Student housing property management softwareLeased by the bed. Ready for August.
Student rentals are rent-by-the-room with a calendar attached. Everyone signs in spring, everyone moves in August, everyone leaves the same week, and somebody's parent is on the lease.
By-the-bed leases with a guarantor attached
A student rental is usually leased by the bed: one resident, one bedroom, one balance, and a co-signer who guarantees it. RentCaddie holds the bedroom as the leased thing and records the co-signer as a separate signer on the same agreement, so the person guaranteeing the rent actually signed something.
Because each bedroom is its own lease, a roommate who does not return in the spring is one lease to replace instead of a renegotiation with the whole house. Screening criteria stay written and applied identically to every applicant, which matters more, not less, when applications arrive in batches from friend groups.
- One lease per bed, with its own rent and deposit
- Co-signer or guarantor recorded as a signer on the agreement
- Applications, documents, and references collected in one place
- Written criteria applied the same way to every applicant
Academic-year terms and the summer gap
Student leases rarely run twelve clean months. RentCaddie takes the real start and end dates, prorates the partial periods from the lease's own daily rate, and bills the months in between on the due day that lease specifies — including a summer term at a different rate if that is what you signed.
The occupancy timeline is where the year becomes visible. Every bed draws its own bar, so a wall of August end dates is something you look at in February rather than discover in July, and renewal offers can go out before the leasing season starts rather than after it.
- Real start and end dates, including nine- and ten-month terms
- Prorated first and last periods with the arithmetic shown
- Renewal offers scheduled ahead of your local leasing season
- A timeline showing every bed's term, not every address's
The August turnover, planned instead of survived
When a whole house empties in the same week, the work is the schedule. Move-out inspections record each bedroom against its own move-in evidence and the shared areas separately, with photos, so a departing resident is not charged for the state of a kitchen four people used.
Turnovers get assigned to cleaners with their own simplified app and their own per-property rate, and the temporary door code they need exists only on the day the work is scheduled. Findings from an inspection become repair tickets and, where the signed fee schedule covers them, priced charges you confirm before anything reaches a resident's ledger.
- Move-out inspections with photo evidence per bedroom
- Shared areas recorded separately from private rooms
- Cleaners and inspectors with per-property rates and time-boxed access
- Inspection findings turning into tickets, expenses, and confirmed charges
Residents and the people paying for them
Students live on their phones and their parents want a paper trail. The resident portal is where a student pays, downloads a receipt, reads their lease, reports a repair with a photo, and finds the WiFi password without messaging you at eleven at night.
Every charge, payment, and allocation lands on that resident's ledger with a date and a description, so the question that arrives in April — what exactly did we pay, and for what — has an answer you can send rather than reconstruct.
- Mobile resident portal for payments, receipts, and documents
- Photo maintenance tickets with a status a resident can follow
- A per-property home guide for the questions that repeat every August
- A per-resident ledger that explains itself
What RentCaddie does not do
Student housing has some specific gaps worth naming.
- It has no university integration: no student information system feed, no campus housing portal, no roommate-matching questionnaire, and no enrollment verification.
- It does not manage purpose-built student communities with amenity bookings, front desks, or bed-swap waitlists at scale.
- It does not run background or credit screening itself; you choose the provider and own the criteria, the decision, and any required notices.
- It is not an enterprise accounting suite — per-property profit and loss and a Schedule-E-ready year end, not a double-entry general ledger or accounts payable.
- Plans count active leases, so a six-bedroom student house counts as six.
Guarantor arrangements, occupancy limits, rental licensing, and student-specific local ordinances vary widely. RentCaddie is not legal advice — have local counsel review your lease and your criteria.
The parts of RentCaddie this uses
Common questions
Does RentCaddie support by-the-bed leasing?
Can a parent co-sign a student's lease?
Can I run a nine-month or ten-month academic lease?
How does RentCaddie handle a whole house turning over in August?
Does it integrate with a university housing system?
Field guides on this
Terms worth getting right
- Rent by the room
- Per-room lease
- Co-signer
- Joint and several liability
- Roommate turnover
- Guest policy
- Prorated rent
- Workforce housing