u/Alarming-Yam-8336

Hey everyone,

I'm a RE investor building a capital expenditure planning tool for my own rental portfolio.

The problem I'm looking to solve: tracking when major systems (HVAC, roof, water heater, appliances, etc.) are due for replacement and whether my reserves are actually adequate. Right now I do this in spreadsheets and it's painful.

The enterprise tools for this (Tailorbird, Oxmaint) start at $18-48k/year and target institutional portfolios. The consumer tools (Stessa, Baselane) that I am aware of do transaction tracking but nothing on the planning side, so I'm building something in between.

I've got sample reports and a screenshot of the exterior photo capture flow linked below. I'm not looking for signups at this point or anything like that. I'm just curious whether anyone here also owns rental property and would be willing to tell me if this output is actually useful or if I'm solving the wrong problem.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1wojTgOe\_\_NiUHx2tAmrE7FxrhrfL8pXE

Stack is Next.js, Supabase, Vercel, with Claude vision API for the photo capture piece. Happy to talk about the build too.

What I’ve built for myself

I own a small rental portfolio (mix of SFR and multifamily) and was annoyed by capex reserves. Not that they exist, just that the rules of thumb were better than nothing but also not really based on anything real either - using the same rule of thumb for a new construction single family and a 50 year old duplex is obviously going to be wrong on one or both counts.

So I built a tool for myself that tracks every major system (and a number of smaller but still capital level components) across my properties — what's installed, how old it is, what it'll cost to replace — and runs the math on what I should be setting aside each month so the money's actually there when something comes due. I can walk a property with my phone, snap photos of equipment, and it pulls component details off nameplates so I'm not hand-entering serial numbers. Upload an inspection report and it extracts the relevant data automatically.

The natural “follow on” scope I added that I expect to be valuable is on the acquisition side. When I'm looking at a property, I do the same walkthrough protocol and it basically shows me what the seller has been deferring — here's a 16-year-old HVAC and a water heater past its expected life, so here's what you're probably spending in the first few years. That should give me the ability to have more real numbers to bring to the negotiation and show the seller instead of just a gut feel on deferred maintenance. Of course, no guarantee the sellers will listen to reason but at least I’ll have tried. After a closing, the property moves into the normal portfolio status so unless I replaced any components as part of closing I don’t need to enter the data again.

Anyway, I've been building this over the past couple of weeks and I'm starting to populate my own properties. It is interesting to see how I was under-reserving for properties I had “recently” done gut renovations on…apparently time flies by as you get older.

Question for PMs

Now that I’ve described my thinking, I'm wondering if PMs deal with this differently. Do you track capital reserves per property for your owners, or is that their problem? When an owner asks "am I saving enough for future replacements," do you have a real answer or is it more of a feel thing?

I’d love to hear how the PM side handles this more broadly. In my experience as an owner (with property managers), nobody's ever proactively brought up capital planning with me. In my mind, helping to ensure your owners are adequately reserved would help smooth both operations and tenant relations, but I’m not actually in that side of the business so my feelings on it may not fit with the actual reality.