# Maintenance requests for small landlords

Maintenance requests for small landlords is a SaaS idea for landlords and small property managers with 5 to 100 units, priced to test at $2 per unit a month, with a $19 minimum. Repair requests arrive by text, email and phone at all hours. With it, tenants report repairs with photos, and the landlord assigns a handyman and follows every job to the end.

_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?

Repair requests arrive by text, email and phone at all hours. Landlords lose track of what they promised, tenants feel ignored, and there is no record when a deposit dispute comes up.

**Why now:** Small landlords outgrow spreadsheets long before they need a full property-management suite.

## What do they use today?

Most small landlords keep a spreadsheet or a notebook of repairs and pass jobs to handymen by phone or message. Receipts end up in a drawer or a photo folder until tax time.

## How does it work?

A tenant with a leaking tap opens the landlord’s request link, with no account needed, and sends a short description and photos. The landlord sees the new job on the board and assigns a handyman, who updates it from an email link. Questions go in the job’s messages, and the cost and receipt are saved when the work is done.

## What goes in the first version?

- A request form tenants open from a link, with photos
- A board of open, booked and finished jobs
- Assign a job to a handyman, who updates it from an email link
- Messages on each job instead of scattered texts
- Cost and receipt per job, exportable at tax time

## Who pays, and how much?

- **Who pays:** Landlords and small property managers with 5 to 100 units
- **Price to test:** $2 per unit a month, with a $19 minimum

Pricing per unit matches how landlords already count rent, repairs and tax, so the bill grows only as the portfolio does. A small minimum applies to an owner with just a few units.

## How to test it in 7 days

1. Read r/landlord for posts about repair chaos and save twenty in the posters’ words.
2. Call five landlords from a local investor meetup and ask how they track repairs today.
3. Put up a page that takes pre-orders and send it to the landlords you spoke to.

## Where to find the first customers

- r/landlord
- Local real-estate investor meetups
- Landlord association newsletters

## What are the risks?

- Landlords watch every dollar, and many manage fine with texts.
- Tenants won’t install anything, so requests must work without an account.

## How to build it on shipanysaas

6 of the parts it needs are already in the kit, the phone app with the All-in plan. 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, In-app notifications, Phone app with All-in

**You build:**

- Tenant request form without an account
- Job board with assignment and status
- Cost tracking and export

[Get the kit](https://www.shipanysaas.com/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; with the All-in plan, the Expo phone app is in apps/native. Help me build the first version of Maintenance requests 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: Tenants report repairs with photos, and the landlord assigns a handyman and follows every job to the end.
- Who pays: Landlords and small property managers with 5 to 100 units
- Their problem: Repair requests arrive by text, email and phone at all hours. Landlords lose track of what they promised, tenants feel ignored, and there is no record when a deposit dispute comes up.
- Price to test: $2 per unit a month, with a $19 minimum (a plan in apps/web/config/billing.config.ts)

## Build only this first version
1. A request form tenants open from a link, with photos
2. A board of open, booked and finished jobs
3. Assign a job to a handyman, who updates it from an email link
4. Messages on each job instead of scattered texts
5. Cost and receipt per job, exportable at tax 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
- In-app notifications: a notifications bell in the web app
- Phone app: an iPhone, iPad and Android app on the same backend (All-in plan)

## New code it needs
- Tenant request form without an account
- Job board with assignment and status
- Cost tracking and export

## 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.
- If apps/native is not in your copy (the Starter plan), build the web app only.

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

### Guides for the parts it uses

- [Expo Supabase setup: one backend for your web and phone apps](https://www.shipanysaas.com/blog/expo-supabase-one-backend)
- [How to add Stripe embedded checkout to a Next.js + Supabase app](https://www.shipanysaas.com/blog/nextjs-supabase-stripe-embedded-checkout)
- [Multi-tenant SaaS architecture: teams, roles and invitations done right](https://www.shipanysaas.com/blog/multi-tenant-saas-teams-roles-invitations)

## More ideas: Local services

- [Digital food safety logs for small restaurants](https://www.shipanysaas.com/saas-ideas/food-safety-logs): Staff record fridge temperatures, cleaning and deliveries on a phone, and the owner has the record ready for an inspection.
- [Proof of delivery for florists and bakeries](https://www.shipanysaas.com/saas-ideas/local-delivery-proof): Drivers mark each local delivery done with a photo and a name, and the customer hears the moment it lands.
- [Rain-day rescheduling for outdoor work crews](https://www.shipanysaas.com/saas-ideas/rain-day-crew-rescheduling): When weather stops work, the owner moves the day’s jobs in one go and every affected customer gets their new date.

- [All SaaS ideas](https://www.shipanysaas.com/saas-ideas)
- [Try the free generator](https://www.shipanysaas.com/saas-ideas#generator)