Instead of Palace
Palace charges you by the property to look at your own rent roll. Keep the rent roll.
Property Management for Claude Code is an open-source property management system that is just Postgres and Claude Code. Owners, properties, tenancies and tenants, arrears with the step the Act expects next, routine inspections, maintenance and contractors, notices with their notice periods checked before they save, the healthy homes register and the monthly owner reporting, asked for in plain language. No price per property, no minimum spend, no modules. Your trust account stays where it is.
What you are paying for
Most of a property management bill is the front end
The owners, the properties, the tenancies, the rent and the inspection history are yours. The screens around them are what you rent, and the rent is set per property, per month, before the implementation fee and the add-on products.
A price per property, every month, forever
MRI Palace lists from NZ$1.83 per property per month with a NZ$200 minimum monthly spend, before GST. The meter runs on the size of the rent roll, not on the work. Win forty properties and the bill goes up whether or not anybody logs in more often.
Add-on products, bought one at a time
Maintenance Plus for the jobs. Inspection Manager for the inspections. Secure Sign for the agreements. Invoice Automate for the invoices. Vault CRM if you also sell. Each one is its own line on the invoice, and each one is another place your data lives.
Implementation and data conversion before anyone logs in
Training and implementation from NZ$1,500, and moving the rent roll off your old system is quoted on top. Reviewers on Capterra say the configuration is still manual and improvements take longer than expected. Every time your process changes, it is a change request.
Reports somebody else designed
The arrears report, the inspection schedule and the owner statement come as the vendor drew them. The question you actually have, like which owners cost more in maintenance coordination than they pay in fees, is an export to Excel somebody rebuilds every month.
Owner statements your owners ring you about
Property managers on the review sites say the same thing: landlords find the statements hard to read. You cannot change the layout, so you write the covering email that explains it, twenty times, every month.
Your own rent roll, in their schema
Twenty years of tenancies, inspections, maintenance and owner correspondence in a database you cannot query. Leaving means asking the vendor for an export of data you created, and paying to have it moved.
What you get instead
A property management system you talk to
Arrears
The file the Tenancy Tribunal will actually read
Arrears is not a number, it is a process with dated steps. One command shows who is behind, how far in calendar days and in working days, and the exact step the Residential Tenancies Act expects next.
- check Five working days brings a notice of overdue rent (s 55AA), fourteen days a notice to remedy (s 56), twenty one days the Tribunal (s 55(1)(a))
- check Every notice already served, with the date, so the gaps in the file are visible before the hearing is
- check Working days counted separately from calendar days, because the Act uses both and they are not the same number
- check The arrears letter drafted from the ledger and the notices, into drafts/, for a person to send
Compliance
The healthy homes register, checked against the data
Seven compliance items on every property: the five healthy homes standards, the smoke alarms and the insulation statement. Each with a status, a date, the evidence and the regulation it comes from.
- check Eleven rules run in one command, each citing its section: RTA 1986 ss 18, 19, 24, 48, 51, 55, 55AA, 56 and 13A
- check Healthy homes checked standard by standard against the 2019 regulations and the 1 July 2025 deadline
- check A bond not lodged inside 23 working days, and a bond over four weeks rent, both found before the tenant finds them
- check Tenant records still held years after the tenancy ended, under Privacy Act 2020 principle 9
The properties
Inspections and maintenance, with the notice period on the screen
Routine inspections against your own cycle, and the 48 hour entry notice checked before anybody drives there. Maintenance sorted by who it is waiting on, not by when it was logged.
- check An inspection booked with less than 48 hours notice is flagged, not served (RTA 1986 s 48(3))
- check Habitability jobs first, then anything sitting on an owner for more than a week, with the owner named
- check Approved work nobody sent a contractor to, and finished work no contractor has invoiced
- check A branded inspection report rendered from the room-by-room findings, and marked sent only when it has been
Yours
Your Postgres, your paperwork, your rules
Plain tables you own, branded documents rendered from them, and read-only pages for the week. No client money anywhere: the rent trust account stays in the system that holds it.
- check Owner monthly summaries, inspection reports and arrears letters in your colours from one brand.json
- check Read-only HTML dashboards for the week and the portfolio, no server to run
- check The total weekly gap between what your tenants pay and the market rent on file, and which reviews are legally available today
- check Import from a Palace, PropertyMe or Console Cloud export in one command, with a dry run first
What it looks like
Real commands, real answers
Three runs on the demo data that ships with Property Management for Claude Code. Type the command in Claude Code, or ask for it in your own words.
Arrears (4 tenancies, $3,728 owing, 2 past fourteen days)
=========================================================
Tenancy Property Tenants Owing Days Wk days Rent Last paid Next step
-------- ---------------------- ------------------------ ------ ---- ------- ----------- ---------- ---------------------------------------------------
TEN-2007 3/14 Coromandel Street Marcus Vaeau $1,760 27 19 $440 weekly 2026-08-18 Apply to the Tenancy Tribunal (RTA 1986 s 55(1)(a))
TEN-2013 7 Duncan Street Holly Redmond, Isaac ... $1,120 14 10 $560 weekly 2026-09-01 Serve the 14 day notice to remedy (RTA 1986 s 56)
TEN-2019 62 Britomart Street Omar Haddad $700 7 5 $700 weekly 2026-09-08 Serve the notice of overdue rent (RTA 1986 s 55AA)
TEN-2004 22 Rata Grove Priya Nadarajah, Tom ... $148 1 1 $760 weekly 2026-09-15 Ring them today, before it becomes a notice
Where each one has got to
TEN-2007 3/14 Coromandel Street overdue notice 2026-08-30 14 day notice 2026-08-30 Tribunal no
TEN-2013 7 Duncan Street overdue notice 2026-09-05 14 day notice NONE Tribunal no
TEN-2019 62 Britomart Street overdue notice NONE 14 day notice NONE Tribunal no
TEN-2004 22 Rata Grove overdue notice NONE 14 day notice NONE Tribunal no
Rent is overdue once it is five working days late (RTA 1986 s 55AA). Three of those notices inside ninety days,
or twenty one days of arrears, and the tenancy can be ended through the Tribunal (s 55(1)(a) and (aa)). Inspections due (9, 5 already overdue) ====================================== Ref Property Suburb Tenants Last done Due Overdue Booked Notice Manager ------- ---------------------- ----------- ------------------------ ---------- ---------- ------- ---------- ------ ------------ PR-1007 3/14 Coromandel Street Newtown Marcus Vaeau 2026-02-17 2026-05-19 119d 2026-09-21 9d Ana Whitiora PR-1014 7 Duncan Street Tawa Holly Redmond, Isaac ... 2026-03-09 2026-06-08 99d Mere Tipene PR-1021 11 Cleveland Street Brooklyn Ruby Sinclair 2026-04-18 2026-07-18 59d Mere Tipene PR-1018 44 Coutts Street Kilbirnie Kiri Manaia 2026-04-28 2026-07-28 49d Mere Tipene PR-1019 9 Owen Street Newtown Dan Fowler, Steph Fowler NEVER 2026-08-28 18d Ana Whitiora PR-1013 33 Main Road Tawa Fiona Blackwood, Alis... 2026-06-29 2026-09-28 in 13d 2026-09-16 1d Mere Tipene PR-1005 6 Kowhai Lane Wainuiomata Bree Halloran 2026-07-07 2026-10-06 in 21d 2026-09-24 11d Mere Tipene PR-1024 38 Warspite Avenue Ascot Park Blake Corrigan, Jess ... 2026-07-10 2026-10-09 in 24d Ana Whitiora PR-1011 2/8 Donald Street Karori Ben Kitchener, Mia Ki... 2026-07-15 2026-10-14 in 29d Ana Whitiora Entry for a routine inspection needs at least 48 hours written notice and no more than 14 days, once every four weeks at most, between 8am and 7pm (RTA 1986 s 48(2) and (3)). Anything showing NONE has no notice on file. Book one with: inspection schedule <property> --on=YYYY-MM-DD
Compliance check
================
Rule Breaches Worst Source
-------------------------------------------------------------- -------- -------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lodge the bond within 23 working days of taking it 1 TEN-2011 (33d) Residential Tenancies Act 1986, s 19(1)(a); tenancy.govt.nz, lodging a bond
A bond can be no more than four weeks rent 1 TEN-2018 (0d) Residential Tenancies Act 1986, s 18(1)
Rent can only rise once every twelve months 1 TEN-2022 (320d) Residential Tenancies Act 1986, s 24(1A)
Sixty days written notice of a rent increase 1 TEN-2007 (32d) Residential Tenancies Act 1986, s 24(1)(b)
Follow the arrears steps: notice at five working days, reme... 3 TEN-2007 (27d) Residential Tenancies Act 1986, ss 55(1)(a), 55AA and 56
At least 48 hours written notice before entering for an ins... 1 PR-1013 (1d) Residential Tenancies Act 1986, s 48(2) and (3)
Every rental has had to meet the healthy homes standards si... 4 PR-1007 (441d) Residential Tenancies (Healthy Homes Standards) Regulations 2019; RTA 198...
A signed healthy homes compliance statement in every tenanc... 2 TEN-2013 (1300d) Residential Tenancies Act 1986, s 13A(1A)(b)(ii); Healthy Homes Standards...
Working smoke alarms, and the insulation statement in the a... 4 PR-1007 (700d) Residential Tenancies (Smoke Alarms and Insulation) Regulations 2016, reg...
Termination notice periods: 90 days, 42 days with a reason,... 1 TEN-1990 (35d) Residential Tenancies Act 1986, s 51, as amended by the Residential Tenan...
Do not keep tenant records longer than you need them 2 Gareth Pinny (2950d) Privacy Act 2020, information privacy principle 9; Tax Administration Act...
Lodge the bond within 23 working days of taking it (Residential Tenancies Act 1986, s 19(1)(a); tenancy.govt.nz, lodging a bond)
TEN-2011 15 Broderick Road Bond of $2,760 taken 30 Jul and never lodged
A bond can be no more than four weeks rent (Residential Tenancies Act 1986, s 18(1))
TEN-2018 9 Owen Street Bond is $4,400 against a four week cap of $3,520
Rent can only rise once every twelve months (Residential Tenancies Act 1986, s 24(1A))
TEN-2022 5 Discovery Drive Increase on 27 Feb 2026 came 320 days after the one on 13 Apr 2025 Ask it anything
Questions Palace cannot answer
Every one of these is a real question the demo answers today. Yours will be different, and that is the point.
Honest trade-offs
What you give up
- remove_circle No trust accounting, and that is deliberate. Rent receipting, owner disbursements, the reconciliation and the audit file stay in the system that holds them today, under the Real Estate Agents Act 2008 and the Real Estate Agents (Audit) Regulations 2009. This holds the tenancy lifecycle, the arrears, the inspections, the maintenance, the compliance register and the owner reporting layer.
- remove_circle No inspection app on the phone. A property manager standing in a bathroom with twenty photographs needs a camera, offline mode and a room-by-room form. This is a database and a command line: you record the inspection room by room afterwards and the photographs live in your own file store with a reference in the note. If your team does eight inspections a day on iPads, keep that app and use this for everything around it.
- remove_circle No owner portal and no tenant portal. Owners get a branded HTML summary you send them, tenants get an email you wrote, and nobody logs in. There is no drag and drop board and nothing updates live while two people watch it.
Two ways to run it
Run it yourself, or have it run for you
Open source
Run it yourself
Free
- 1 Clone the repo
- 2 npm run demo, then open the folder in Claude Code
- 3 Type /arrears
- 4 Import your Palace export and point it at your own Postgres
Omni by Enterprise DNA
Have Enterprise DNA install it
One setup fee, then a monthly retainer
- check We migrate your Palace, PropertyMe or Console Cloud owners, properties, tenancies and tenants
- check We connect it to your mail, your accounting system and the trust account you already run
- check We write the commands and the compliance rules for your jurisdiction and your agency agreement
- check It runs inside Omni, our managed Command Center, with the rest of your business
Questions
Instead of Palace, answered
Where does the trust account go? expand_more
It stays exactly where it is. This system never holds rent, never receipts a payment into a bank and never pays an owner. There is a rent ledger, and it is a record so the arrears maths works: what was charged, what came in, what is owed. Trust accounting is a regulated obligation with an auditor attached, and it belongs in the system that already carries it. What moves here is the tenancy lifecycle, the arrears process, the inspections, the maintenance, the compliance register and the owner reporting. The boundary is written into the repo, not bolted on.
Our property managers do inspections on an iPad. Does this replace that? expand_more
No, and you should not try to make it. An inspection app with a camera and offline mode is a real product and this is not one. Keep it. What this gives you is everything around the visit: whether the inspection is past your cycle, whether the 48 hour entry notice actually went out, the findings room by room, the maintenance those findings turn into, and a branded report that is marked sent only when it has been sent. Most agencies find the app was never the problem.
Will this hold up if the Tenancy Tribunal asks for the file? expand_more
The records will, because they are better records than most agencies keep. Every arrears step is dated: the notice of overdue rent at five working days, the notice to remedy at fourteen, the application at twenty one. Every notice carries the day it was served and the day it takes effect, and the system refuses to record one with less than the statutory period unless you force it and say why. Read docs/compliance.md: eleven rules, each with the section it comes from. It is your rule book pointed at your data, not legal advice, and you change it to match your jurisdiction.
What happens to twenty years of rent roll history? expand_more
The parts that matter come with you. Export owners, properties and tenancies from Palace as CSV, run one import command, and it lands in your own Postgres with the owner links and the rents intact. The paid-to date becomes an opening charge, so your arrears figure is right from the first minute. Run it with --dry-run first and it tells you exactly what it would create and every row it would skip. Inspection photographs, stored documents and the trust ledger do not come across, and docs/replace-palace.md says so plainly along with everything else that does not carry.
Our property managers are not technical. Who types the commands? expand_more
Nobody types commands. You say "who is behind on rent and what do we do about it" and Claude Code runs the right one. The slash commands are there so the same question gets the same answer every time, in the words the industry uses: /arrears, /inspections-due, /vacates, /compliance-items. A property manager who can write an email can run this. The one thing it will not do is guess: if an address matches two properties it lists both and asks.
Stop paying by the property to look at your own arrears list
30 minutes with Sam. We look at what you pay for your property management software, what your team actually uses in a week, and what the installed version would look like for your agency. If it is a fit, we install it. If it is not, take the repo and run it yourself.
Property Management for Claude Code is MIT licensed and published by Enterprise DNA at github.com/Enterprise-DNA-OS/property-management-for-claude-code.