Student Housing Software: Rent by the Bed, Guarantors, Repairs & Portals (2026 Guide)

Generic software can approximate one or two of these. Doing all five at once is what separates purpose-built student housing software from a landlord tool with a "student housing" label stapled onto its marketing page.

The Capability Checklist

Before you evaluate anything by name, evaluate it against this list. These are the seven things student housing software has to actually do, not just claim to do.

Rent Per Bed With Split Payments and Guarantor Billing

This is the single feature that disqualifies the most software, fastest. If a platform's answer to "can you bill four roommates separately" is a workaround, custom notes fields, a spreadsheet synced alongside the main ledger, manual invoice splitting, that's a sign it wasn't designed for this. What you actually need is a per-bed ledger with an independent balance, so each roommate (and their guarantor) sees only what they owe, and a late payment from one bed doesn't get tangled up with the other three. Guarantor billing needs to sit on top of that same per-bed structure, not as a separate system you're reconciling by hand.

Roommate Matching, Reassignment, and Mid-Year Turnover

Roommate changes aren't an edge case in student housing, they're a predictable seasonal event. Someone studies abroad for spring semester, someone else graduates a term early, someone transfers in. The software needs a real workflow for this: matching a new roommate to the vacancy, transferring the lease terms without re-drafting the whole document, and closing out the departing roommate's balance and deposit cleanly. If your current process for this involves a phone call, a manual lease amendment, and hoping the deposit math works out, that's the gap this capability is meant to close.

Booking Tours During a Six-Week Leasing Season

Because leasing concentrates into a short window tied to the academic year, the volume of tour requests during that window can be many times higher than the rest of the year combined. Software that's fine the rest of the year can fall over completely during peak leasing weeks if tour scheduling isn't built to handle spikes, whether that's self-serve booking for prospects or a coordinated calendar for a leasing team covering multiple buildings near the same campus. This is a capability that looks unnecessary eleven months of the year and business-critical for the other one.

Repairs Triage in Shared, High-Turnover Units

A repair request in a four-bed shared house isn't automatically obvious to route: is it a bed-specific issue (a broken lock on one door) or a whole-unit issue (a leaking pipe under a shared kitchen)? Generic maintenance software assumes one tenant reporting on one unit, and doesn't distinguish. What you need is triage that can route a request appropriately, coordinate a vendor around a compressed turnover schedule rather than a steady trickle of tickets, and produce a per-bed record of condition and repairs, since that record is what protects the deposit at move-out and prevents disputes between departing and incoming roommates.

Questions to Ask Any Vendor Before You Sign

Ask these directly, and be suspicious of any answer that starts with "we can build that as a custom workaround."

• Is rent tracked and billed at the bed level, or only at the unit level with manual splitting?
• Can a guarantor log in and see only what they're responsible for, without seeing the other roommates' balances?
• What happens, in the actual software, when one roommate leaves mid-lease? Is it a supported workflow or a manual process?
• How does the platform handle a leasing season where tour requests spike for six to eight weeks and then drop to almost nothing?
• Can a maintenance request be routed to a specific bed or room, not just the unit as a whole?
• Is there a real mobile app, not just a mobile-responsive website, since your residents will almost never use a desktop?
• Is there a turnover or move-out/move-in timeline tool, or is that being managed on a separate spreadsheet outside the platform?

If a vendor answers all seven without hedging, they've probably built for this segment specifically. If most answers involve "we'd set that up manually," you're looking at a generic landlord tool wearing a student housing label.

How Platuni Handles Each of These

Platuni's student housing solutions are built around three named capabilities: lease-by-bed templates, parent and guarantor workflows, and move-in and turnover checklists. Bed-level billing and lease structure scale by tier: Growth supports multi-room sub-units with a per-room lock-in system, useful for a duplex or a small house with separate roommate agreements, while Enterprise adds full bed-level tracking, room type support, and flexible sharing and lock-in types built for larger houses, dorms, and corporate housing at scale.

Guarantor handling follows the same pattern. Growth includes an optional co-signer requirement with roommate-by-unit billing. Enterprise adds advanced co-signer and guarantor workflows, including full-lease and bed-space co-signing specifically.

For tours and leasing season volume, Platuni's solutions page groups "listings and tours" together: marketing rooms and beds, syndicating to student-focused channels, and booking tours from the same workflow.

Maintenance and turnover are handled under what Platuni calls "maintenance and turns," covering work orders, vendor coordination, and turn checklists per unit, backed by a downloadable Turn Season Timeline template for sequencing move-outs, cleans, and move-ins week by week across a portfolio. Compliance sits alongside this as "document and compliance": storing leases and IDs, running safety checks, and staying audit-ready, and at the Enterprise tier this is backed by a named compliance suite covering LIHTC, student housing, and other regulated workflows specifically.

Platuni also offers a set of ready-made templates for this exact workflow: a Roommate Agreement for shared-unit ground rules, a Guarantor and Co-signer Form for collecting parent and international guarantor details, a Move-In/Move-Out Inspection template documenting each bed's condition, and a Renewal Reminder Template for launching renewal campaigns ahead of the academic year.