Property Aura

Small landlords run entire portfolios on spreadsheets — tracking rent, expenses, maintenance, and tenants by hand, then scrambling at tax time. Property Aura is a live property management and accounting SaaS that replaces that spreadsheet with a full dashboard, automated rent collection, and a tenant portal. It’s deployed, it takes paying customers, and it’s the product this whole body of work grew out of.

The problem

Managing a handful of units is repetitive bookkeeping: who paid, what’s outstanding, what you spent on a boiler repair, what the portfolio is actually returning. Most landlords tolerate spreadsheets far longer than they should, because the alternatives are either priced for enterprise portfolios or built for property managers with staff. There’s a real gap for the landlord with one to fifty units who wants software that feels light but does the accounting properly.

Property Aura fills that gap — and then monetises it with a free tier that genuinely converts: one property free, unlimited everything for Pro.

How it works

A landlord signs in with Google (frictionless, no password to forget), adds their properties and units — single-family, multi-family, or condos — and lands on a dashboard spanning the whole portfolio. From there it covers the full lifecycle:

• Tenants and leases — terms, rent, due dates, deposits, occupants, guarantors.
• Accounting — expenses by category, vendor, and payment method, with recurring costs and receipt storage.
• Rent collection — automated, with a separate tenant portal on the other side where tenants pay and raise maintenance requests.
• Maintenance, documents, and reports — everything in one place, with tax-ready financial reports and PDF exports.

Two AI features sit on top: a Landlord AI assistant that answers questions about your own portfolio, and a Research AI flow for evaluating new markets — the same capability that later became its own product, PIE. Meanwhile Cloud Functions watch the data: they schedule recurring rent and expenses, monitor lease endings, react to payment-status changes, and flag fraud. The tenant portal runs on its own cookie-based auth, so tenants never touch the landlord’s app — they just pay rent and log requests. A spreadsheet import brings an existing portfolio across in minutes, and an onboarding email sequence nudges free users toward the moment a second property makes Pro obvious.

Under the hood

• Firebase as the entire backend — Auth, Firestore, Cloud Storage, and Cloud Functions on Node 22, deployed via Firebase App Hosting with Next.js standalone output.
• Next.js 15 App Router with TailwindCSS and shadcn/ui, multi-currency (USD, EUR, GBP), and dark mode by default.
• Stripe recurring billing — a free tier (one property) converting to Pro ($49.99/mo), driven by a webhook state machine with an admin bypass.
• Reactive Cloud Functions for auto-rent, recurring payments and expenses, lease-end monitoring, and fraud detection — so the bookkeeping largely runs itself.
• AI via Genkit and Gemini 2.5, exposed as typed flows under src/ai/flows/, plus an inline assistant (“Bella”) in the sidebar.
• Reporting that holds up — Recharts financials, PDFs via @react-pdf/renderer / jspdf / pdf-lib, and transactional email through Resend.
• A programmatic SEO engine — 52 published posts across how-to, comparison, FAQ, and pricing templates, with intent validation, semantic keyword generation, and a dynamic sitemap.
• Import that respects existing data — CSV and Excel import so a landlord’s current spreadsheet becomes the seed, not a do-over.

Property Aura is the proof point that I can take a product from zero to a live, paying SaaS — and then turn to distribution.