Put Every Door You Manage on One Map
Dana manages 312 doors across 220 properties in Austin. On a Tuesday in March she split the week's inspections between Marcus and Priya, eleven properties each, sorted by ZIP so nobody would crisscross town. Marcus texted that he was done at 12:40. Priya was still in the car at 5:40 and pushed two properties to Wednesday.
Both lists had eleven properties on them. Seven of Priya's were in 78704, which reads like one neighborhood on a spreadsheet and covers about six square miles, including Zilker, Bouldin Creek, Travis Heights and Barton Hills. Her seven doors were scattered across all four with South Congress traffic in between, while Marcus's eleven happened to sit within a few blocks of each other. Dana wasn't trying to hand out an uneven day. She was working from a list, and the list didn't show the one thing that decided how long each day ran.
The short answer
A list sorts, and sorting says nothing about how far apart the stops are. Which doors belong on the same trip, whether two people's weeks are actually even, where you're stacked up: those are all questions about distance, and a list is the one format that can't answer them.
Rentvine, AppFolio, Buildium and SnapInspect all give you a map or a map link on a property page, one door at a time. What none of them gives you is the whole portfolio on one map at once, which is the view Dana needed before she split the list.
You can build that view this week without buying anything. Export your property list out of Rentvine, import it into Google My Maps, color the pins, and look.
Put the portfolio on a map this week
1. Export the list. In Rentvine, run a property or unit report and export it to CSV. Keep at least: property name, full street address, city, state, ZIP, portfolio, and assigned manager. If your team keeps a last-inspection date as a custom field on the unit, include that column too. Rentvine has no built-in last-inspection field, so it exists only if someone at your firm created one. If you track those dates in a spreadsheet instead, paste the column in next to the addresses before you upload.
2. Add a status column before you upload. My Maps colors pins by the text in a column and won't do the date math for you, so compute the status yourself. With the last-inspection date in column B, put this in a new column and fill it down:
=IF(TODAY()-B2>365,"Overdue",IF(TODAY()-B2>335,"Due soon","OK"))
That's the 12-month mark for occupied units, flagged 30 days early. If you inspect vacant doors on a shorter interval, give those rows their own value.
3. Import it into Google My Maps. Go to google.com/mymaps, create a map, and click Import on the first layer. Upload the CSV. My Maps asks which columns hold the address (one full-address column works, or street, city, state and ZIP separately) and which column to title the pins with. Use the property name. It plots up to 2,000 rows per layer and allows 10 layers on a map, so a few thousand doors fit with room left over, and it's free.
4. Color the pins. Open the layer's Style panel and set "Group places by" to your status column. Overdue, Due soon and OK each get their own color. Do a second map, or a second layer, grouped by assigned manager instead. Those two views answer different questions, so make both.
The map then answers three things Dana had been guessing at.
Which doors go on the same trip
Zoom in past the ZIP boundaries to the neighborhood. Pick the overdue and due-soon pins that are genuinely close to each other, and that set is your day. A realistic route is 8 to 12 properties, fewer when they're large multi-unit buildings, more when they're single doors a block apart. The cluster picks the day, and then you order the stops inside the cluster.
There's a practical limit when you go to drive it. Consumer Google Maps takes 10 points including your starting location, it routes them in the order you enter them, and there is no optimize button. A 12-stop day has to go in as two trips, and you reorder by dragging stops until the total looks sane.
Whether territories are balanced by drive time or just by address count
Split the export into one CSV per manager and import each as its own layer. Now use the checkboxes in the left panel and turn on one person's layer at a time.
Eleven and eleven are identical on a list and nothing alike here. One person's pins sit inside a few blocks. The other's fill the screen at city zoom. Use the ruler tool under the search box (Measure distances and areas) to measure the longest hop in each person's set, because that hop is usually the whole difference between a noon finish and a 5:40 finish.
When they don't match, move properties between the two CSVs and re-import until the two clouds look alike. What you're evening out is the spread across the map, not the number of addresses.
Where you're stacked up
Owners and insurers ask this one in concrete terms. How many of my doors are inside that one HOA. How many are on the creek side of the road, or in one flood zone, or in one school attendance zone. Answering that from a list is a research project. On the map you count pins.
The map shows the thin spots too. The two doors sitting well outside everything else are the ones that never fit anyone's day, get pushed a week at a time, and eventually show up as the overdue pin nobody can explain.
The part that currently lives in one person's head
Dana could have caught the split before Tuesday. She's driven those neighborhoods for years and she knows a Travis Heights address and a Barton Hills address are not the same trip. That knowledge is worth money, and right now it exists in exactly one person. When she's out, or when she's the one who leaves, it goes with her and whoever plans next is back to sorting by ZIP.
The map is how it gets out of her head. With a layer per manager, Marcus and Priya open it themselves, see their own pins against everyone else's, and say so before Tuesday when a set of stops is spread across four neighborhoods. They don't need years of Austin geography if they can see where everything is.
The catch with the manual version
The map is a snapshot. An owner brings on eleven doors, a property sells, someone finishes six inspections, and it's now wrong in a way that looks exactly like being right. The status colors are worse, because they were computed from the dates in the file the day you uploaded it and they've been aging ever since.
Keeping it honest means re-exporting from Rentvine, recomputing the status column, re-importing, and rebuilding the per-manager layers. In practice that happens twice and then stops. A map you've stopped updating is more dangerous than the list, because you trust it.
Where VestaGlass fits
VestaGlass reads your Rentvine portfolio and puts every door on one map, colored by inspection status: overdue, due, due soon, scheduled, ok. Filter the map and the list by status, by portfolio, or by who it's assigned to. It syncs nightly and on demand, so it's current as of the last sync rather than as of the last time somebody remembered to export. A property does need coordinates in Rentvine to be mapped.
Planning an inspection day that took about an hour of exporting, sorting and plotting takes a few minutes on the map, and that is what we see on the product, not an industry statistic.
From there you click the doors you want on one trip, set the stop order yourself, and see the drive time for every leg at that order, with time-of-day traffic, recalculated every time you move a stop. A bad order becomes obvious instead of becoming a 5:40 finish. Assign the route to Marcus or Priya and they run it from a phone, one stop at a time, with turn-by-turn handed off to Google or Apple Maps.
The judgment still sits with you in a few places. It doesn't draw territories: there are no boundaries on the map and no territory model behind it, so balancing two people's days works the same way it does in My Maps, by turning on one filter at a time and looking. It can't tell you which team member is closest to a property, because people don't have locations in the system. And it won't cluster the doors for you or choose the stop order for you. Doors that are near each other are simply near each other on the screen, which is enough to see both the trip and the day that's going to run long.
See where every door actually is
See how VestaGlass turns your Rentvine property data into a usable inspection map.