Avail signs the lease. Keystead runs the books.
Avail, backed by Realtor.com, is a solid free toolkit for listings, screening, and lease signing. Keystead picks up where the signature ends: AI lease parsing, rent auto-matched from your real bank feed, and a Schedule E your CPA can file from.
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Keystead vs Avail, honestly
| Feature | Keystead | Avail |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $29/mo up to 10 units, $79/mo up to 50. 14-day free trial, no card. | Free Unlimited plan; Unlimited Plus is $9 per unit per month. Backed by Realtor.com. |
| AI lease parsing | Drop a PDF — tenants, rent, deposits, dates, and clauses extracted with confidence scores and citations back to the document. | Offers state-specific lease templates with e-signing; terms of an existing lease are entered by hand. |
| Lease creation & e-signing | Keystead reads the lease you already have — it doesn't draft new ones. | State-specific lease templates with electronic signing built in. |
| Rent-to-tenant matching | Plaid bank feed auto-matches every ACH, Zelle, and wire to the right tenant by amount, name, and your rules — however the tenant pays. | Rent collected through Avail records itself; payments arriving outside the platform are tracked manually. |
| Accounting & bank rules | QuickBooks-style rules engine: auto-categorize by payee and amount, with transfer detection between your accounts. Per-property books. | Income and expense tracking is built around activity on the platform; no user-defined bank-rules engine. |
| Schedule E export | Included on every plan, aligned line-by-line to the IRS form. Built by a CPA founder. | Basic reporting and exports are available; there's no CPA-built, line-by-line Schedule E export at the center of the product. |
| Listings & syndication | Keystead can publish a simple public listing page per unit, but marketing syndication isn't the focus. | Listings syndicated across Realtor.com's network and partner sites — a real advantage of the Realtor.com backing. |
| Applications & tenant screening | Not yet — Keystead focuses on what happens after the lease is signed. | Online applications and screening reports built into the leasing flow. |
| Maintenance / work orders | Work orders with status, assignees, estimates, and actual costs — included on every plan. | Maintenance tracking with tenant-submitted requests. |
Avail plan details from avail.co, checked June 2026: Unlimited plan free; Unlimited Plus $9 per unit per month. Features and pricing change — confirm current details on each vendor's site.
Who should use Avail — and who should use Keystead
Avail makes sense if you want the leasing lifecycle handled in one free tool: syndicated listings (with Realtor.com's network behind them), online applications and screening, state-specific leases with e-signing, and rent collection. For a landlord whose main job each year is re-leasing units, that's a strong package at $0 — or $9 per unit per month for the premium tier.
Keystead makes sense when the ledger is the job. If you're matching Zelle deposits to tenants by hand, retyping lease terms into a spreadsheet, or sorting a year of expenses into tax categories every March, that's the work Keystead automates. It's built for self-managing landlords with one to fifty units who want their books to close themselves — and to be Schedule E-ready when they do.
Platform records vs. your real bank feed
Tools built around their own rent-collection rails see the payments made on those rails. But tenants pay how tenants pay: Zelle, ACH from their own bank, the occasional paper check. Keystead connects to your actual bank through Plaid, so every incoming payment — regardless of how it was sent — auto-matches to the right tenant by amount, name, and rules you define.
The same feed powers the expense side. Outgoing transactions hit a QuickBooks-style rules engine: insurance categorizes itself to Insurance, the water bill to Utilities, and transfers between your own accounts are detected so they never inflate income or expenses. And it starts with the lease itself: drop the signed PDF and Claude extracts every term with a confidence score and a citation back to the page — thirty seconds instead of thirty minutes of typing.
Tax time, from a CPA founder
Keystead's founder is a CPA, and the product is organized around the form you actually file. Every expense category maps to a specific Schedule E line item — insurance, mortgage interest, repairs, taxes, utilities, each on its own IRS line. In January you export a per-property Schedule E report and hand it to your accountant — no reconstruction project, no billable hours spent untangling a "miscellaneous" bucket.
The Schedule E export is on every Keystead plan, including during the free trial, because tax-ready books are the point of the product — not an add-on.
What it actually costs
Avail: the Unlimited plan is free, with unlimited units, listings, applications, screening, leases, and rent collection. Unlimited Plus is $9 per unit per month and adds premium features like faster payments and waived fees. For a 10-unit portfolio on the premium tier, that's about $90/month.
Keystead: $29/month for up to 10 units, $79/month for up to 50, custom above that. Every plan includes the AI lease parser, Plaid bank feeds with automatic rent matching, the bank-rules engine, Schedule E export, work orders, and unlimited reports. 14-day free trial, no credit card — run it next to Avail for a week and see which one leaves you less to do.
Common questions
Is Keystead free like Avail's Unlimited plan?+
No. Avail's free plan is real and covers a lot — listings, applications, screening, leases, and rent collection. Keystead starts at $29/month for up to 10 units. What you're paying for is the accounting backbone: AI that reads your lease PDFs, a Plaid bank feed that matches every incoming rent payment to the right tenant no matter how they paid, QuickBooks-style categorization rules, and a Schedule E export your CPA can use as-is.
What does Keystead do that Avail doesn't?+
Keystead treats your bank feed as the source of truth. Incoming rent — ACH, Zelle, wire — auto-matches to tenants by amount, name, and your rules, even when tenants pay outside any platform. Expenses run through a real rules engine with transfer detection, and every category maps to a Schedule E line. Avail's tracking is built around payments made through Avail; Keystead's is built around your actual bank account.
When is Avail the better choice?+
If you want one free tool that handles the leasing lifecycle — list the unit, screen applicants, generate a state-specific lease, collect rent — Avail does that well, and the Realtor.com syndication is a genuine plus. If your tenants are stable and your pain is bookkeeping, reconciliation, and tax prep, Keystead is built for exactly that.
Can I switch from Avail to Keystead?+
Yes, and it's fast: add your properties (Keystead auto-fills details from public records), upload your signed lease PDFs (AI extracts the terms — including leases generated in Avail), and connect your bank through Plaid. Most landlords are fully set up within an afternoon. You can also run both side by side during the 14-day trial.
Does Keystead create leases like Avail?+
No. Avail generates state-specific leases with e-signing; Keystead deliberately starts after the signature. You upload the executed lease and AI extracts every term — tenants, rent, deposit, dates, late fees, key clauses — with a confidence score and a citation back to the page. Drafting documents and keeping books are different jobs, and Keystead picked the books.
Try the version where the books close themselves.
Upload one lease and connect one bank account. If Keystead doesn't save you an hour in the first week, stay on Avail — no hard feelings.
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