Letting agent software for a small agency: where to start

At two or three people, the shortlist is short

Of the eight systems compared here, the three that publish a price a small agency can commit to without a call are Apex27 at £35 per user per month excluding VAT, PayProp at a licence from £79 a month plus under 1% of processing volume, and Arthur Online from £82.50 a month including 55 units. Acquaint CRM does not publish a CRM price but publishes the terms most favourable to a small agency: no installation fee, no minimum term and a rolling monthly contract. That combination of transparency makes the first decision cheap to reverse.

What actually matters at that size

• The client account reconciles, every month, without a spreadsheet. This is the whole job. Everything else on a feature list is secondary until the reconciliation is boring.
• Deadlines chase you, not the other way round. Deposit registration inside 30 days, gas and electrical certificate expiry, tenancy renewals and rent reviews. A system that does not raise these is a filing cabinet with a login.
• Landlord statements you are not embarrassed by. They are the single most visible thing your software produces, and the reason landlords leave.
• One record for a property. If the tenancy, the maintenance history, the certificates and the ledger live in different places, they will disagree within a year.
• Getting out. Ask what an export of the client ledger looks like before you put three years of history in, not after.

You do not need a system to be legal, but you do need the memberships

No rule requires letting agent software. The obligations are memberships and processes: an approved client money protection scheme if you hold client money in England, an FCA-authorised client account, a displayed CMP certificate, deposits in an approved scheme within 30 days, and redress scheme membership. A small agency running on a well-kept spreadsheet and a bank account can meet every one of them. Software is a commercial choice about admin time, error rate and what happens when the one person who understands the spreadsheet is on holiday.

What to do in the first fortnight

1. Take the trials that exist. Apex27 offers a trial period with flexible billing and no long-term commitment; several others offer only a demo.
2. Load one real month of transactions, not sample data, and reconcile it against your actual bank statement. If that does not work, nothing else matters.
3. Produce a landlord statement and read it as a landlord would.
4. Set one certificate expiry in the past and one in three weeks, and see what the system does with each.
5. Ask each supplier for the migration scope in writing: what comes across, what does not, who does the work, and what it costs.

Prices and terms in this guide were read on each supplier's own website on 15 August 2026 and are reproduced, not estimated. Suppliers change plans without notice, and nothing here is legal or regulatory advice about your agency's obligations.