An Avail alternative for landlords who outgrow DIY listing tools

The leasing funnel. Avail’s own homepage and pricing page put listing, applications, TransUnion screening, lawyer-reviewed state-specific leases and digital signing at the front of the product, and that is an honest reflection of where the software spends its energy. If your recurring pain is “the unit is empty and I need a qualified tenant in it,” Avail is built for that sequence.

The free Unlimited plan is not a demo. It includes listing on those 19 sites, applications, screening reports (paid by the applicant or by you, depending on how you set it), state-specific leases with e-sign, online rent collection, maintenance tickets, a tenant portal, and income and expense tracking. Unlimited Plus, which Avail prices at $9 per unit per month, adds next-day FastPay deposits, waived ACH charges for tenants, custom application questions, cloneable lease templates, a branded property website and faster support.

Avail’s pricing page is explicit about payment fees, which is more than many vendors offer. On Unlimited, tenants pay $2.50 per bank transfer; on Unlimited Plus those ACH charges are waived. Card and debit payments add a 3.5% processing fee on either plan. Screening report prices vary by state and are usually paid by the applicant. CreditBoost rent reporting, where offered, is a separate tenant charge.

That model is legitimate: the landlord’s subscription can stay at zero because the tenant and the applicant fund the rails. It is also the reason a “free” comparison against a published per-unit price is incomplete until you add those fees up at your real payment mix. Ten units paying by ACH twelve times a year is $300 a year in tenant bank-transfer fees on Unlimited, before anyone uses a card.

Avail assumes you are the owner. The Property Tool assumes you might not be. Owner statements are generated from the same rent, expenses and management-fee rule your team already records, co-owner splits apply when a property is 60/40, and each owner reads the result in their own portal. That layer is the whole reason a manager reaches for software; it is not a feature Avail markets, because the DIY landlord has nobody to report to.

The second split is stay length. Avail’s calendar and accounting are built around a monthly lease. The Property Tool treats a night as the primitive and a twelve-month tenancy as a long stay, so a holiday let and a long-term house sit in one booking calendar and one ledger. If every door you own is a twelve-month residential lease, that difference will not move you. If any door is not, it will.

The third is listing. Avail syndicates vacancies. The Property Tool does not syndicate long-term rentals to Zillow or Realtor.com, and it does not run TransUnion reports. Screening here is a checklist you keep on the applicant — useful for a process, not a substitute for a bureau pull. Tenant screening: what to check is worth reading either way.

Take ten long-term units you manage yourself. Avail Unlimited is $0 to you; tenants pay $2.50 per ACH payment, or you buy Unlimited Plus at $90 a month to waive that fee and unlock FastPay. The same ten units here are $20 a month after the two free doors, with online rent collection and e-signatures included rather than sitting on a higher tier. Card payments still run at the processor’s rate in both products — Avail publishes 3.5% to the tenant; here the processor’s own rate is passed through with nothing added on top.

The gap widens if you manage those ten units for other people. Avail’s bill does not buy owner logins or a fee calculated from a stated base. The Property Tool’s $20 does, because that reporting is the product rather than an upgrade. The full table is on the pricing page; property management software pricing is the method for normalising tenant-paid fees against a subscription.

Export tenant and lease records, payment history, maintenance tickets and the documents you stored on each tenancy. Cut over at a period boundary so the last rent cycle closes in Avail and the next one opens here. Tenants will need a new payment method before the first due date in the new system; cancel autopay in Avail so nothing double-charges. How to switch property management software has the order of operations.

Keep Avail’s listing and screening workflow in mind as a gap, not a bug: if filling vacancies is still your bottleneck after you move, you will be listing on rental sites by hand or through another tool. That is a fair reason to stay if the vacancy, not the owner report, is what costs you time.