Avail Review (2026): The Best Free Landlord Software Has a $2.50 Catch

The number one Google result for “avail review” is written by TurboTenant. That is not a typo. Avail’s direct competitor owns the top of the search page for Avail’s own brand, and most of the other results are aggregator tables still quoting a $7 per unit price that died some time ago. So an honest, current, independent review of Avail is genuinely hard to find, and that is the gap we are filling here.

Quick disclosure on method: we have not run a hands-on trial of Avail. This review is research-based. We verified every official figure on avail.com’s live pricing page on July 23, 2026, and everything we could not verify at the source is labeled REPORTED with a date and an attribution. That discipline matters more than usual with Avail, because the internet is littered with dead Avail prices.

The short version: Avail Unlimited is genuinely free for landlords, one of the most complete free tiers in the category. But free-for-landlords is not free. On the free tier, your tenant pays $2.50 every time they pay rent by ACH. Over a 12-month lease that is $30 a year the tenant quietly eats, and the only way to remove it is for the landlord to upgrade to Unlimited Plus at $9 per unit per month. It is the same structural trap we flagged in TurboTenant’s tenant-fee toggle, and it is the single most important thing to understand before you onboard your renters.

---

Avail at a glance

Plan	Landlord cost (OFFICIAL, avail.com, 2026-07-23)	Tenant ACH fee	Tenant card fee	What you get
Unlimited (free)	$0, unlimited units	$2.50 per payment	3.5%	Syndication to 19 sites, applications and screening, state-specific leases, rent collection, maintenance tracking, tenant portal, income and expense tracking
Unlimited Plus	$9 per unit per month	$0 (waived)	3.5%	Everything in free, plus FastPay next-day deposits, custom application questions, lease customization and cloning, branded property site, priority support
Verdict at a glance: 4.1/5. Best free tier for lease quality and syndication reach. Docked for the tenant-side ACH fee, the 3.5% card fee that survives the paid upgrade, weak advanced reporting, and zero AI in 2026.

Two things in that table deserve a second look. First, the $9 per unit Plus price. A surprising number of 2026-dated aggregator pages, including SoftwareFinder, SoftwareConnect, and RealEstateBees, still print Plus at $7 per unit. That price is dead. The live official price on July 23, 2026 is $9. If a comparison table you are reading says $7, everything else in that table is suspect too.

Second, the card fee. Upgrading to Plus removes the tenant’s ACH fee, and most fee tables blur this into “Plus removes payment fees.” It does not. The 3.5% card processing fee applies on both tiers. A tenant paying $1,500 rent by credit card hands over $52.50 in fees whether the landlord is on free or Plus. Only bank-transfer payments become free with the upgrade.

---

What Avail actually is

Avail is landlord software for the do-it-yourself end of the market: the owner with one to maybe twenty units who wants listings, applications, screening, leases, rent collection, and maintenance requests in one place without paying per-door software fees. It started as an independent Chicago startup (originally Rentalutions) and has been owned since 2020 by Move Inc., the company that operates Realtor.com under the News Corp umbrella. The product is now branded “Avail, by Realtor.com” and lives at avail.com.

One accuracy note, because we have seen it garbled elsewhere: Avail is not owned by CoStar. Move Inc. and Realtor.com are the parent, News Corp is the umbrella. CoStar owns Apartments.com, a different syndication network entirely.

The ownership is worth understanding as a strategy, not a scandal. Realtor.com wants rental listings and rental audience. A genuinely free, genuinely capable landlord tool is excellent lead generation for that network, which is why Avail’s free tier is more complete than free tiers usually are. You benefit from real syndication muscle: your listing pushes to 19 sites including the Realtor.com rental network. The trade-off is that Avail’s roadmap serves a media company’s rental funnel, which may explain why the accounting and reporting side has stayed thin while listing tools stay polished.

The core workflow covers the full lifecycle:

• Listings and syndication. One listing form, pushed to 19 partner sites. This is Avail’s strongest muscle and the most direct benefit of the Realtor.com ownership.
• Applications and screening. Applications are built in, screening runs on TransUnion, and the landlord chooses whether the applicant or the landlord pays for reports.
• State-specific leases. Lawyer-reviewed templates localized by state, with e-signature. This is the feature that most consistently earns praise in the review corpus and a real differentiator against generic lease uploads.
• Rent collection. ACH and card payments, autopay, automated reminders and late fees, with the fee structure described above.
• Maintenance tracking. Tenants submit requests with photos through the portal, landlords track status.
• Income and expense tracking. Basic bookkeeping tagged to properties, useful at tax time, not a replacement for real accounting software.

---

Pricing: the real math, dated and sourced

Everything in this section is OFFICIAL from avail.com/pricing as of July 23, 2026, unless labeled REPORTED.

Unlimited (free): $0, unlimited units. Not a trial, not a three-unit teaser. Unlimited units on the free tier, with the full core feature set. Among free landlord platforms this is one of the broadest free tiers available, comparable to Innago and TurboTenant’s free tier and wider than TenantCloud’s.

Unlimited Plus: $9 per unit per month. Note the per-unit structure, because it changes the math as you grow. Five units on Plus is $45 a month, which is $540 a year. Ten units is $90 a month, $1,080 a year. At that scale you are paying more than dedicated paid platforms charge, and flat-priced competitors get cheap fast by comparison. Plus makes the most sense at one to three units, where $9 to $27 a month buys next-day deposits and fee-free ACH for your tenants.

The tenant fee ledger, which is the actual story:

• Tenant ACH payment on the free tier: $2.50 per payment. Twelve rent payments a year means $30 a year per tenant.
• Tenant ACH on Plus: $0. The landlord’s $9 per unit per month absorbs it.
• Card payments: 3.5% on both tiers. The upgrade never touches this.

Run the crossover: waiving a tenant’s $30 a year in ACH fees costs the landlord $108 a year per unit on Plus. Nobody upgrades to Plus for the fee waiver alone. You upgrade for FastPay next-day deposits and the workflow extras, and the tenant fee waiver rides along. If you stay free, be upfront with tenants that their rent portal charges $2.50 a pop, because they will notice, and surprise fees are how landlord-tenant relationships sour.

Screening prices: not published. Avail’s official pricing page lists no screening prices at all. REPORTED figures from iPropertyManagement, Stessa, and Landlord Gurus (April 2025) put it around $30 for a single report or $55 for the full credit, criminal, and eviction bundle, varying roughly $25 to $75 by state. Treat any single flat number you see elsewhere with suspicion, the price genuinely varies by state. The landlord decides who pays, and most DIY landlords pass it to the applicant.

The dead $7 exhibit. SoftwareFinder, SoftwareConnect, and RealEstateBees all carried Avail Plus at $7 per unit on 2026-dated pages when we checked in July 2026. The official live price is $9. This is not a knock on Avail, prices change. It is a knock on the aggregator layer of the SERP, and a reminder to always check the vendor’s live pricing page before budgeting. We date-stamp every figure in this review for exactly that reason.

---

The zero-AI finding

Here is something no other Avail review mentions, and for our audience it is the most interesting finding: Avail has zero AI features. None. No AI listing description writer, no AI lease audit, no AI maintenance triage, no AI leasing assistant, no chatbot.

In 2023 that was normal. In 2026 it is notable. TurboTenant, Avail’s closest competitor, now ships AI lease audits, AI listing generation, and AI maintenance tooling. Up the market, platforms like EliseAI run genuinely agentic leasing and collections conversations, which we covered in our roundup of the best AI tools for landlords and the best AI leasing assistants.

Does the absence matter? It depends on what you believe those features do. Our honest read: the AI features at the DIY-landlord price point are mostly convenience tools, a faster way to write a listing, not a transformation of the job. Avail’s automation is classic rules-based scheduling: rent reminders, late fees, listing syndication. That covers most of what a five-unit landlord automates anyway. But the direction of travel is one-way, and Avail sitting still while TurboTenant ships AI features every quarter tells you something about where Move Inc. is investing. If you want your software vendor to be visibly building, that signal favors the competition.

---

Reputation: what the review corpus says

Figures checked July 23, 2026; the Trustpilot score comes from the live review page, the Capterra and G2 figures from same-day search results.

• Capterra: 4.6 from 276 reviews. Strongest showing, praise concentrates on ease of use, the lease library, and the price.
• Trustpilot: 3.9 from 404 reviews, browser-verified on the live page July 23, 2026. Trustpilot skews toward payment and support disputes across this whole category, so a 3.9 there is unremarkable rather than alarming.
• G2: 4.0. Thinner review volume, weaker signal.

The complaint patterns worth knowing, drawn from recurring themes rather than isolated one-star reviews:

• Weak advanced reporting and accounting. The most consistent criticism. Income and expense tracking is basic, owners with growing portfolios outgrow it and bolt on dedicated accounting tools.
• Occasional credit-report errors. A recurring complaint theme describes screening reports with stale or mismatched data. Screening runs on TransUnion, so this is partly upstream of Avail, but Avail owns the support experience when it happens.
• Price-increase grumbling. The move that took Plus from $7 to $9 generated predictable friction from long-time users. A 29% jump on a small number is still a small number, but it is worth knowing the price has moved upward under Realtor.com ownership.

None of these patterns are disqualifying for the target user. They sketch the product’s edges: Avail is excellent at the front of the landlord workflow (list, screen, lease, collect) and thin at the back (report, account, analyze).

---

Who Avail is for

Choose Avail if:

• You self-manage one to ten units and want the strongest free tier for lease quality and listing reach.
• State-specific, lawyer-reviewed leases matter to you. This is Avail’s clearest edge over every free rival.
• You want listing syndication with real distribution, powered by the Realtor.com network.
• You are willing to either let tenants pay $2.50 per ACH payment or spend $9 per unit monthly to waive it.

Look elsewhere if:

• You want your tenants to pay nothing to pay rent and you also do not want a subscription. Innago charges tenants $2 ACH with a landlord-absorb toggle, and our roundup of the best AI rent collection tools covers options where ACH is genuinely free on both sides.
• You need real accounting. Avail’s tracking is tax-time basic. TenantCloud does more here, and our TenantCloud review covers where it fits.
• You want AI features or a vendor visibly shipping them. That is TurboTenant’s lane, and our TurboTenant review covers its AI stack and its own tenant-fee catch.
• You are past roughly 20 units. Per-unit Plus pricing scales badly, and you are entering the territory we map in our best AI tools for property managers guide.

On the TurboTenant question specifically, the two products are close enough that the decision usually comes down to fee structure and feature priorities. We keep the full crossover math in our dedicated TurboTenant vs Avail comparison, but the one-line summary is: Avail wins on leases and syndication, TurboTenant wins on AI tooling and a slightly lower tenant ACH fee, and both make the tenant pay unless the landlord upgrades.

---

Verdict: 4.1/5

Avail earns its 4.1 by being the most complete free landlord platform for the front half of the job. Unlimited units at $0 with real syndication, TransUnion screening, and the best lease library in the free tier category is a genuinely strong offer, and the Realtor.com ownership, whatever it means for the roadmap, funds distribution that independent rivals cannot match.

The deductions are specific. The $2.50 tenant ACH fee on the free tier is a real cost that marketing language hides, and the 3.5% card fee surviving the paid upgrade is the kind of detail most fee tables blur. Reporting and accounting are thin. And in 2026, zero AI features paired with a quiet roadmap suggests a product being maintained rather than pushed.

If you are a small self-managing landlord who values airtight leases and wide listing reach, and you are honest with your tenants about the payment fees or willing to absorb them via Plus, Avail is one of the best free choices available. Just budget from the live pricing page, not the aggregator tables. As we found repeatedly in researching this review, the internet’s Avail prices are two years old.