Why I built PorchLedger
It started the day Zillow shut off its lease builder. If you were a small landlord who relied on it, you know the feeling: a renewal coming up in a few weeks, a new tenant ready to sign, and suddenly no way to generate a lease. The tool that thousands of us quietly depended on was just gone, and the alternatives were a lawyer, a stationery-store template from another decade, or a subscription platform built for property managers with hundreds of doors.
I have a handful of rentals, not hundreds. I needed a lease that handles the details Colorado actually requires, that I could draft in an evening and reuse next year. Nothing out there fit, and being a techie, I could not help myself. I started writing the tool I wanted.
Then the lease turned out to be the easy part
Once the lease builder worked, the rest of the job came into focus. A lease is maybe a tenth of what running rentals actually demands, and the other nine tenths were scattered across spreadsheets, photo rolls, and memory:
- Expense tracking that survives an audit. Every repair logged from my phone in the driveway, receipts and invoices attached, contractor payments acknowledged with a signature, and a clear answer to "is this deductible now or depreciated?"
- Active lease tracking. Which leases end when, with reminders that respect Colorado's 60-day notice requirement for rent changes, and calendar feeds that put renewal deadlines on my phone next to everything else in my life.
- Real market data feeding wealth analysis. Government-published numbers (HUD fair market rents, house price indexes, mortgage averages) blended into my own portfolio, so I can see rent versus market, refinance opportunities, and the equity every mortgage payment quietly builds.
- Proactive alerts. When the National Weather Service issues a freeze warning for a property's county, I want a text that says "remind tenants to drip the faucets" before the pipes burst, not a news story after.
- Tax season done in an afternoon. A Schedule E package per property, a depreciation worksheet ready for tax software, a mileage log, and 1099 flags for the vendors I paid in cash.
I looked for software that did all of this in one place, for someone my size. I could not find it. Everything was either a lease-only tool, an accounting-only tool, or an enterprise platform priced and designed for property managers.
And then the world started talking to AI
The way people use software is changing. I do not want to open an app, tap through four screens, and fill a form to record "paid the plumber $340 in cash." I want to tell my AI assistant that sentence and have it logged, categorized, and receipted, with my family emailed so everyone knows.
So PorchLedger speaks AI natively. It exposes its whole surface to AI agents: ChatGPT, Claude, and anything else that can connect. My assistant logs expenses and mileage from a chat, reads receipts, drafts a lease from a PDF I forward, answers "how did the portfolio do this year?", and even reclassifies a photo it uploaded to the wrong slot. Every AI action emails the household as a review backstop, because trust needs receipts too. I have not found other landlord software in the market that treats AI agents as a first-class way in.
What PorchLedger is today
Lease drafting and renewals, expense and mileage tracking with proof, contractor-signed payment receipts, a trades directory, monthly statements that show cash flow next to equity built, market-data checks on every rent, weather and disaster alerts by email and text, calendar integration, household sharing, one-click full data export, and tax packages your CPA will actually thank you for. Built by one landlord, for small landlords, and used every day on my own properties first.
PorchLedger is currently invite-only while it grows carefully. If the story sounds familiar and you want in, reach out.
Visit PorchLedgerQuestions: info@porchledger.com