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Software for mobile-home parks: what owners actually use

By · Published June 2, 2026 · 10 min read

Ask in a park-owner forum what software to use, and you get ten answers, because there is no obvious one. Small parks are an awkward size: too much for a plain spreadsheet, too small for the big systems, and stuck with one job the generic apps do not do, which is billing tenants for water off a meter.

Here is an honest tour of what owners of 10-to-100-lot parks actually run in 2026, what each thing costs, and where each one leaves you doing work by hand. Prices move, so check the current number before you sign up.

QuickBooks plus a spreadsheet: still the real default

More small parks run on QuickBooks and Excel than on any purpose-built software. Owners have run 60-plus-space parks this way for years. It is cheap, it is familiar, and your accountant already knows QuickBooks.

What it does well: the books. QuickBooks is solid accounting, and a spreadsheet holds a rent roll fine.

Where it costs you time: everything that is not accounting. You copy and paste invoices from the spreadsheet into email, which owners describe as about an hour every month. Tracking who is late is manual. Water billing off meter reads is a formula you build and babysit. Cash and money orders get logged by hand. It works, but you are the software.

The budget app bundle: TurboTenant, REI Hub, Relay

A newer setup shows up in forum threads: a free or cheap rent-collection app, a simple accounting app, and a business bank account, wired together.

TurboTenant is free to start, with paid tiers around $149 a year and up. REI Hub, built for rental accounting, runs about $15 a month. Relay is business banking, free at the low end and up to around $90 a month for more features. Bundled, it is a low monthly cost and a real step up from pure spreadsheets for collecting rent and keeping books.

Where it falls short for a park: none of these bill water from a meter read, and the rent tools are built for apartment units, not lots and park-owned homes. Cash payment for unbanked tenants has to come from a separate service. It is a good budget stack for a simple park with banked tenants. It is not built for the park-specific jobs.

Rent Manager: the full system parks graduate to

When a park owner outgrows spreadsheets and wants one system that does it all, Rent Manager is the name that comes up. It is powerful, and it has the one feature generic tools lack: a metered-utilities module that turns meter reads into tenant charges, with field entry from a phone. It handles manufactured-housing leases and the home-as-asset side too.

The cost is real. Rent Manager prices per unit but carries a monthly minimum around $200, so a 30-lot park pays that $200 whether or not the per-unit math is lower, which works out to a high per-lot cost at small sizes. Setup adds more, with implementation commonly running around twice the monthly fee, plus training. Owners, including those with many parks, describe the system as capable but not simple, and going live takes time.

Where it fits: a growing owner with several parks or a few hundred lots, who will use the depth and can absorb the price and the learning. For a single 25-lot park, it is a lot of system and a lot of minimum.

The cheaper rent-collection apps: Rentec, Innago, Buildium, and others

A cluster of general landlord apps get used on parks. They collect rent well and cost less than Rent Manager. The catch is the park-specific work.

Rentec Direct runs about $55 a month and up. Its help docs describe utility billing as a manual or import step, not an automatic meter-to-bill calculation, and it does support retail cash payments, with a setup fee and a per-transaction cost.

Innago is free to the landlord and makes its money on tenant payment fees, like $2 per ACH payment and about 3% on cards. It markets a mobile-home-park page, but it does not compute a metered water bill, and it has no cash-at-the-store network.

Buildium starts around $62 a month and offers real retail-cash payments through PayNearMe, which is a genuine plus for unbanked tenants. Its utility feature, though, is ratio billing, which splits a master bill by a formula rather than reading each lot's meter.

Schedule My Rent has no monthly fee and charges a couple of dollars per payment, and it supports cash through MoneyGram at stores like Walmart, which is handy for cash tenants. It does not do metered utility billing.

The pattern across all of them: fine for collecting rent, no true meter-based water billing, and cash support that ranges from good to none.

The one feature to check before you pick any tool: can it turn a meter read into an itemized, no-markup water line on the tenant's bill? Most generic apps cannot. That single gap is what pushes park owners up to expensive systems or back to a spreadsheet formula.

Park Sidekick and the older desktop tools

For years, some owners used Park Sidekick, a mobile-home-park-specific desktop program with lot rent, utility tracking, and a one-time price. Owners in forums liked it. The trouble is age: it is Windows desktop software, and at the time of writing its website was not resolving, so its current status is uncertain. Treat older desktop tools as proof that owners want park-specific software, but check that anything you rely on is still supported before you build your park on it.

The big names built for large companies

Yardi launched MH Manager in December 2025, aimed at big institutional companies that own many parks, and Yardi Breeze Premier supports manufactured housing with a monthly minimum around $400 and quote-based pricing for the MH features. These are built for big companies, not for a 40-lot park, and the price and complexity show it.

So what should a small park use?

There is no single right answer, but the choice usually comes down to three questions:

Do your tenants pay cash? Then you need real cash and money-order handling, which rules out several apps or pushes you to Buildium or a cash-payment add-on.

Do you bill water off meters? Then you need true meter-to-bill billing, which most generic apps do not have, or you keep doing the formula by hand.

How many lots and parks? A single small park with banked tenants can do fine on the budget bundle or even a good spreadsheet. A growing owner gets more from a full system, at a full price.

Lot Sidekick is the park-built option in this list: lot rent, submetered water billing with no markup, cash and money-order receipts, and a live map, at a flat price with no $200 minimum. It is not the only reasonable choice, and this post is here to help you pick honestly, not to pretend the others do not exist. For a side-by-side way to decide, see our post on Rent Manager, a spreadsheet, or park-built software.

Sources

General information. Pricing and features change often; confirm the current terms on each vendor's page before you decide.

Lot Sidekick runs the billing side end to end (rent, submetered water, and who's-late) on a live map of your park. Send your spreadsheet and I'll set up your park, or see the live demo, or call (425) 405-0734.