If you rent to UAH, Auburn, Alabama, or any campus-adjacent crowd, you already know: 80% of your leases turn over in a six-week window, half your applicants have no US credit, parents want to cosign on their phone, and the August 15 move-in day is fifteen cars in a driveway. Tenantory was built by an operator running that exact playbook. Every feature below exists because we needed it.
Nothing on the market is built for the academic calendar. You end up welding pieces together — an app for rent, another for leases, a spreadsheet for cosigners, a sticky note for the Aug 15 move-in plan. Here's where it cracks, every year.
Seventy percent of your bedrooms turn in a three-week window. Every generic PM tool gives you the same 30-day renewal nudge it sends a retiree in Boca. You need batch everything — mass move-outs, mass renewals, mass screening, mass welcome emails — or you're copy-pasting for ten hours a Saturday.
Your best applicant is a PhD student from Hyderabad with a full assistantship and a perfect email reply time. A credit pull returns "no record found." Every screening vendor scores them a 0. You reject the wrong person, or you skip screening and take the risk blind. There's no middle path in most tools.
The student signs. Then mom and dad need to sign a separate cosigner addendum with their own income verification, their own ID, their own guarantor obligations. DocuSign can technically do it, but the routing logic is on you, the W-2 upload is on you, and following up when dad forgets for five days is also on you. By mid-August you're a collections clerk.
Academic year is 9 months. Summer is 3. Some tenants want fall-only at a premium, some want summer-only at a discount, some sign August-to-August and sublet for May–July. Every PM tool wants a clean 12-month term. You end up editing a Word doc and praying the clause you deleted wasn't load-bearing.
May comes. Half the house empties out. The lease says they still owe through July but you're splitting hairs over sublet clauses, partial-month credits, and the tenant who "thought it ended when finals did." You need lease-end-date accounting that tells the truth without you running a pivot table.
Three strangers sharing a kitchen is either the best experience of the year or a refund request by October. You need to ask a few questions at application — sleep schedule, cleanliness, guests, pets — and not place the 6 a.m. gym-rat next to the 2 a.m. gamer. Most tools don't even have the field.
Every feature below is live in production. I use all of them on my own rental portfolio in Huntsville — the current cohort is 60% UAH students, half international, half with parental cosigners. Open the trial, add a property, all of this lights up.
When a tenant checks "I need a cosigner" on the application, the portal auto-routes a parallel mini-application to the cosigner's email — ID upload, income verification, guarantor addendum e-sign, the whole thing. You see both in one dashboard, with a single "fully executed" status when both signatures land. No DocuSign seat. No routing homework.
No SSN? No problem. The international track asks for passport + visa/I-20, proof of funds or sponsor letter, employer/university verification, and an optional parental cosigner. Tenantory scores the application against those alternate signals instead of a US credit pull. You make the call with real data — not a "no record found" auto-rejection.
Four lease templates shipped out of the box: fall-only (Aug–Dec), spring-only (Jan–May), summer (May–Jul), and academic year (Aug–May) with optional summer hold. Pick one, fill in rent and room, send. Each template has the right clauses baked in — subletting rules, summer-vacancy language, early-termination for study-abroad.
A single page for August 15: every arrival, every departure, every deposit disposition, every key handoff, every utility reading. Auto-generated checklists per room. Tenants get SMS with their arrival window (you pick 30-minute slots so fifteen cars don't hit the driveway at noon). When the day is done, one button posts all deposit statements and sends move-out summaries to every departing tenant.
When a room opens up — a student flakes, a cosigner falls through, someone gets a better offer — Tenantory pulls the next qualified applicant off the waitlist, sends them the lease, and opens a 48-hour signing window. If they pass, the next one gets it. You spend zero minutes moving names around a spreadsheet the week before move-in.
Eight short questions on the application — sleep schedule, noise tolerance, cleanliness (1–5), guest frequency, pets, smoking, study environment, kitchen usage. Tenantory scores applicants against the current housemates at the property and flags green / yellow / red compatibility before you accept. Prevents the mid-semester "can you move me to the other house" email.
Here's what a typical 25-bed campus-area operator pays today, stitched across four products plus a spreadsheet and a 20-hour August. And here's what that same portfolio costs on Tenantory Pro.
That's $1,100+ a month you weren't spending on rehabs, plus a calendar that stops bleeding every August. The spreadsheet hours don't show up on the invoice — but they're the ones that kill operators by year three.
Rachel runs a student-focused portfolio a short walk from the UAH campus in Huntsville — three houses, 22 leaseable rooms, heavy engineering-grad mix. Here's what changed after her first full August on Tenantory.
Last August I drove around with a binder of printed cosigner PDFs. This August I had the laptop open on the porch, signing waitlisted students in while the move-outs were still packing. I stopped dreading the 15th.
Before Tenantory, Rachel ran the August turn through a Google Sheet, three Word templates, and a DocuSign seat she paid for twelve months to use for six weeks. Roughly one in four international applicants got auto-rejected by her screening tool for "no credit file" — she'd then reverse the decision by hand, chase a sponsor letter, and lose a week. Summer rent collection was, in her words, "a group text with my dad asking how much to pro-rate."
The unlock was the cosigner + international flow. "Three of my four best tenants this fall are PhD students from India and Vietnam. Zero would have scored well on a normal credit pull. Tenantory let me see income, sponsor, assistantship — the stuff that actually predicts whether rent shows up on the first."
The August move-in day went from a 14-hour Saturday to a staggered 6-hour stretch. Tenants got SMS'd 30-minute arrival windows, the checklist auto-generated per room, and every deposit statement for the prior cohort went out in a single click at the end of the day. "I ate lunch. I didn't eat lunch last August."
Summer-vacancy dropped from 42% to 18% because the lease templates now handle May–July holds at reduced rent as a first-class option. "Students were always willing to pay something to keep their room. I just didn't have a clean way to offer it before."
Up to 50 rooms for $99 a month. Flat. A 15-bed operator pays $6.60 per room. A 45-bed operator pays $2.20. If you're over 50 rooms, Scale is unlimited and custom-priced. The math is boring, and the August is less scary.
The ones I'd ask if I were you.
Yes, start to finish, from their phone. When the student submits the application, they tick "I need a cosigner" and enter a parent email. Tenantory sends the parent a mini-application: ID upload, income verification (W-2 or two pay stubs), guarantor addendum with full e-signature, and a short relationship attestation. No account creation, no DocuSign seat, no PDF back-and-forth.
You see both applications in one card in your dashboard — the student's and the parent's — with a combined status. When both are signed, the lease and cosigner addendum are generated as one bundled PDF, ready to save or share with your attorney.
Yes. The international applicant track skips the US credit pull entirely and scores the application on the signals that actually predict whether rent shows up: passport + visa/I-20, proof of funds (bank statements translated if needed), university verification of enrollment, an assistantship or employment letter if applicable, and an optional parental cosigner.
Tenantory gives you a side-by-side view — the domestic applicants with their credit score, the international applicants with their alternate dossier — so you're deciding apples-to-apples, not auto-rejecting the best tenant in the stack because TransUnion has no file on them.
First-class. Four templates ship with the product: Fall only (Aug–Dec), Spring only (Jan–May), Summer (May–Jul), and Academic year (Aug–May). Each has the correct clauses — subletting, summer holds, early-termination for study abroad, room-only vs. whole-house occupancy — baked in and editable.
Rent can differ per term on the same room: fall at $850, spring at $850, summer at $550. Tenantory generates a single lease with the term schedule embedded, or three separate leases if you prefer — your call at property setup.
The Move-In Day planner. Open it the week before and Tenantory lays out every arrival and departure across your whole portfolio on a single timeline. You slot each tenant into a 30-minute window and tap Send — they all get SMS + email with their arrival time, parking instructions, key pickup location, and a welcome packet.
On the day itself, you check them in from the mobile view. Each check-in auto-kicks off the room's welcome sequence: first-month rent reminder, renter's insurance requirement, housemate intro message, maintenance portal invite. No copy-paste, no forgotten welcome emails, no "where do I park?" texts at 9am.
Yes. Each lease can carry a term schedule — e.g., $875/mo Aug–Dec, $875/mo Jan–May, $525/mo Jun–Jul. The tenant portal shows each month's scheduled rent, and the accounting engine books the right revenue to the right month so your Schedule E and rent roll both reflect reality.
Most of our student operators use the summer discount to keep occupancy high instead of letting rooms fully vacate in May. The rate is usually 50–65% of academic-year rent. Tenantory doesn't prescribe — you set the number, the lease holds it.
Three modes, set per-property. Tenant-initiated: the tenant posts the room in their portal, applicants apply through your normal pipeline, you approve or reject, and the sublet is added as a short-term lease under the original one. Operator-only: tenants can't sublet without your written approval, which the portal routes to you with a one-tap yes/no. Not allowed: the lease clause and portal flow simply forbid it.
Most of our student operators use tenant-initiated for May–July. The original tenant remains on the lease, the subletter pays through the portal, and if anything goes sideways, the original tenant's deposit is still on the hook. Clean paper trail, clean collections, no group-text math.
14-day free trial. No card. If Tenantory doesn't save you 12 hours a week in the first 30 paid days, I refund every dollar and wire you $100 for your time. I have not paid it once.