart of the product. From a single dashboard you collect rent, send invoices, manage maintenance, store documents, and keep the whole operation moving. Instead of one app for payments, a second for maintenance, a group text for tenants, and a folder of PDFs, the work that used to be scattered now has a single surface.
A note on availability: online rent collection is live in Canada today, by bank transfer (PAD) or card, with the United States coming. Everything else here, from maintenance and leases to messaging, documents, and reporting, works regardless of where you are.
The dashboard is designed to answer the questions that actually keep landlords up at night. How many properties and units do I have? How much rent has come in this month? How many work orders are open right now? What happened recently across the portfolio? Those numbers are on the first screen, and the attention items, open requests, unread messages, and leases expiring soon, are surfaced so the urgent things find you instead of the other way around.
- Track maintenance from reported to resolved, with status, priority, photos, and a full timeline.
- Keep leases on the record with start and end dates, rent, and documents, plus a nudge before they expire.
- See recent activity, like a rent payment received or a new maintenance request, in one feed.
- Watch the numbers that matter, total properties and units, rent collected, and open work orders, at a glance.
Step 5: Communicate easily
Good property management is mostly good communication, so Unitly makes it effortless to send updates, announcements, and messages to your team and tenants instantly. A building-wide announcement about a parking gate repair reaches everyone at once. A one-to-one note to a single tenant stays private to that conversation. Either way, it lives in a thread tied to the unit, so a year from now you can still see exactly what was said and when.
Because the conversation has a permanent home, the late-night text that used to vanish into your phone becomes part of the record. Tenants reach you without resorting to a personal number, and you get accountability without effort. Notifications keep both sides informed by email, SMS, or push, on whatever device they happen to be holding.
Step 6: Grow your portfolio
The final step is the payoff: using insights and reports to make smarter decisions and grow your business. As rent flows in and units fill up, Unitly turns that activity into clear reporting, rent collected over time, occupancy rate, and the trends underneath them, so you are managing with data instead of memory.
Growth is not only about adding doors. It is about knowing which properties perform, where money leaks, and when to act. When the reporting is a byproduct of the daily work rather than a separate spreadsheet you have to maintain, you finally get to make decisions from a position of clarity, and that is what lets a side portfolio become a real business.
Built for property managers and tenants
Most tools pick a side. Unitly is deliberately built for both, because a rental only works when both halves of it do.
For property managers
Manage properties, automate tasks, collect payments, and keep everything organized from one dashboard.
For tenants
Stay connected with your property manager, pay rent online, submit maintenance requests, and get important updates.
For property managers, Unitly is the command center: manage properties, automate the busywork, collect payments, and keep everything organized from one powerful dashboard.
- Property management: properties, units, tenants, and occupancy in one organized view.
- Rent collection: invoices and payments tracked so you always know what is owed and paid.
- Maintenance tracking: every request with a status, an owner, and a history.
- Reports and insights: rent collected, occupancy, and trends, without building a spreadsheet.
For tenants, Unitly is the simplest way to stay connected with a property manager, pay rent online, submit maintenance requests, and get the updates that actually matter.
- Pay rent online instead of chasing down a check or an app you do not have.
- Submit maintenance requests with photos and priority, then follow them to resolved.
- Get updates and announcements from your manager in one place.
- Message your property manager directly, with a record on both sides.
Secure, reliable, and available anywhere
Underneath the features, the fundamentals are handled. Your data is encrypted in transit, and access is property-scoped, so only the people you invite to a property can see it, never the wider internet and never another landlord. Unitly works on phones, tablets, and computers through your browser, and native iOS and Android apps are coming soon, which means you can manage a unit from your desk or report an issue from a parking lot. And when you need a hand, support is there to help rather than to upsell you.
These are the things you only notice when they are missing: a tool that loses your data, a dashboard that only works on a laptop, or a support queue that never answers. Getting them right is unglamorous, and it is exactly why a platform like this becomes the system you trust with the back office of your business.
Frequently asked questions about how Unitly works
Do I need to be technical to use Unitly? No. If you can fill out a form and send a message, you can run your portfolio on Unitly. The whole flow, from creating an account to inviting a tenant, is designed to be obvious.
Can tenants and managers use the same platform? Yes, and that is the point. Managers get a portfolio dashboard and tenants get a focused view of their own rental, but they share the same leases, maintenance threads, and conversations, so nothing falls through the gap between two separate systems.
What does it cost to get started? You can move your portfolio over and use the real product for free up to five active units, no card and no sales call. If you grow past that, pricing stays small and predictable, so the cost scales gently with your business rather than jumping at the worst moment.
Will it work on my phone? Yes. Unitly works on phones, tablets, and computers through your browser. Native iOS and Android apps are coming soon, so both managers and tenants can do what they need from wherever they are.
Ready to simplify property management?
That is how Unitly works: create your account, add your properties, invite your team and tenants, manage everything from one place, communicate without friction, and grow with the insights that fall out of the daily work. Six steps, one platform, and a lot fewer things slipping through the cracks.
Unitly is built for independent landlords who want something simpler than traditional property-management software. You can get started in the time it takes to read this post. Sign up as a property manager or a tenant, add your first property, and see your portfolio come together at unitly.cloud.