How to build a rental property management app with Lovable

Rule of thumb: if what you want is rent collected for you, screening run for you, and 1099s filed for you, buy it, because those are the parts that are genuinely tedious to arrange alone and the per-transaction fee is what they cost. If what you want is a ledger that matches how your leases actually work, a portal with your name on it, and no floor under your door count, build it. The middle case is a small portfolio that will grow, and there the number to look at is the fee on an incoming payment multiplied by your doors and by twelve, because that is the line that grows with you whether or not the subscription does.

* One line on the free tier matters more here than on most builds. Supabase Free includes 500 MB of database space, 1 GB of file storage, and 5 GB of egress a month, and it pauses a project after a week of inactivity - which is a real risk for an app whose busiest day is the 1st and whose quietest stretch is everything between. Pro, from $25/mo, removes the pause, raises storage to 100 GB (then $0.0213 per GB) and egress to 250 GB (then $0.09 per GB), and adds a daily backup with 7 days of history. Before you have tenants signing in, Free is fine; the day you send the first invite, the pause is the reason to move.

Neither column takes a cut of rent, because the app records payments rather than moving them, so the running cost is a database and a host and nothing else. That bill does not move when rent does: ten doors and two hundred cost the same to host, and the only thing that grows is the storage under whatever lease documents you keep.

Prices and rates from supabase.com, developex.com and docs.lovable.dev, checked August 2026.

Only the first three are needed to start, and none of it touches your computer. From here, you describe what you want and Lovable builds it in the browser.

1. 01

   Set the ground rules, then connect Supabase

   The backend comes first on this build, because every screen after this one reads or writes real money records.

   PromptConnect the backend and set the rulesCopy

   Before we build anything else, note the ground rules for this project: it is a rental property manager, the vocabulary throughout is property, unit, lease, tenant, charge, payment, and ledger entry, a lease balance is always calculated from its charges and payments rather than stored, and a tenant account must only ever reach its own lease. Now connect this project to Supabase, and once it is linked, design the tables. Properties, with units under them, and each unit marked vacant, occupied, or under maintenance. Leases, which tie one tenant to one unit and hold all the money terms - the rent, the deposit, the term dates, which day of the month rent is due, how long the grace period runs, and late fees both as a flat amount and as a percentage. Tenants. Charges, each with a type, an amount, a due date, and the period it belongs to. Payments. Every screen from here should read and write real Supabase data rather than placeholder content.

   Say the stored-balance rule out loud in this first message. It is the kind of thing that gets designed in for speed and then has to be unpicked once a statement and a dashboard disagree.

2. 02

   Bookmark, then ask for the ledger arithmetic on its own

   The part where being wrong is expensive. Bookmark first, then test the awkward payments in the preview rather than the tidy one.

   PromptBuild the ledgerCopy

   Bookmark the current version first. Then build the ledger: a screen per lease listing every charge and every payment with a running balance, an action to record a payment received, and the rule that a payment is applied to that lease’s oldest open charges first, marking each one paid once it is fully covered. Calculate the balance from the records every time rather than keeping a total anywhere. Seed three leases and show me, in the preview, what happens when one pays exactly, one pays short, and one pays twice.

   Bookmark before this one specifically. Reverting in Lovable restores your code but does not undo what has already been written to your database, so a ledger change tested against real rows is worth a known-good version to come back to.

3. 03

   Ask for the monthly rent run

   An edge function that raises rent on each lease’s own due date and adds late fees - and refuses to bill a month it has already billed.

   PromptBuild the monthly rent runCopy

   Add a scheduled edge function that runs once a day, finds every active lease whose rent day is today, and raises that month’s rent charge - but first checks whether a rent charge already exists for that lease and that month, and skips it if so, so running it twice changes nothing. In the same pass, find charges more than their lease’s grace period past due and add a late fee from that lease’s flat amount, its percentage, or both. Then show me how to trigger it manually from the Supabase dashboard, run it twice, and confirm the second run adds nothing.

   Ask how to trigger it by hand as part of the same message. A scheduled job you cannot fire on demand is a job you cannot test, and this one only shows its bug on the second run.

4. 04

   Add both logins and the access rules, then run the audit prompt

   Two audiences in one database, and one of them is your tenant. This is the step to be slow and specific on.

   PromptAdd logins and access rulesCopy

   Add authentication: email-and-password sign-up, login, logout, and a profile per person, with signed-out visitors sent to the login screen. Then two roles - landlord and tenant - stored in their own table rather than on the user account itself, because anything on the account can be edited by the person it belongs to, plus a helper the access rules can call without recursing. Link each tenant record to an account. Then turn on row-level security across properties, units, leases, tenants, charges, and payments, with two rules on each: a landlord reaches their own portfolio, a tenant reaches only rows tied to their own lease, and every insert and update carries an explicit check that the new row is not being filed under somebody else. Then show me how to sign in as a second tenant and confirm the first tenant’s statement comes back empty.

5. 05

   Build the tenant portal, then look at it as a tenant

   The side your tenants use, plus the repair requests that give them a reason to open it more than once a month.

   PromptBuild the portal and maintenanceCopy

   Now the tenant side. Behind a tenant login, give them four screens: the lease and what it says, a running statement of what has been charged and what has been paid, a way to log a payment they have already made, and the repairs they have reported. Then repairs from the landlord’s angle - one queue over the whole portfolio, with status changes, notes, and a record of every change and who made it - where a tenant reports a problem with a description, a priority, and a photo if they have one. Last, a message thread per tenant plus a notice that reaches a whole building. Then open the tenant side in the preview signed in as a tenant, and use Select elements to point me at anything on screen that tenant should not be able to see.

6. 06
   Destination

   Import your portfolio, then walk the whole thing through

   Bring your real units and balances in, then take the app end to end from both sides before anybody else does.

   PromptImport the portfolio and test end to endCopy

   Two more pieces. First, spreadsheet import: units, tenants, leases, and opening balances, with every row checked, the good ones brought in, and each rejected row kept beside the reason it failed so I can correct only those and re-upload. Second, the landlord dashboard - rent roll, who is behind and by how long, how much of the portfolio is let, and the month’s collections. Then walk me through it in the preview: invite a tenant on a single-use link that expires, accept it as that tenant, read their statement, report a repair, log a payment clearing the oldest charge, then check that the landlord side shows the new balance and the new ticket. Import a small file first, so there is something real to look at.

Review the access rules (row-level security policies) on every table. For each one, tell me in simple terms who can view, add, edit, and delete records, confirm that people can only reach their own data while the right roles can reach more, and flag anything left open that shouldn’t be.

The one rule that matters: the database service key, and any provider key you add later, never go into the app or a public repo. If one gets out, treat it as compromised and rotate it the same day.

One button, and the app you have been previewing is live.

Work out one number before you connect anything: the fee on a single incoming payment, times your doors, times twelve. On twenty units at $1,500, capped bank debit costs about $1,200 a year and cards about $10,500, for the same money arriving. Connecting nothing is still a real answer: the ledger is correct either way, and a landlord who is happy to be paid by transfer pays none of this.

Add a step when a tenant submits a maintenance request that sends the description and any photo caption to a server-side function calling an AI model, and returns a suggested category, a suggested priority, and a one-line summary for the ticket list. Show them as suggestions the landlord can accept or change rather than applying them silently, and never let the suggestion downgrade something the tenant marked as an emergency.

Add a "Draft a reminder" action on a lease with an outstanding balance. Send the amount owed, which charges are unpaid, how many days overdue each is, and the tenant’s payment history for the last few months to your ai function, and return a short, factual message in a tone I choose - a first friendly nudge, a firm follow-up, or a formal notice. Always show it as an editable draft, never send it automatically, and state the figures rather than describing them vaguely.

Add an upload on the lease form that sends an existing lease document to your ai function and returns the fields it can find - rent amount, start and end dates, deposit held, the day rent falls due, and any late-fee terms - as a pre-filled form for me to check before saving. Mark each field with how confident the extraction was, leave anything ambiguous blank rather than guessing, and keep the original document attached to the lease.

Add a question box on the dashboard that turns a plain-language question about my portfolio into a read-only query against my own data and shows the answer as a small table I can export. Send the schema rather than the records to the model, run only SELECT statements, apply the same access rules as the rest of the app so it can never read past what the signed-in account is allowed to see, and show me the query it ran alongside the answer.

You bring no key and pick no provider: Lovable manages an API key per project, and if you do not name a model it chooses one from what you describe. Match the model to the job: fast and cheap for anything that runs on every record, stronger only where the reasoning matters. Send every feature above through that one integration.