# Rental applications and shortlists for small landlords

Rental applications and shortlists for small landlords is a SaaS idea for landlords and small letting agents who fill their own vacancies, priced to test at $15 a month per landlord, or $5 per vacancy. Applications arrive by email, text and phone, with documents scattered across threads. With it, applicants fill in one form with their documents, and the landlord compares everyone side by side before picking a tenant.

_Published 19 Oct 2026. A starting point we wrote, not market research: run the 7-day test before you build._

## What problem does it solve?

Applications arrive by email, text and phone, with documents scattered across threads. Landlords lose track of who sent what, and applicants who hear nothing assume the worst.

**Why now:** Applicants expect to apply from their phone in minutes, and landlords want a fair, written record of how they chose.

## What do they use today?

Small landlords take applications through whatever the applicant prefers, then copy names and details into a notebook or spreadsheet. Some use a basic form from a listing site, and still compare applicants by hand.

## How does it work?

For each vacancy the landlord shares a link to one application form, and applicants fill it in and upload their documents from their phones. The landlord opens a comparison of the applicants, adds notes and shares a shortlist with a co-owner or agent. Once someone is chosen, polite emails go to the others, and old applications are deleted after a set time.

## What goes in the first version?

- An application form per vacancy with document uploads
- Side-by-side comparison of applicants
- Notes and a shortlist shared with a co-owner or agent
- Polite emails to applicants who weren’t chosen
- Applications deleted after a set time

## Who pays, and how much?

- **Who pays:** Landlords and small letting agents who fill their own vacancies
- **Price to test:** $15 a month per landlord, or $5 per vacancy

Landlords fill vacancies in bursts, with long quiet gaps between. A flat monthly fee per landlord suits the busy ones, and a fee per vacancy suits those who only need it now and then.

## How to test it in 7 days

1. Ask ten small landlords how they collected and compared applications for their last vacancy.
2. Run one real vacancy through a mock-up form and ask the landlord which view helped them decide.
3. Ask three small letting agents what they would need before they stopped handling this by email.

## Where to find the first customers

- Small landlord groups on Facebook
- Landlord subreddits
- Local landlord associations

## What are the risks?

- Fair-housing and data protection rules apply, so it must not filter applicants unfairly and must delete old applications.
- Listing sites offer basic applications; this must be clearly better at comparing and deciding.

## How to build it on shipanysaas

4 of the parts it needs are already in the kit. Get the kit, open it in Claude Code, Codex or Cursor, and paste the starting prompt.

**Already in the kit:** Sign-in, Teams and roles, Billing, Emails

**You build:**

- Vacancy forms with document uploads
- Applicant comparison and shortlist
- Retention rules that delete old applications

[Get the kit](https://shipanysaas-demo.vercel.app/pricing)

### The starting prompt

```text
You are in a fresh copy of the shipanysaas starter kit, a pnpm and Turborepo monorepo: the Next.js web app is in apps/web and the Supabase database, with its migrations, in apps/web/supabase. Help me build the first version of Rental applications and shortlists for small landlords.

Read AGENTS.md first, then the AGENTS.md in every folder you work in: the kit's rules there win over your defaults. When a skill in .agents/skills (also in .claude/skills and .cursor/skills) matches a task, use it.

## The product
- What it does: Applicants fill in one form with their documents, and the landlord compares everyone side by side before picking a tenant.
- Who pays: Landlords and small letting agents who fill their own vacancies
- Their problem: Applications arrive by email, text and phone, with documents scattered across threads. Landlords lose track of who sent what, and applicants who hear nothing assume the worst.
- Price to test: $15 a month per landlord, or $5 per vacancy (a plan in apps/web/config/billing.config.ts)

## Build only this first version
1. An application form per vacancy with document uploads
2. Side-by-side comparison of applicants
3. Notes and a shortlist shared with a co-owner or agent
4. Polite emails to applicants who weren’t chosen
5. Applications deleted after a set time

## Already in the kit: reuse it, never rebuild it
- Sign-in: email and password or Google, plus magic links and passkeys you can switch on
- Teams and roles: team accounts with members, roles and invitations
- Billing: Stripe or Lemon Squeezy subscriptions, per seat or usage-based, and one-off payments
- Emails: transactional email through Resend or Nodemailer

## New code it needs
- Vacancy forms with document uploads
- Applicant comparison and shortlist
- Retention rules that delete old applications

## How to work
1. Plan first: list the database tables (with row-level security, so each team only sees its own rows), the pages and the server actions for the first feature. Then stop and wait for my OK.
2. Build one feature at a time with the kit's own UI and form components, with a migration for every schema change and user-facing text in the translation files.
3. After each feature, run the verification steps in AGENTS.md, fix what they find, and tell me what you built and what comes next.

## Rules
- Ask me before you add a dependency, delete a file, or change sign-in, billing or the admin panel.
- Leave the parts of the kit this product doesn't use as they are.

Done when every first-version feature works for a signed-in team and the AGENTS.md checks pass.
```

### Guides for the parts it uses

- [How to add Google sign-in to a Next.js + Supabase app](https://shipanysaas-demo.vercel.app/blog/nextjs-supabase-google-sign-in)
- [How to add Stripe embedded checkout to a Next.js + Supabase app](https://shipanysaas-demo.vercel.app/blog/nextjs-supabase-stripe-embedded-checkout)
- [Multi-tenant SaaS architecture: teams, roles and invitations done right](https://shipanysaas-demo.vercel.app/blog/multi-tenant-saas-teams-roles-invitations)

## More ideas: Property

- [Rent tracking and late reminders for small landlords](https://shipanysaas-demo.vercel.app/saas-ideas/small-landlord-rent-tracker): Landlords with a few units see who has paid this month, and late tenants get polite, dated reminder emails.
- [Digital house manuals for short-let hosts](https://shipanysaas-demo.vercel.app/saas-ideas/short-let-guest-house-manuals): Hosts write one guide per property, and each guest gets a link with check-in steps, Wi-Fi and house rules.
- [Move-in and move-out inventory reports for letting agents](https://shipanysaas-demo.vercel.app/saas-ideas/tenancy-inventory-photo-reports): Agents walk a property room by room on a phone, take photos, and compare move-in and move-out condition side by side.

- [All SaaS ideas](https://shipanysaas-demo.vercel.app/saas-ideas)
- [Try the free generator](https://shipanysaas-demo.vercel.app/saas-ideas#generator)