Rental Portfolio Ops Dashboard

Small rental portfolio operators — typically 3–5 properties, 5–10 units — usually run occupancy tracking, applicant screening, lease management, rent collection, and maintenance requests across a patchwork of spreadsheets, texts, and sticky notes. None of it lives in one place, so answering a basic question like “which leases are expiring soon?” means manually cross-referencing multiple sources.

This concept build replaces that patchwork with a single relational Airtable base and a live, read-only dashboard hosted on Bolt. At an assumed 7–10 hours a week spent on manual tracking and reporting, the modeled result is roughly 6 hours a week reclaimed — about 310 hours a year redirected toward sourcing units, tenant relationships, or owner communication instead of spreadsheet reconciliation.

The real cost of a spreadsheet-and-sticky-notes system isn't just the time spent compiling information for an owner update — it's the risk of missing something important, like a lease renewal deadline or a payment that's gone quiet, because nothing surfaces it automatically.

• Occupancy, applicants, leases, payments, and maintenance tracked across disconnected spreadsheets, texts, and notes
• Every owner update or status check requires manually cross-referencing multiple sources
• No automatic surfacing of at-risk items — expiring leases, late payments — until someone goes looking
• An estimated 7–10 hours a week spent on manual tracking and reporting at this portfolio scale

A single relational data layer instead of six disconnected spreadsheets. The foundation is an Airtable base with six linked tables — Properties, Units, Applicants, Leases, Payments, and Maintenance Requests — so a unit's status, its current lease, its payment history, and any open maintenance requests are all one click apart instead of living in separate files.

Formula fields do the calculating instead of the person. Rather than manually figuring out how many days are left on a lease or how late a payment came in, three formula fields — Days Until Lease End, Days Late, and Turnaround Days — compute those automatically from the raw dates already being entered. The person keeps entering the same dates they always would; they just stop doing the subtraction by hand.

Bolt as the presentation layer, not the source of truth. The Airtable base is the single source of truth; the Bolt-hosted dashboard reads from it live rather than duplicating data. That separation means the underlying data structure can be reused for other interfaces later — a client portal, a mobile view — without rebuilding the data model.

Applicant stage as a first-class field, not a note. Applicant status is tracked as a structured single-select field (Inquiry → Screening → Approved → Denied → Leased) rather than freeform notes, which is what makes a funnel visualization possible on the dashboard side — a small schema decision that unlocks a specific reporting capability downstream.