STESSA REVIEW: Features, Pricing, Pros & Cons

Stessa, a Roofstock brand, has the solution for landlords looking to add more power and automation to their accounting process. It’s a straightforward real estate financial tracking tool. Stessa consolidates all of your critical indicators, such as debt, occupancy, cash flow, overall value, and more, into a single, easy-to-understand dashboard. Keep reading our full Stessa review to learn more about how it can benefit real estate investors, including aiding in rent collection, what Biggerpockets thinks of it, and a good comparison between Stessa vs Quickbooks and Stessa vs Avail.

Who Is Stessa?

Stessa is a landlord-focused real estate performance tracking software. Heath Silverman and Jonah Schwartz founded it. Stessa was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California. Roofstock purchased Stessa in March 2021.

Stessa makes it easy for landlords to maintain track of their real estate investments by providing powerful free solutions for individual investors.

Review of What Stessa Offer?

Stessa is a website and a smartphone app that assists real estate investors with property management. Consider it Quickbooks Lite. If you already use Quickbooks, you might find Stessa deficient in features. However, if you’re putting things together with Google Sheets or Excel spreadsheets, Stessa is a step forward.

Stessa will pull property information from the local government and other third-party data sources for the properties you’ve entered. This provides you with a quick way to view estimates of the value of your property as well as other statistics.

Stessa allows users to build property portfolios. There may also be reasons to establish portfolios based on property location, such including:

#1. Keeping Track Of Tenants

Stessa enables you to keep track of information for each tenant. This includes the following:

Rent
When they moved in
The market rate of the unit
Lease expiration
Deposit for unit
Number of beds and baths
Documents (i.e., file attachments)

Stessa allows you to keep track of various transactions such as rent payments, collection, and costs. Transactions can be manually entered or pulled from your bank or credit card. While Stessa may assign categories automatically, you can tailor transactions by modifying the category and property to which they are assigned.

#2. Cash Management

Stessa also provides Cash Management services. Streamline your portfolio finances with an account that works effortlessly with Stessa. A Cash Management account provides money management designed specifically for real estate investors, from paying suppliers, shifting funds, and tracking expenses to earning cash back and interest.

Once your Cash Management account is activated, you can enable online rent collection and stop manually collecting and depositing rent. Rent reminders, late charge messages, payment categorization, and deposit notifications are all automated with online rent collecting. Tenants can pay with a single click through Stessa and avoid late penalties by enabling recurring ACH payments.

#3. Reporting

Stessa includes the following reports:

Income statement
Cash flow
Capital expenses
Tax package
Stress Test

However, you may encounter constraints while attempting to create new report kinds or edit existing reports.

#4. Stress Test

The Stress Test report is one-of-a-kind. It enables landlords to determine how long they can sustain a decrease in rent payments.

The report allows you to select a property or portfolio and specify the reduced percentage of the rent, as well as the expected duration of the reduction. For example, you anticipate paying 70% of the rent over the next six months. That amounts to a 30% reduction in rent costs. The report compares your rental revenue to your expenses. It then displays the amount of cash predicted at the conclusion of the month.

Running a Stress Test enables landlords to determine their break-even point (i.e., the point at which rental income equals expenses), how long they can endure a rent decrease, and the amount of cash left over after the assessment period. The Stress Test can be downloaded into Excel, where additional values can be manipulated. All of the online formulas will be retained in the downloaded spreadsheet.

Review Features of Stessa

The software is divided into three major sections.

#1. Financial Dashboard

In my situation, the return is 0% because this statistic is just concerned with price appreciation. It considers CapEx but excludes all other cash flow.

#2. Track my income and expenses.

Stessa keeps track of actual outcomes at tax time when you have securely connected your bank account. At a glance, you can check if you are missing any rent or incurring any unnecessary expenses, as well as how your property is performing.

While the software will automatically import all of your transactions, you can also manually add any transaction. This could be a cash payment or the use of another account that has not yet been linked. If there are transactions that are personal spending and not related to the property, you can quickly remove them from the software so they are not recorded.

Stessa also allocates categories to various transactions automatically. You can easily modify the category if you want to.

#3. Store Investment documents

Stessa organizes all of your lease, purchase, mortgage, insurance, and vendor receipt documents by property.

Stessa Pricing Review

Stessa’s base plan, which includes all of its stated features, is completely free, which is its main selling point. While it has a very restricted feature set, it is a good starting point for people new to property investing or management.

It has an expensive $1,000 per month pricing tier for property managers with larger portfolios, featuring features such as:

Rent analysis
And market research

How Does Stessa Make Money?

Stessa makes money by introducing users to complementary services that property owners may need, such as mortgage lenders, insurance firms, and other real estate investing services.

You can purchase a Stessa Rent Estimate for $19.99.
Stessa enables you to also get a rate quote to purchase or refinance a property.

There was no unwanted email or sales push to use the other associated services when using the app.

Pros and Cons of Stessa Review

After we’ve gone over Stessa’s features and cost, let’s look at some overall benefits and cons:

Pro

#1. Free plan

The biggest reason to go with Stessa (despite the fact that you’re giving up a lot in exchange for it) is its free plan.

Stessa hides some functions, particularly related to research, behind a huge paywall, which some tools offer with their basic and considerably less expensive premium plans. However, its base plan, albeit severely limited in terms of features, is free.

#2. Easy to use

Users say Stessa’s rental property accounting software is simple to use. Some navigation items and interface elements can be confusing, but in general, users report that Stessa’s ease of use is one of its strong points.

Con

#1. Not a full property management software

Stessa, as a property finance-related tool, lacks many of the most sophisticated and time-saving features that every property manager has come to anticipate from a property management software.

Maintenance management, communications tools, leasing, and tenant communications are all services that assist streamline your property management and save you time and money, and they are all capabilities that Stessa lacks.

#2. Lacks many basic features you can get from other tools at low-cost

Free isn’t always what it appears to be.The greatest property management tools, whether property finance-specific or full-fledged property management software, are extremely reasonable (usually between $50 and $100 per month).

So, while you may believe you are giving up benefits in exchange for the free plan, what you are actually giving up is significant, and what you are receiving in return (the money saved) is insignificant.

Stessa vs Quickbooks

There are some significant variations between Stessa vs Quickbooks. Quickbooks is a sophisticated accounting tool designed to serve all types of businesses. Stessa is a free site designed particularly for home rentals.

Customizing Quickbooks to track rental property income and expenses can be a time-consuming and confusing procedure, especially if you’re new to real estate investing. Stessa can be installed in three simple steps. You can upload all of your transactions into Stessa, and the tax information will be available in a CPA-friendly format. Furthermore, Stessa is free, as opposed to Quickbooks, which is not!

Stessa vs Avail

Avail has 246 reviews and a rating of 4.59 / 5 stars vs Stessa has 79 reviews and a rating of 4.76 / 5 stars. Avail provides services to independent and do-it-yourself landlords as well as their tenants. Avail landlords often own 1-50 units and want to provide a professional experience while saving time and maximizing revenues. Stessa works with both novice investors with one or two properties and professional investors with huge property portfolios.

Alternatives to Stessa

Let’s have a look at some alternatives now that we’ve dug deep into Stessa and seen what it can and cannot achieve.

We said before that Stessa isn’t a full-fledged property management solution. For our alternatives, we’ve gathered a few property management software that provides a more comprehensive range of functions, some at a very low cost.

They are as follows:

#1. DoorLoop

DoorLoop is a true all-in-one property management software built for and by property managers.

It provides a comprehensive set of property accounting services, including advanced features like QuickBooks Online integration. It does, however, include a plethora of additional capabilities that Stessa does not, leaving you lacking for nothing if your objective is to simplify and streamline your complete property administration.

DoorLoop costs $59 a month for up to 20 units, with additional units costing $2 per unit per month.

Get all of Stessa’s fantastic accounting capabilities plus a suite of amazing property management solutions for one affordable price.

#2. Hemlane

Hemlane is another wonderful alternative if you want a more well-rounded feature set.

Hemlane does not have all of the functionality of a full residential or commercial property management software package, but it does contain many of the property management tools that Stessa does not, as well as some unique features that allow you to communicate with agents on location.

Hemlane begins at a reasonable $30 per month. However, this only applies to your first unit. Hemlane charges $2 per unit each month, so for the same 20 units as DoorLoop’s starting plan, you’d spend $68.

#3. Rent Manager

Rent Manager, the third option on our list, is another well-rounded alternative with many of the property management-specific features for residential and commercial properties that Stessa lacks, as well as adequate accounting functions.

The trade-off is that the user interface is out of date, and users claim that the software can be difficult to manage.

Rent Manager does not publish its pricing, so you will need to contact its sales department directly for additional information.

Is Stessa Really Free?

Stessa is completely free to use – save time and increase rewards throughout your portfolio.

Does Stessa Charge a Fee?

The best part is that there are no fees for you or your tenant! Check visit Stessa Rent Pay for Owners to learn more about how rent collection works in Stessa. The Rental Application Page now offers credit checks, background checks, and tenant application services.

Does Stessa Connect to Quickbooks?

Stessa vs Quickbooks is quite connected. Rental property owners can utilize Stessa and QuickBooks to track income and spending, assets and liabilities, depreciation, and owner’s equity.

How Long Has Stessa Been in Business?

Stessa, which was created in 2016, is used by tens of thousands of investors to track over 250,000 rental properties worth more than $60 billion. Roofstock, a renowned online investment platform for buying and selling SFR homes, purchased the company.

Does Stessa Sell Your Data?

Stessa may share your personal information with third parties in methods that fall under the definition of “sales” under the California Consumer Privacy Act. As a California resident, you may request that we not sell your personal information in the future by filling out the form below.

Can the IRS See Your Quickbooks?

Yes. When you submit a Merchant application, QuickBooks Payments compares the information you provide on the application to the information on file with the IRS.

Conclusion

According to my Stessa review, the program allows rental property investors to easily track, manage, and report on their real estate investments for FREE. Visual performance dashboards, automated income and spending tracking, document management tools, and tax-ready financial reports will help you save time and maximize your rentals. You can give it a shot to see what works best for you.