Running a Small Rental House: The Complete Guide
Running a small rental house sits in a strange spot: enterprise software is overkill and expensive, and spreadsheets break down once you hit 50+ items. This guide is for the owner-operators figuring out how to track inventory, price rentals, and decide what to buy with real numbers.
Start here: the reality of running a rental house
What the actual numbers look like on a small-to-mid rental operation. Margins, overhead, and what owners wish they'd known earlier.
Inventory: what to buy, keep, and sell
The single biggest capital allocation problem in a rental house. Buy too much of the wrong thing and you bleed depreciation; buy too little of the right thing and you lose bookings.
Software: when to move off spreadsheets
Spreadsheets work at 10 items. At 50, they're a liability. This covers what to look for in rental management software and the tradeoffs between the common options.
Pricing and utilization: the two levers that matter
Rental houses live and die by utilization × rate. If either is off, profit evaporates. These pieces cover both.
Operations: agreements, damage, insurance
The unglamorous side of running a rental house. The stuff that protects you when a shoot goes sideways.
Build your business plan
Whether you're formalizing an existing operation or starting fresh, these pieces help you think about the economics end-to-end.
Rental house analytics without the enterprise price tag
Rental IQ gives you per-item ROI, utilization, and profitability across your entire inventory. Designed for small rental houses, not Fortune 500s.