Leaving Buildium? Prices, support and what owning changes

Leaving Buildium and leaving TurboTenant come from opposite ends of the same market. One is a full property-management subscription; the other starts free and charges for more. What the two searches share is a rent ledger worth keeping and an arrangement around it that has stopped feeling right.

This page quotes what reviewers have written in public, says who is better off staying, and describes what moving a small portfolio's ledger to software you own involves.

What reviewers report

Each of the following is one reviewer's report of their own experience, quoted exactly as it was written. It is evidence of what that person reported, not a finding about either company.

Their cost increases constantly and they say its because of new features

-- a one-star reviewer of Buildium on Capterra, December 2025 (the review page)

Since being sold the prices went up a lot and I can no longer make a call for help.

-- a four-star reviewer of Buildium on Capterra, March 2026 (the review page)

Company provides terrible service unless landlords subscribe to paid tiers. Chat service takes hours to get basic questions answered, many times with no resolutions.

-- a landlord reviewing TurboTenant on Trustpilot, September 2026 (the review page)

I cannot cancel my subscription from a year ago when I briefly used their site.

-- a user reviewing TurboTenant on Trustpilot, September 2026 (the review page)

Three threads run through them: a price that rises over time, support that depends on the plan or has become harder to reach, and a subscription one user reports being unable to cancel. The second review is worth reading twice, because it comes from a four-star reviewer -- someone broadly satisfied -- and it still names the price and the phone. None of the four is a verdict on how the ledger works. They are about the arrangement around it.

Who is well served by staying

Many landlords and managers are well served by these platforms. Buildium's own pricing page promises live phone support in minutes, and Buildium collects rent online, which Rentara does not: if your tenants pay through the platform and you want that to continue, staying is a reasonable answer. TurboTenant has a genuinely free plan for listing, screening and rent collection, and a landlord whose needs fit that free plan has little reason to buy anything, Rentara included.

What switching involves

The subscription terms come first. Plan terms, renewal dates and the steps for cancelling are written in the agreement and the terms it points to. The last review above is about exactly that step, which is why it belongs at the start of a move rather than the end.

Then the records. Properties, units, leases, tenant contacts, the rent ledger, payment history and maintenance history are what a portfolio owns. The ledger is the one a dispute is argued from, and years of it are the part worth exporting completely. On the receiving side, Rentara takes records in from a CSV file with a mandatory dry run, so a file is checked before a single row is written.

Then the money route, and a period of running both. If tenants pay through the platform today, moving means telling each tenant a new way to pay -- a bank transfer, a standing order, whatever you already use -- because Rentara records payments and does not take them. That step has the longest tail, and it is why a month or two of both systems is the usual shape: rent still arriving by the old route is recorded while the new route settles in.

What owning the copy changes

The price stops tracking the portfolio. The licence covers the installation, not the doors, so the tenth unit costs nothing and the twentieth nothing again. There is nothing to renew and nothing to cancel.

The record stays with you: every lease, charge, payment and maintenance ticket in a database on a server you chose, which matters most in the years when a dispute is argued from it.

Support becomes yours. There is no chat queue to wait in, because there is no vendor between you and the software -- and also nobody to call. Looking after the server is your job, or the job of whoever you pay.

What Rentara does, and what it does not

• Rent posted automatically, monthly or quarterly from each lease's start day, and never twice for the same period.
• Late fees by your rule -- a grace period, then a flat fee, a share of the overdue rent, or both -- at most one per overdue period, and never a fee on a fee.
• A private link per lease, with no login, where the tenant sees the lease terms, the ledger and the balance, and reports maintenance with a photo.
• A rent roll, an arrears report with days overdue, and owner statements per property or owner.
• Maintenance tickets from open to resolved, with costs flowing into the owner statements.

What it does not do: it does not collect rent online -- payments are recorded, not taken, and nothing it sends a tenant asks them to pay. It is not a listing or screening tool, and not a general ledger. It is single-operator, one portfolio per installation, and tenant email is off until you switch it on. A portfolio in the hundreds of units wants a setup conversation first, and nothing in it is legal advice.

Questions people ask

Can tenants pay rent through Rentara? No. Rentara posts what is due, applies the late-fee rule and records each payment when it lands. The money moves by whatever route you and the tenant already use.

Does the price rise as I add units? No. The licence covers the installation, not the doors.

Can Rentara list a vacancy or screen applicants? No. Finding tenants is outside it, so a free listing tool and Rentara do not overlap: one fills the unit, the other runs the tenancy.

Where to look next

The product page is Rentara, with its limits in the product's own words, and the Property Suite holds it alongside the other property tool. The Buildium alternatives page and the TurboTenant page set each platform against what this store sells, with a source and a read date for every statement, and the side-by-side puts the rented options together. For what any of them charges, per unit or per year, read the observatory: every figure there sits beside the date it was read and a link to its source. Prices are on the observatory; read them on the date shown there.

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