We’ve built a property management tool for small landlords

Hi William

Landlord Software is a tough market at the moment, especially with so many landlords being in what I’ve dubbed as “analysis paralysis” due to all the changes we are facing.

What competitor analysis have you done?

Also, what are your thoughts on our latest Landlord Survey results – linked below in case you’ve not seen it?

https://www.property118.com/results-of-the-property118-landlord-sentiment-survey-q1-2026/

Wishing you all the best with your launch in May.

Reply to the comment left by Mark Alexander – Founder of Property118 at 13/04/2026 – 11:06
Mark, thank you — and for the kind words about the launch.

On competitor analysis: we have been maintaining a competitive landscape review which we update fortnightly.

It currently benchmarks 11 platforms — Hammock, August, Arthur Online, RentalBux, LandlordOS, and others — across MTD compliance, maintenance management, compliance dashboarding, tenant features, and AI. We also monitor every MTD claim against the official GOV.UK register.

There are good products in the market. Hammock is deservedly the established MTD leader. August is well-executed for self-managing landlords. Arthur is comprehensive for agents and larger portfolios.
What we believe is that none of them have been built around evidence as the core architecture — an immutable, timestamped record where neither landlord nor tenant can edit the other’s entries. MTD has capable solutions. What happens after — when a tenant disputes a deposit, when you need to prove you responded to a damp report within 14 days, when a possession case needs documented evidence in a world without Section 21 — is where we think there’s a genuine gap to help landlords with their increasing regulatory burden.

On your survey: two numbers jumped out at me.
40.8% of landlords fully self-manage, and another 16% only use agents for letting. That’s well over half the sector running their properties without dedicated support — and doing it while MTD, the Renters’ Rights Act, and Awaab’s Law are all landing at once. That’s who we’re building for.
The other is the 57% planning to sell or exit in the next twelve months. From conversations we’ve had, I don’t think most of those landlords are leaving because they want to.

I think they’re leaving because the cumulative weight and cost of regulation has tipped the balance. Perhaps if the right tools existed to make compliance manageable rather than overwhelming, some of those landlords might stay. I’d like Harthing to be one of the reasons they do.

We go live on 12th May. It’ll be free at launch, and we’ll be shaping the product based on what landlords actually tell us they need. I’ll be here regularly to answer any questions — honestly, including about what we haven’t built yet, and what your members would like us to. I look forward to hearing from them.

William

Have you looked at Alphaletz, Lendlord, Landlord Vision and Landlord Studio?

How does yours compare to what they do?

Reply to the comment left by Mark Alexander – Founder of Property118 at 13/04/2026 – 14:32
May I also add the NRLA Portfolio software to that list, please?

Reply to the comment left by Neilt at 13/04/2026 – 14:37
Mark — yes, we’ve looked at all of those, and thank you to the commenter for adding NRLA Portfolio.

Alphaletz is a solid property management platform — free for the first property, open banking, good task management and compliance tracking. It’s LandlordZONE’s official technology partner, and Richard Jackson built it as a portfolio landlord himself, which I respect.

Lendlord is strong on portfolio analytics — deal analysis, ROI, LTV, yield tracking — and has over 50,000 registered users. They’ve also just launched an RRA compliance tool for evidencing delivery of the information sheet to tenants, with in-app acknowledgement and e-signatures. Our whole thesis with Harthing is that proving you acted properly should be built into the architecture from day one, not bolted on as a single-use feature — but it’s encouraging to see other platforms recognising that evidence matters as much as management.

Landlord Vision has been around since 2002 and their v1 is on the official GOV.UK MTD register. Good accounting and compliance reminders. Well-established.

Landlord Studio we covered in our landscape review — clean financial tracking, receipt scanning, Xero integration.

NRLA Portfolio is included free with NRLA membership, with PortfolioPlus at £5/month. Compliance tracking, tenant portal, document storage, Open Banking. Their MTD route is via a partnership with Taxd, which is HMRC-recognised. And they have the Safe2 integration for ordering safety certificates directly.

All of these are good at what they do. Most of them were built before the current wave of regulatory change — MTD, Section 21 abolition, Awaab’s Law — and have adapted to meet it. We’ve had the advantage of designing Harthing from the ground up around that new compliance regime, with the evidence trail as the starting point rather than something added later. Whether that turns out to be a meaningful advantage is something we’ll find out when real landlords start using it in May and letting us know!

William

Reply to the comment left by William Harford at 13/04/2026 – 14:54
Hi William

If yours can do all the things that all the others do well then you, in turn, deserve to do well.

Honestly, do you think you’ve achieved that?

Reply to the comment left by William Harford at 13/04/2026 – 14:54

Mark, to more specifically address how we compare: honestly, our launch MVP in May will be lighter on some features than those established platforms — we won’t have Open Banking or accounting software integrations at launch, for example. What we do have from day one is property management, maintenance lifecycle tracking, compliance document storage with expiry tracking, financial transaction recording with HMRC expense categorisation, AI document parsing, and the Accountability Record — an immutable, hashed evidence export that a landlord can produce if challenged.

The full product adds Open Banking, direct HMRC MTD submission (once we have recognition), accounting software integration, a tenant portal, and deeper AI features. Also, a fair part of that roadmap will be shaped by what our early access users tell us they actually need — we’d rather build what landlords ask us for than guess. We are also considering asking a group of early users, our Founding 30, to be part of a permanent advisory board (if they are willing and can spare the time) to help guide us longer term (and in return for permanent free access, of course!!)

Ultimately, where we think we’re different isn’t the feature list — most of those platforms cover similar ground over time. It’s more that we conceived and built the whole thing from scratch around the new compliance regime, with the immutable evidence trail running through everything from day one. That’s harder to retrofit than it is to build in from the start.

However, ultimately the market will tell us if we’re on the right track; along, I have no doubt, with you & your members…!

William

Reply to the comment left by Mark Alexander – Founder of Property118 at 13/04/2026 – 15:03
Apologies, I posted my response to your follow up question as a reply to my own comment, not yours; trying to do too many things at once!

Reply to the comment left by William Harford at 13/04/2026 – 15:10
Well, I’m reasonably convinced that you’re on the right track, so I, for one, will wait until the May release and sign up then. I’ve been using Quicken 2002 since its first release and have never found anything comparable. Of course, times have changed. I have to have a separate computor to run it on Win XP and it’s not Landlord specific. So I’ll look forward to trying out your effort in this area

Reply to the comment left by William Harford at 15:27

I think MTD and integration with Quickbooks and Xero are vital if you don’t want to clash with the advice of landlords’ accountants. Get that bit right and I think accountants could be an excellent source of business referrals for you.