The best e-signature app for landlords with a few units or a few hundred

What landlords sign, and what that asks of an app

• Leases with several tenants, each signing their own copy from their own link, plus a guarantor who may live in another state.
• Addendums for pets, parking or a roommate change, usually a page or two that needs every tenant again.
• The move-in checklist, signed on a phone in the empty unit, with notes about the scratched floor while everyone is standing there.
• Renewals in a batch, each with its own new rent and end date.
• Rental applications from people you've never met, ideally from a link on the listing.

The shortlist at a glance

The five options in detail

TurboTenant: the all-in-one for small portfolios

TurboTenant is property management software rather than a signing app. Its lease page says you can send the lease for e-signatures from your account at no extra cost, and the leases are built to be state-specific, though the lease document itself is a paid item. The plans add rental applications, screening and online rent payments: Free, Essentials from $12.42 a month and Pro from $16.58 a month. If you want one place to list, screen, sign and collect rent, start here. If you already have a lease your attorney wrote, a signing app is the simpler fit.

DocuSign Personal: a few leases a year

DocuSign Personal is $10 a month billed annually for one user and 5 envelopes a month, with reusable templates and the mobile app. That's enough for a landlord with a duplex and a couple of turnovers a year. The gaps show up as you grow: in-person signing and shared templates start on Standard at $25 per user a month billed annually, and bulk send needs Business Pro.

Dropbox Sign Essentials: unlimited requests for one person

Essentials is listed at $20 a month, or $180 billed yearly, for one user with unlimited signature requests and 5 templates. Its signing languages include two flavors of Spanish. To hand a tablet to a tenant in the unit or send renewals in bulk, you'd need Standard, which is for teams of two or more, and in-person signing there is for single-signer documents.

signNow Business: one low price for the account

At $8 a month billed annually for the whole account, signNow is the cheapest paid plan here, and Business includes unlimited templates and iOS and Android apps. The allowance is 100 invites a year on annual billing or 10 a month on monthly billing, so before a busy leasing season, check how a lease with three tenants and a guarantor counts against it. Extra invites cost $0.96 each on Business.

SignMaster: renewals, checklists and tenants who read Spanish

SignMaster does the signing part and stops there: no listings, screening or rent collection. What it does well for landlords: bulk send renewals from a spreadsheet, one envelope per tenant with their own rent and dates filled in (250 rows a send on Solo), in-person signing of the move-in checklist on your phone, a public signing link for rental applications, and signing pages in 6 languages including Spanish and Vietnamese. There's no Android app, so Android users work in the browser.

Setting up a lease the first time

1. 1

   Make the lease a template

   Upload your lease once and turn the rent, deposit, dates and tenant names into fields. Next turnover you fill in the blanks instead of retyping. A residential lease template is a starting point if you don't have one.

2. 2

   Add every adult as a signer

   Each tenant and any guarantor gets their own link and signs their own fields. Put yourself last so you countersign once everyone else is done.

3. 3

   Bring the checklist to the walkthrough

   Send the move-in checklist as its own envelope and have the tenant sign on your phone in the unit, so the condition notes are agreed on the day.