Run your student rentals without running everything from your phone.
Hearth coordinates the students, guarantors, rooms, move-ins, and move-outs across your off-campus houses — in one dashboard. Students and their parents just text. Nothing to download, no portal to get anyone to adopt.
Built for independent landlords managing off-campus group houses — not large purpose-built student apartment operators.
The one number you actually want in August
Not "how many messages" — how ready is this house, and who's holding it up
Sofia R. is missing all four. Hearth drafts the text, you approve it, and the number moves when she replies.
The academic year, end to end
Hearth follows the calendar your leases actually run on
Generic property software models a unit and a tenant, month by month. None of it knows that steps 03 and 06 happen to every house you own in the same week.
The problem isn't one tenant texting you
It's coordinating twelve students, their guarantors, and a synchronized turnover — alone, on the academic calendar
Everything happens at once, not year-round
Standard multifamily turnover is staggered across twelve months. Yours compresses into one week in August and one week in May, across every single house you own, at the same time.
One lease, twelve people, twelve parents
A joint lease means one maintenance issue, one unpaid share, or one lease question touches multiple students and their co-signers at once. Generic software models a unit and a tenant. That isn't what you have.
It all lives in texts, spreadsheets, and memory
Who sent their guarantor form. Who's arriving Saturday. Who owes what for the big room. Who photographed their walls at move-in. None of it is anywhere you could actually pull up eight months later.
What Hearth keeps track of
The whole operating picture of a group house, not just a message inbox
People
Students, guarantors, and what each of them still owes you — signatures, move-in forms, arrival times. You can see who's complete and who needs a nudge, without going through your texts.
Property
Each house, its rooms, and the academic-year lease group living in it. Room-level rent shares that reconcile to the lease total, so nobody's guessing what they owe.
The record
Every message, incident, condition photo, and payment on a single property timeline — from move-in day to the day the year closes out. Exportable as one file.
Start with one house's move-in
Not a platform migration. One property, one turnover, and you can judge it from there
Every message updates a real record
Students text like they always have. Hearth turns it into structured data you can actually search later
Documented by default
Hearth doesn't protect you from anything. It just means you're not arguing from memory
- Every conversation logged and timestamped, per student and per room
- Answers come from the lease you uploaded, the same way each time
- Hearth never makes the judgment call — anything outside a routine question goes to you
- Move-in and move-out condition photos filed side by side
What that looks like in practice: a deposit gets contested in June. You open that student's room, put the August photos next to the May ones, and export the year's record as a single file.
To be clear about what this isn't: Hearth is a record-keeping and coordination tool, not legal protection and not legal advice. Good documentation is useful in a dispute — it doesn't decide one, and it doesn't transfer liability away from you. For anything with legal weight, talk to an attorney.
Why generic property software struggles here
These aren't edge cases in college housing — they're Tuesday
The enterprise AI leasing tools built for student housing start around $25,000 a year and assume you have a leasing team. They're not ignoring landlords your size — their pricing and sales motion structurally can't reach you. Hearth starts where they stop.
"99.5% of the time, tenant communication is personal info they could find in the lease data or FAQs."
An owner-operator we talked with, describing what actually fills up her weekWhat's real today
We'd rather tell you plainly than have you find out on a demo call
Working now
Lease-grounded answers from an uploaded lease, with conservative escalation when a question falls outside it. That part is real and running. Everything else on this page is designed and demonstrated but not yet connected to live tenant texting.
Shown in the demo, not yet live
Real tenant SMS, requirement and arrival tracking, move-in/move-out checklists, condition photos, key status, the property timeline, room-level rent shares, guarantor signature status and sublet routing. All designed, all demonstrated with synthetic data, none of it live yet. Building this is exactly what the founding pilots fund.
Planned integrations, not features
We don't process rent, hold deposits, screen applicants, or do your accounting — and won't. Hearth is designed to work alongside the payment and accounting tools you already use, not replace them.
See it on a real lease.
The full landlord dashboard and student text thread, running on an actual Collegetown group-house lease.
See how it works →Why Hearth
You're trusting software to talk to your students and their parents. That's worth taking seriously, so here's exactly where the line is, and why it holds. Hearth is pre-launch and has no live pilots yet — we'd rather be plain about the boundaries now than oversell them.
✓ Answers only from your lease
Hearth never invents policy. Every answer is grounded in the lease and FAQ you upload, nothing else, nothing guessed.
✓ Every conversation is logged
Timestamped automatically, for every student and guarantor, on every property. If something's ever disputed, you have the record, not just your memory.
✓ Uncertainty gets escalated, not guessed
If a question falls outside the lease or sounds urgent, it's flagged to you immediately instead of Hearth making something up.
✓ You can review anything, anytime
Nothing happens in a black box. Every message, every answer, every escalation is visible in your dashboard.
✓ Nothing goes out without you approving it
Hearth drafts the reminder and shows you the recipient, the reason and the exact wording. You press send. It never messages anyone on its own.
✓ Never discusses money on its own
Payment questions get logged and routed to you. Hearth doesn't negotiate, waive, or promise anything financial. It also doesn't process rent or hold deposits — that's not built, by choice.
How it actually works
From lease upload to student text to landlord notification, in five steps
This is what a student sees
No app to download, no portal to log into. Just the same text thread they already have with you, with answers that cite the actual lease.
This is what you see when it matters
Routine questions never reach you. When something actually needs your judgment, you get pulled in immediately, like this:
How Hearth works
One phone number for students and guarantors. One dashboard for you. Nothing new for anyone to download.
Student texts, as usual
No app, no login. They text the same way they'd already text you.
Hearth answers from your lease
Routine questions get answered instantly, grounded in the lease and FAQ you provide, with the source cited.
It knows what it doesn't know
Anything ambiguous, urgent, or judgment-based gets flagged instead of guessed at.
You only see what matters
A dashboard with the full log, plus real-time alerts for anything that actually needs you.
Escalation, by tier
Not every message deserves an interruption. Hearth sorts them for you
Auto-resolved
Answered instantly from the lease or FAQ. You never see it unless you go looking.
Logged, daily digest
Minor stuff, like a burnt-out bulb or a cosmetic issue, bundled into one daily summary.
Needs you today
Broken appliances, lockouts, anything requiring a real judgment call.
Urgent
Gas, no heat, flooding, fire, injury, break-in. You're notified immediately, always.
Questions people ask us
Do students need to download anything?
No. They just text a phone number, the same way they'd text you directly today.
What if Hearth gets something wrong?
Anything touching money or lease terms is drafted for your approval before it ever goes out. Hearth doesn't act autonomously on things that matter. Answers are grounded in your uploaded lease, and always cite where they came from.
Is this only for Cornell-area landlords?
We're starting in Ithaca with Cornell student housing because that's where we know the market best, but nothing about Hearth is Cornell-specific.
How is this different from a property-management platform?
Most property-management software is built around a tenant portal, something students have to download or log into, and mostly ignore. Hearth meets students where they already are: their own text messages. No app, no login, no portal to get anyone to adopt.
Founding pilot pricing
Hearth is pre-launch and pre-revenue, with no customers yet. We haven't tested a pricing model on anyone, so publishing a tidy set of tiers would be guessing dressed up as certainty.
What founding pilot landlords get
- Free through your first full move-in or move-out
- Setup done with you — lease, rooms, students, guarantors
- Direct line to us during your turn weeks
- Founding pricing locked in when we do start charging
- Your full property record exports as one file if you leave
When pricing does launch, we expect it to scale with beds under management rather than properties — a twelve-bedroom group house is a genuinely different amount of coordination than a two-bedroom apartment, and charging both the same never made sense. We'll set the actual numbers with our pilot landlords, not before them.
Join the Ithaca pilotNo contract, no card, nothing to cancel. If Hearth isn't useful during your turnover, that's genuinely useful for us to learn.
Contact us
Questions, feedback, or want to be one of our first landlords? We'd love to hear from you.
Join the Ithaca pilot
Not a platform migration and not a year-long commitment. Pick one group house, we set it up with you before its next turnover, and you judge Hearth on how that turnover actually goes.
- We set up your first house with you — lease, rooms, students, guarantors
- Hearth starts answering from that lease the same day
- Run one full move-in or move-out before you decide anything
- Free through your first turnover, and early pricing locked in if you stay
- Walk away whenever — your record exports as one file, no hostage-taking