A first-hand audit of open-source software for long-term rental operators, compiled by RapidEye Research in August 2026: 27 verified statistics covering how large the searchable field looks versus how small the usable field is, which landlord and tenant platforms are actually maintained, where HOA and lease management stand, and what happened when we installed the leading tools in clean Docker environments. Nearly every figure was produced by our own measurement against the GitHub API on August 1, 2026, with 18 projects profiled in a published field guide and fresh install tests run the same day. It is the long-term rental companion to our July 2026 audit of the short-term rental and hotel side of this ecosystem.
Key statistics
6 highlights from this report
Key statistics
Key takeaways
Open-source software for landlords and property managers looks abundant in search and turns out to be a thin, half-dormant field on inspection. The most-starred platform has nearly stopped moving, the most active one is built for developers rather than self-hosters, whole categories like HOA management barely exist, and neither platform we freshly install-tested worked as documented.
Half of audited open-source rental management projects shipped zero commits in a year.
The most-starred landlord platform shipped 2 commits in 12 months.
The entire landlord field holds fewer stars than a fifth of one hotel platform.
No open-source HOA manager on GitHub exceeds 2 stars.
0 of 2 platforms install-tested in August 2026 passed on documentation alone.
A 16-star 2026 app out-committed the other 17 audited projects combined.
How we built this report
Every figure was produced or retrieved first-hand by RapidEye Research on August 1, 2026; nothing here is aggregated from other statistics pages.
- Measured the searchable field
Authenticated GitHub search API queries across rent, landlord, tenant, lease, and HOA management terms, with the top results of each query classified by hand to separate real rental software from car rental coursework and cloud multi-tenancy projects.
- Profiled 18 projects
Every deployable long-term rental, landlord, or HOA codebase we could identify got a deep pull: stars, forks, license, creation date, contributor count, and commits to the default branch over the trailing 12 months, all via the GitHub API.
- Install-tested in clean Docker environments
Two platforms were freshly installed (or failed) by hand in August 2026, following each project's own documentation and recording every manual fix. Four further results are reused from our July 2026 companion lab on the same terms.
- Independent review
Written by one co-founder, reviewed by the other before publishing, with the full per-project field guide published below.
Honest scope caveat: GitHub search is not exhaustive (projects hosted elsewhere, or described in other languages, can be missed), star counts measure attention rather than quality, commit counts cover each repository's default branch only, and install tests reflect one competent attempt per platform on one day (August 1, 2026) on an ARM Mac. Individual results will vary with hardware and platform experience.
Open-source rental management, by the numbers
All 27 figures, grouped by theme. Statistics from our own measurement are marked RapidEye Research; each entry names the dataset and retrieval date it came from.
The searchable field Statistics 1-7
The field looks huge until you read the results. According to GitHub's repository search API (github.com), retrieved by RapidEye Research on August 1, 2026, the query "rent management" matches 14,310 repositories, yet half of its 20 most-starred results are car rental systems, mostly university coursework. The pattern repeats across the vocabulary: "property management system" matches 5,282 repositories, "landlord tenant" 1,900, and "lease management" 1,595, while "HOA management" returns just 357, none of which is an actual HOA manager with more than 2 stars. Even the word "tenant" has been captured by another industry: in the 20 most-starred "tenant portal" repositories, ranks 1 through 10 are all cloud computing and multi-tenant infrastructure projects, and the first repository about people who pay rent appears at rank 11, with 5 stars.
Repositories match the GitHub search "rent management", but 10 of the 20 most-starred results are car rental systems.
RapidEye Research, GitHub search API (Aug 1, 2026)
Repositories match "property management system", the field's broadest self-description.
RapidEye Research, GitHub search API (Aug 1, 2026)
Repositories mention landlords and tenants together; "lease management" adds another 1,595.
RapidEye Research, GitHub search API (Aug 1, 2026)
Repositories match "HOA management", and no actual HOA manager in the top results exceeds 2 stars.
RapidEye Research, GitHub search API (Aug 1, 2026)
Position of the first renter-related project among the 20 most-starred "tenant portal" repositories; ranks 1-10 are cloud infrastructure.
RapidEye Research, GitHub search API (Aug 1, 2026)
Deployable long-term rental, landlord, and HOA projects survived manual triage into the audit, holding 2,809 combined stars.
RapidEye Research manual triage (Aug 2026)
The whole 18-project field's 2,809 stars are under a fifth of the 14,177 held by QloApps, the leading open-source hotel platform, alone.
RapidEye Research, GitHub repository data (Aug 1, 2026)
What this means: Search inflates this category by orders of magnitude. Two industries sit on its vocabulary (car rentals on "rent", cloud computing on "tenant"), and once those and the coursework are stripped out, the world's open-source software for landlords fits in a single table. We publish that table at the bottom of this page. For the short-term rental and hotel half of the same measurement, see our open-source property management software audit.
Maintenance reality Statistics 8-15
Profiling the 18 audited projects one by one, RapidEye Research found that 9 of 18 shipped zero commits to their default branch in the 12 months to August 1, 2026, and 7 of 18 publish no standard open-source license, which makes reuse legally unclear regardless of code quality. Attention is concentrated at the top and thin everywhere else: Microrealestate alone holds 41% of the field's combined stars, and the top three repositories hold 63%. The star leader is itself slowing: Microrealestate's main branch received 2 commits in that 12-month window, the latest in December 2025. Contributor counts mislead in both directions. Rentalog, a frontend-only rent tracker, lists 117 contributors and 240 forks against 111 stars, the classic signature of a Hacktoberfest drive, yet shipped nothing in the past year; Dwellingly, a civic-tech tool built by the Code for PDX volunteer brigade for property managers working with social workers, gathered 61 contributors and has been silent since February 2023.
Of audited projects (9 of 18) shipped zero default-branch commits in the 12 months to August 2026.
RapidEye Research, GitHub API profile (Aug 1, 2026)
Of audited projects (7 of 18) carry no standard open-source license; 9 of 18 use MIT.
RapidEye Research, GitHub API profile (Aug 1, 2026)
Audited projects are single-contributor codebases, carrying full bus-factor risk.
RapidEye Research, GitHub API profile (Aug 1, 2026)
Of the field's combined stars belong to Microrealestate alone; the top three repositories hold 63%.
RapidEye Research, GitHub API profile (Aug 1, 2026)
Commits reached Microrealestate's main branch (1,155 stars) in 12 months, the latest in December 2025.
RapidEye Research, GitHub commit history (Aug 1, 2026)
Contributors on Rentalog, a frontend-only rent tracker with 240 forks, which still shipped zero commits in the past year.
RapidEye Research, GitHub API profile (Aug 1, 2026)
Contributors built Dwellingly, the Code for PDX civic-tech property tool, before it went silent in February 2023.
RapidEye Research, GitHub API profile (Aug 1, 2026)
Projects were formally archived by their maintainers rather than left to drift: Loca (239 stars, 2022) and HRM (64 stars, 2019).
RapidEye Research, GitHub archive status (Aug 1, 2026)
What this means: In this field, stars are a record of past attention, not present maintenance. The most-starred platform is coasting, the biggest contributor counts came from drive-by pull requests, and the license gaps disqualify over a third of the field for any commercial operator before the code is even read.
Who is actually building Statistics 16-22
Real development activity lives in a handful of places, and mostly not where the stars are. Condo, an MIT-licensed property management SaaS platform, recorded 1,223 commits from 50 contributors in the 12 months to August 2026, the only project in the audit above 1,000; its documented path, however, is a developer setup (databases via Docker Compose, then Node and Python tooling), not a one-command self-host. The steadiest small platform is bigprof's Online Rental Property Manager, maintained since 2018 by 3 contributors, whose release 26.14 shipped on July 13, 2026. The ERP route is real but rough: PropMS, a property management stack built on ERPNext, logged 69 commits in the past year, but its code moved between company organizations, leaving a frozen 66-star original and an active 22-star successor, both without a standard license, while the Odoo Community Association's real estate module set has had no default-branch commit in over a year. And 2026 added a strange new cohort: a 16-star rental app created in February 2026 recorded 3,540 commits in the audit window, more than the other 17 projects combined (1,747), a velocity characteristic of AI-assisted development.
Commits from 50 contributors reached Condo (387 stars) in 12 months, the only audited project above 1,000.
RapidEye Research, GitHub API profile (Aug 1, 2026)
One-command self-host paths in Condo's documentation: its README describes a developer setup with database containers plus Node and Python tooling.
RapidEye Research, repository documentation review (Aug 1, 2026)
2026 release date of Online Rental Property Manager 26.14, a 3-contributor platform maintained continuously since 2018.
RapidEye Research, GitHub release data (Aug 1, 2026)
Commits in 12 months on the active PropMS successor repo (22 stars); the 66-star original froze in August 2024, and neither carries a standard license.
RapidEye Research, GitHub API profile (Aug 1, 2026)
Stars on the most-starred GitHub repository matching "openmaint", which is a third-party Docker packaging of the facility maintenance suite, not the software itself.
RapidEye Research, GitHub search API (Aug 1, 2026)
Commits in 12 months on a 16-star rental app created in February 2026, more than the other 17 audited projects combined (1,747).
RapidEye Research, GitHub commit pagination (Aug 1, 2026)
Commits in 12 months on Tatl, a Rails HOA manager created in April 2026 that is the category's only active project, at 2 stars.
RapidEye Research, GitHub API profile (Aug 1, 2026)
What this means: The projects with momentum are either corporate-backed platforms that expect you to be a developer, or brand-new AI-era codebases with commit velocities no human team produces and no audience yet. The middle of the market, a maintained tool a small landlord can self-host in an afternoon, is almost unoccupied. Operators modeling their own property data before reaching for any of these can start from the reference schema in our hotel operations data model, most of which transfers directly to long-term rental portfolios.
The install lab Statistics 23-27
Reading repositories only gets you so far, so we installed things. In the RapidEye Research install lab (August 2026), 0 of 2 freshly tested platforms passed by following their own documentation. Online Rental Property Manager documents no Docker path, so we hand-rolled a PHP and MySQL stack, added two missing PHP extensions the app expects, and reached its setup wizard, which then required an image captcha before account creation; our automated lab does not complete captchas, so the run stops there, at a working wizard rather than a dashboard. Property Plus, an 85-star MERN tenant management system, crashed at boot because its email module requires an API key for Resend, a commercial email service its documentation never mentions (the README still describes a Gmail SMTP setup), and its default port collided with a stock macOS service; after those fixes it booted cleanly to its login screen with the database connected. The July 2026 companion lab supplies the baseline: Microrealestate booted all 11 of the containers its compose file defines, but its tenant portal returned a server error out of the box, while ResidenceCMS was the field's one documentation-only pass.
Freshly install-tested platforms worked by following their own documentation alone.
RapidEye Research install lab (Aug 2026)
Container-level fixes were needed before Online Rental Property Manager booted to its setup wizard, which is then gated by an image captcha.
RapidEye Research install lab (Aug 2026)
Undocumented commercial API credential (a Resend email key) is required before Property Plus will boot; its README documents a different email stack entirely.
RapidEye Research install lab (Aug 2026)
Containers in Microrealestate's compose file, all of which booted in our July 2026 test, though the tenant portal served an error out of the box.
RapidEye Research install lab (Jul 2026); compose file re-verified Aug 1, 2026
Documentation-only install pass across both labs' long-term rental tests: ResidenceCMS, the Symfony property CMS.
RapidEye Research install lab (Jul 2026)
What this means: Every platform we tested carries undocumented operational knowledge: a missing PHP extension, a credential the docs never mention, a portal that errors on first boot. Self-hosting one of these is a small engineering project, not an install. Budget for that, or accept that the commercial platforms are charging for exactly this gap.
The field guide All 18 projects
Every project profiled in this audit, with repository metadata retrieved August 1, 2026. The activity bar shows commits to the default branch in the trailing 12 months (square-root scale). Status: Active means commits in the past year at a steady clip, Slowing means barely any, Dormant means none, Archived means formally shut down by its maintainer. Install results name the lab month.
| Project | Category | Stars | License | Created | 12-mo commits | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MicrorealestateInstall: tenant portal error (Jul 2026) | Landlord platform | 1,155 | MIT | 2017 | 2 | Slowing |
| CondoDeveloper setup only | Property SaaS | 387 | MIT | 2021 | 1,223 | Active |
| Loca | Landlord platform | 239 | MIT | 2015 | 0 | Archived |
| ResidenceCMSInstall: pass, docs only (Jul 2026) | Property CMS | 179 | MIT | 2018 | 0 | Dormant |
| Online Rental Property ManagerInstall: captcha-gated setup (Aug 2026) | Landlord platform | 174 | MIT | 2018 | 4 | Active |
| openMAINT Docker (third party) | Facility maintenance | 119 | None | 2019 | 13 | Active |
| Rentalog | Rent tracker (frontend) | 111 | MIT | 2023 | 0 | Dormant |
| Rental House MS | Landlord platform | 88 | MIT | 2022 | 0 | Dormant |
| Property PlusInstall: pass, manual fixes (Aug 2026) | Tenant management | 85 | None | 2022 | 26 | Active |
| PropMS (original) | ERPNext module | 66 | Non-std | 2020 | 0 | Dormant |
| HRM | Rent management | 64 | AGPL-3.0 | 2016 | 0 | Archived |
| Dwellingly | Civic property tool | 49 | None | 2019 | 0 | Dormant |
| Rental Management System | Landlord platform | 23 | MIT | 2025 | 227 | Active |
| PropMS (successor) | ERPNext module | 22 | Non-std | 2024 | 69 | Active |
| OCA vertical-realestate | Odoo module | 20 | AGPL-3.0 | 2017 | 0 | Dormant |
| Rental Management (fork line) | Landlord platform | 16 | MIT | 2026 | 3,540 | Active |
| ImmiQ | Tenant management | 10 | Non-std | 2025 | 0 | Dormant |
| Tatl | HOA manager | 2 | None | 2026 | 183 | Active |
Reading note: "Non-std" means the repository publishes license text GitHub cannot map to a standard SPDX identifier; "None" means no license file at all. Star counts and commit figures are from the GitHub API on August 1, 2026 and will drift.
Cite this study
Academic or press use: copy a ready-made reference. RapidEye is the publisher.
Quick FAQ
Is there a good open source property management software for landlords?
The most-starred option, Microrealestate (1,155 GitHub stars), shipped only 2 commits to its main branch in the 12 months to August 2026, and its tenant portal failed our install test out of the box. The most actively developed project, Condo (387 stars, 50 contributors, 1,223 commits in 12 months), documents a developer setup rather than a one-command self-host. The steadiest small option is bigprof's Online Rental Property Manager, maintained since 2018 with a release shipped in July 2026.
Is there an open source alternative to Buildium or AppFolio?
Nothing at comparable depth. In our August 2026 audit of 18 open-source long-term rental projects, the entire field holds 2,809 combined GitHub stars, under a fifth of what the single leading open-source hotel platform holds, and half the field shipped zero commits in the past year. The closest functional analogs are Microrealestate and Online Rental Property Manager, both far narrower than commercial suites.
Is there open source HOA management software?
Effectively no. A GitHub search for HOA management returns 357 repositories as of August 1, 2026, but no repository in its top results that is actually an HOA manager exceeds 2 stars. The category is the emptiest corner of open-source property software we measured; its only active project is a 2-star Rails app created in April 2026.
Do open source landlord tools actually work when you install them?
Rarely on documentation alone. In our August 2026 install lab, 0 of 2 freshly tested platforms passed by following their own documentation: one boots into a setup wizard gated by an image captcha after two container-level fixes, and the other crashes at boot on a commercial email API credential its documentation never mentions. In the July 2026 companion lab, the most-starred landlord platform booted all 11 of its containers but served an error from its tenant portal.
Data sources
Nearly every figure on this page is RapidEye Research's own measurement; the underlying raw data traces to these named public sources, each queried directly during the August 2026 audit. Sources are named at the publisher level with their root domain, rather than linked or titled; every figure is verifiable at the named source.
GitHubRepository search API, repository metadata, commit history, and release data, retrieved August 1, 2026github.com
RapidEye ResearchInstall lab: Docker-based install testing of open-source rental platforms, July and August 2026rapideyeinspections.com