If you own three duplexes and manage them yourself, you eventually hit the same fork in the road: do you sign up for a full landlord platform, or do you just need a better system than the spreadsheet and shoebox you have now? Avail and KeyLoft sit on opposite sides of that fork. Avail, owned by Realtor.com, is a full-service platform that wants to handle your listings, applications, screening, leases, and rent collection end to end. KeyLoft is a free iPhone app that keeps your properties, tenants, leases, rent payments, and maintenance records organized on your device — no account, no subscription, no internet required.
Neither is objectively better. They solve different problems for different landlords. This comparison lays out where each one genuinely wins so you can pick without wasting a month finding out the hard way.
Quick Comparison
| Feature | KeyLoft | Avail |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free — all features, no tiers | Free tier available; Unlimited Plus at roughly $7 per unit per month |
| Works Offline | Yes — fully functional with no connection | No — cloud platform, requires internet |
| Account Required | No — open the app and start | Yes — email account and login |
| Best For | Solo landlords and small portfolios who want fast, private record-keeping | Landlords who want online rent collection, applications, and screening in one place |
| Platform | iPhone and iPad (native iOS) | Web browser plus mobile apps |
| Key Features | Property and unit tracking, tenant records, lease dates and renewal reminders, rent payment logging, maintenance history, expense records, document notes | Syndicated listings, online rental applications, credit and background screening, state-specific lease builder, online rent payments, maintenance tracking, rent price analysis |
| Data Privacy | Data stays on your device; nothing uploaded to a server | Data stored on Avail servers under a corporate parent's privacy policy |
Pricing
Let's be accurate about Avail, because it gets misrepresented in a lot of comparison posts. Avail has a genuinely usable free tier. You can list units, accept applications, build leases, and collect rent online without paying a monthly fee — certain services carry per-use costs (tenant screening is typically paid by the applicant, and faster rent transfers or e-signatures may cost extra). The paid tier, Unlimited Plus, runs about $7 per unit per month and unlocks next-day rent payments, custom lease clauses, waived FastPay fees, and more control over application questions.
That per-unit model is the thing to think through. At one unit it is coffee money. At ten units it's $70 a month, or $840 a year, whether or not you used the platform that month. Rental portfolios are not linear in effort — a stable ten-unit portfolio with long-term tenants might generate almost no platform activity for eight months straight, but the per-unit charge doesn't pause.
KeyLoft has no pricing table because there is nothing to price. It is free, permanently, with no premium tier holding back features, no unit caps, and no upsell prompt when you add your fourth property.
| Cost Over Time (5-unit portfolio) | KeyLoft | Avail Free Tier | Avail Unlimited Plus |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $0 | $0 base (per-use fees apply) | About $35 |
| 1 Year | $0 | $0 base (per-use fees apply) | About $420 |
| 3 Years | $0 | $0 base (per-use fees apply) | About $1,260 |
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Features
Avail's strength is transaction handling. It is built to move money and paperwork between you and your tenants. Post a vacancy and it syndicates to Realtor.com, Zillow-adjacent networks, and other listing sites from one form. An applicant fills out a standardized rental application, authorizes a credit and background check through TransUnion, and you see the report without ever touching sensitive documents yourself. You generate a state-specific lease from a template attorneys have reviewed, send it for e-signature, and collect rent by ACH on a recurring schedule. If a tenant pays late, Avail can report it. If they pay on time, it can report that too, which some tenants value.
That is a real, substantial feature set, and no free offline app replicates it. If you are turning over units regularly and want screening plus payments handled without assembling three separate services, Avail earns its fee.
KeyLoft's strength is the other half of landlording — the part that happens after the lease is signed and keeps happening for years. It tracks each property and unit, who lives there, what they pay, when the lease started and ends, which payments came in and when, what maintenance was done and what it cost, and what expenses hit each property. It gives you renewal reminders before a lease lapses into month-to-month by accident, and it holds the maintenance history you'll want when a tenant claims the water heater was never serviced.
Where Avail is a transaction platform, KeyLoft is a record system. It opens instantly, logs a rent payment in a few taps, and never asks you to log in. There is no listing syndication, no screening bureau integration, and no ACH rail. That is a deliberate scope decision, not a gap someone forgot to fill.
This mirrors how a lot of small operators build their toolkit — one lightweight app per job rather than one platform for everything. Landlords who also run a side business or freelance often pair a rental tracker with something like Stintly for time tracking, invoicing, and self-employment finances, and landlords doing significant renovation or build-out work use TrestleBook to manage contractor billing and job costing on the construction side. Each tool stays simple because it isn't trying to be all three.
Want to try KeyLoft for free? Download KeyLoft for Free — no subscription required.
Offline & Privacy
Avail is a cloud platform, and cloud is the correct architecture for what it does — you cannot process an ACH transfer or pull a credit report from an offline device. But it means the app is only as available as your connection. Property management is unusually good at putting you in bad-signal places: a concrete-walled basement checking a furnace, a rural property outside coverage, a parking garage after a showing, an airplane where you finally have two hours to reconcile the quarter. In every one of those moments a cloud app either stalls or shows you a cached shell.
KeyLoft works the same in all of them because everything lives on the device. There is no sync spinner, no session timeout, no "reconnecting" banner. You can log a repair standing in the crawlspace and it's saved.
Privacy is the second half of this. Avail collects tenant names, contact details, payment history, application data, and screening results, stored on servers operated by a company owned by Realtor.com's parent. Avail publishes a privacy policy and there's no reason to assume bad faith — but you are handing your tenants' personal and financial data to a third party whose terms can change, whose ownership can change, and whose breach exposure isn't yours to control. Landlords in states with tightening tenant-data rules should read those terms carefully.
KeyLoft stores your data on your iPhone. No account means there is no server-side profile of you or your tenants to leak, subpoena, sell, or lose. The tradeoff is honest and worth stating plainly: your device is your backup strategy. Keep iCloud device backup on, or you are one lost phone from one lost dataset. Cloud platforms handle redundancy for you; local-first apps hand you both the control and the responsibility.
Who Should Use Avail
Avail is the better choice if:
- You collect rent online and want it automated. Recurring ACH with automatic late fees is a genuine quality-of-life upgrade over chasing checks or Venmo.
- You turn over units frequently. Syndicated listings plus standardized applications plus integrated screening saves real hours on every vacancy.
- You need compliant leases without a lawyer on retainer. The state-specific lease builder is one of Avail's strongest features, especially for landlords in one or two states.
- You have a partner, spouse, or assistant who needs the same view. Cloud platforms handle shared access natively; a local-first app on your phone does not.
- You want tenants to have a self-service portal. Tenants submitting maintenance requests and viewing payment history themselves cuts down your inbound texts.
If three or more of those describe you, pay the per-unit fee and don't look back. The tool matches the job.
Who Should Use KeyLoft
KeyLoft is the better choice if:
- You have one to ten units and stable tenants. If you sign one lease a year, you're paying a platform monthly for a workflow you use annually.
- You already collect rent a way that works. Plenty of landlords use Zelle, ACH through their own bank, or checks. If that's settled, most of a platform's value is already covered — you just need the record kept.
- You want your records fast and always available. No login, no loading, no connection.
- You care about where tenant data lives. On-device storage is the strongest privacy posture available.
- You're a new landlord. Starting free while you learn what you actually need beats committing to a subscription in month one.
- You're tax-prep focused. Clean per-property expense and payment records are the bulk of what your accountant needs, and that's a record-keeping problem, not a platform problem.
The Bottom Line
Avail is a solid platform and the free tier is more generous than most competitors'. If your bottleneck is filling vacancies, screening applicants, and moving rent money, Avail solves that well and the per-unit price is defensible for what you get.
But most small landlords' actual bottleneck isn't transactions — it's memory. Which lease expires in March. Whether unit 2B's rent cleared last month. What the plumber charged in June and whether the same drain has backed up before. That is a record-keeping problem, and paying $7 per unit per month for a transaction platform to solve it is buying a lot of machinery you'll never start.
The honest recommendation: if you're running fewer than ten units with low turnover and rent collection you're already happy with, start with KeyLoft. It costs nothing, so trying it risks nothing, and you'll know within two weeks whether the gaps matter to you. If you find yourself wishing for online applications, integrated screening, or a tenant portal, Avail is right there and you'll sign up knowing exactly why you need it — which is a much better reason than guessing up front.
Ready to switch? Download KeyLoft for Free — it takes 30 seconds and costs nothing.