The 3.3 release of Housters is now up on http://housters.com and will make it to the Google Play Store and iOS App Store in the upcoming days.
The biggest new feature in this release is the ability to define the mortgage terms for your properties. It’s important to know how much of your mortgage payments are going into principal vs. going into interest, as principal builds up equity while interest obviously does not. Previously, it was up to you to use an amortization table and log in Housters how much each month went to principal and interest. However, now you can edit your property and set your mortgage terms, such as purchase price, down payment amount, length of mortgage, first payment date, and pmi/escrow amounts. Housters then uses that information to calculate how much principal, interest, pmi, and escrow amounts go into each monthly payment. While editing the property you can also enable Housters to auto-generate these transactions for you each month. Alternatively, if you want to manually add the transactions, Housters will input the correct principal, interest, pmi, and escrow amount values for you.
Another cool feature is the ability to generate late fee charges for your tenants. When adding a tenant or lease, you can say for example that rent is due on the 1st, a $25 late fee charge should be generated 5 days after, and a $75 late fee charge should be generated 10 days after. If the tenant owes rent 5 and 10 days after the 1st of the month, Housters will generate late fee charge tenant adjustments, increasing their expected and unpaid rent amounts. This means that it’s up to you to make sure you log their paid rent promptly so that it doesn’t incorrectly generate late fee charges.
The last new feature I’ll point out is the new Rent History Report. This should be useful ammo when confronting a tenant or going to court, as it shows for each rent period how much rent was due, when it was due, how much was paid, and when it was paid. As with all reports, this is only available on housters.com, not the mobile apps.
See the full release notes below with all of the changes, enjoy!
**Website Release Notes:**
– Set mortgage terms for a property so that Housters can calculate principal / interest amounts for you
– Enable auto-generated monthly mortgage payment transactions for a property, split by principal, interest, pmi, and escrow amounts
– When adding mortgage payment transactions manually, split by principal, interest, pmi, and escrow amounts
– Define per tenant lease the late fees to be charged after rent is due
– New Rent History Report showing detailed rent roll
– Filter the Rent Status Report to only show tenants with unpaid rent
– Print transaction details from transaction list
– Define a custom sort order for the property list
– Define a custom sort order for the transaction type list
– Show vacancies and the vacancy rate on the property summary
– Improve navigation to Applicants section
– New dismissable help tips
– Unsubscribe link in all mailing list emails
– Resolve time zone issues
– Bug fixes