HVAC Filter Delivery for Property Managers

HVAC filter delivery is a subscription that ships the right size air filter to each rental unit on a schedule. The resident changes it, and the system does not freeze up in July. The manager sets the size and the interval per unit, and the vendor ships.

The cost usually lands on the resident, either as a line inside a benefits package or as a marked-up pass-through.

The problem is older than the product. Landlords on BiggerPockets have traded ideas for years on how to make a tenant change a filter, from photo proof to $25 fees to a year’s supply in the closet. The plain view in those threads is that you cannot depend on the tenant to protect a $4,000 system.

Delivery removes the excuse.

This is a thin category. Our database records two programs built for property managers with PMS integrations, and two direct shippers with a property-manager page and no integration. It also records two benefits bundlers that resell someone else’s filters, and one filter manufacturer with a property management program.

This guide covers who buys it, how to evaluate the vendors, and what pricing looks like where anything is published. It also covers which PMS each connects to, and what the Index recorded for the category in its September edition.

Who buys HVAC filter delivery?

The buyer is a single-family rental manager whose leases make residents responsible for filters, or a small multifamily operator with in-unit HVAC. Both have the same lease clause and the same experience with it. An American Apartment Owners Association article puts it in one line: you may include filter replacement as a tenant responsibility in the lease, but enforcing that term is another story.

The manager who buys delivery has stopped trying to enforce it and started shipping the filter instead.

How buyers arrive

The forum record shows how the buyer arrives here. One landlord asks how to make sure a tenant changes the air conditioner filter. The reply is that a tenant who says “I just changed it a month ago” is rarely telling the truth.

Another describes a severely clogged filter blocking airflow until the coil froze, then invoices the tenant $75 for the diagnostic call under a lease section requiring monthly replacement. The experienced landlords in the thread tell him to eat the $75. A third proposes a compliance scheme and is asked how many tenants will put the filter in with the arrow pointing the wrong way.

The self-managing landlord with a few local doors often solves this by changing the filter himself and using the visit as an excuse to inspect every couple of months. A manager with scattered houses across a metro cannot do that, and that manager is the buyer.

Package sellers and owners

The second buyer is the manager who already sells a resident benefits package, or is about to, and needs to decide whether filters belong in it. Second Nature’s package leads with filter delivery, Beagle’s kit offers it as a component, and Latchel resells FilterTime’s service inside its optional package.

If the package decision is the real decision, read the guide to resident benefits packages first. Then come back here for the filter component, and what a manager buys instead of it.

The owner is a third party to the purchase and the one most likely to push back. One BiggerPockets thread is an owner questioning why his manager requires filters to be bought through the manager at $10 a month. The manager’s justification was about Fair Housing law, and the owner did not believe it.

A manager rolling out a mandatory program needs a better explanation than that, and the explanation is the HVAC work-order count before and after.

How do you evaluate a filter delivery program?

The vendor list is short, and so is the list of demo questions. Ask the questions in this order, because the first two decide whether the program works at all.

Sizing and proof

Start with sizing. Residents do not know their filter size, and a unit with an odd-size return grille needs a custom filter. Ask where the size for each unit is recorded and who keeps it current.

Second Nature’s page says it syncs each unit’s filter size from the manager’s property accounting software and updates it when the HVAC system is replaced. FilterTime’s portal lets the manager pick size, quality and schedule per property, with custom sizes available.

Homestock USA lists 50 or more sizes in MERV 8, 11 and 13 and makes custom sizes at no extra charge. The first order has a three to four week lead. Filters Direct USA calls 1-inch custom sizes its specialty.

Whichever vendor you choose, ask what happens on the day a technician replaces a unit and the return size changes.

Then proof. The reason a manager wants this program, beyond fewer calls, is the day a compressor fails and someone has to establish whether the filter was changed. Ask what artifact the vendor produces.

FilterTime’s program produces one monthly shipment report. Second Nature’s page describes shipping notifications. Neither proves installation, and nothing in this category does; a delivered filter can still sit in its wrapper.

Ask whether the program includes anything that prompts the resident at delivery, and plan a periodic inspection anyway.

Cadence, grade and billing

Then cadence and grade. The vendors ship on different schedules. Second Nature tunes the interval to pets and climate.

Beagle’s pages describe delivery typically every 60 to 90 days. Filters Direct USA offers monthly, bi-monthly or quarterly. Homestock USA lets the manager adjust the schedule from an online account.

On grade, Homestock pitches MERV 8 as the property manager’s choice. Filters Direct ships MERV 9 polyester with an antimicrobial treatment across the board, and the rest let the manager pick. A higher MERV rating restricts more airflow on an older system, so ask the vendor and your HVAC contractor the same question and compare the answers.

Then who pays and how it is described. Two billing shapes exist, and they lead to different conversations with residents and owners. In the package model, the resident pays a monthly fee that includes filters.

In the wholesale model, the manager buys filters and passes the cost, plus a markup, to the resident. FilterTime’s own pitch is that it ships with no invoice in the box for exactly that reason. Decide which model you want before the demo, and ask how the charge appears on the lease and the resident ledger.

Coverage, the PMS and the contract

Then coverage. Homestock USA serves 33 states. Filters Direct USA ships free across the US.

Our record carries no delivery footprint for Second Nature or FilterTime, so ask. If your doors sit in two or three states, ask for delivery times to each rather than a national claim.

Then the PMS. Double entry between the property management system and the vendor’s portal is what the Rentvine and FilterTime integration sells against. If your PMS is not on a vendor’s list, someone on your staff keys every unit twice and keys the change every time a resident moves out.

Ask which fields sync in which direction.

Then the contract. FilterTime’s pages say no contracts, cancel anytime and free shipping, on net 30 terms with one monthly invoice. Filters Direct USA says skip or cancel anytime.

Homestock USA says shipping is always free and orders ship in two business days. For the bundlers, the filter term is the package term, so ask what happens to filter delivery if you drop the package.

Last, the bundle you already have. Latchel’s current benefits overview lists 16 items and does not name filters, even though its own webinar page and a FilterTime article confirm the resale. If you are on a package and assume filters are in it, ask.

How is filter delivery priced?

No vendor in the category publishes a per-filter or per-unit figure for a property-manager program on the pages we fetched. What the database and the research record is this.

Second Nature includes filter delivery in the resident’s monthly package payment. The database records the package as resident-paid at $20 to $80 a month with success-based billing to the manager. Its filter page says comparable filters typically retail for $13 to $40 depending on size.

Beagle’s pages say filters start at $4 a month inside its kit, with a typical resident charge for the kit of $10 to $20 a month per unit. The manager keeps the markup. Latchel’s optional resident benefits package launched at $14.99 a month in March 2024; its filter pricing is not published.

FilterTime’s pricing page is an estimate form that promises a number in under 20 minutes, and its marketing says competitive pricing, free shipping and cancel anytime. Homestock USA does not publish property-manager pricing and quotes bulk orders by email. Filterbuy sells at wholesale factory-direct pricing with volume discounts and quotes portfolio pricing on request without publishing figures.

Filters Direct USA does not publish a property-manager rate; its consumer subscribe-and-save program takes up to 30 percent off list.

The two shapes, and what to ask for

The two shapes you will price are per filter per delivery, bought wholesale by the manager and marked up to the resident. The other is a per-unit monthly line inside a resident-paid package.

An AAOA article describes a program whose domain no longer resolves. It pitched the wholesale shape as $28 to $42 of profit per unit per year, with the tenant paying $6 to $9 a month. That is how the category has been sold to managers, even when the company behind the pitch did not last.

When a vendor does not publish pricing, ask for four numbers in writing. The per-filter price at your most common sizes, the price for a custom size, the shipping terms, and the minimum order or portfolio size.

Then compute the annual cost per unit at your cadence and compare it to what a resident would pay for the same filter at a hardware store. That is the comparison an owner or a resident will make.

Which PMS platforms do filter programs integrate with?

The property management system is the deciding filter for the integrated vendors and irrelevant for the direct shippers.

Second Nature lists AppFolio and Rentvine in our database, sourced from its pricing page; AppFolio announced the partnership in April 2025. The size sync from the manager’s accounting software is the integration doing real work, since it is what keeps each unit’s filter size current without a spreadsheet. FilterTime lists Rentvine in our database, from Rentvine’s own announcement of the integration, and it has a Buildium marketplace listing.

Beagle lists Yardi, Rent Manager and Rentvine in our database. Latchel’s coordination product lists Yardi, AppFolio, Buildium, Rent Manager, Rentvine and Propertyware in the database. Its filter resale pages state no integration of their own, and the filters are FilterTime’s.

Homestock USA and Filters Direct USA name no property management system and run from their own online accounts.

Our record carries no integrations for Filterbuy.

The AppFolio, Buildium and Rentvine integration pages list every category that connects to each system, useful when filters are one of several decisions.

There is no built-in alternative. No PMS surfaced with its own filter delivery module during research; the PMS-side artifacts are marketplace listings and integrations for the vendors above. The alternative a manager runs today is a lease clause, a reminder in the PMS, and a resident buying the wrong size at the hardware store.

That is the arrangement the forum threads describe failing.

Who are the filter delivery vendors?

The table below is generated from the vendor database and shows each vendor’s description, pricing where published, PMS integrations and segments, each with its source and last-verified date. Buyers replacing FilterTime can start with the field set against FilterTime.

Read the field in three pairs and one manufacturer.

Second Nature, which began as FilterEasy, and FilterTime are the two programs built for property managers with PMS integrations. Second Nature sells it inside its package and FilterTime on its own.

Homestock USA and Filters Direct USA are direct shippers with a property-manager page, custom sizes and free shipping, and no integration. Beagle and Latchel are benefits bundlers whose filter delivery is a component of a package, with Latchel’s filters supplied by FilterTime.

Filterbuy is a filter manufacturer whose business program offers one invoice and national pricing across a portfolio. It ships pallets or bulk to each property or the office, and makes custom sizes.

The full list of filter delivery vendors compares them side by side.

Three more names came up in research and are not listed. Airestor’s site refused every fetch, Air Filters To You’s property-management page did the same, and Filtersix’s domain no longer resolves. Consumer filter retailers with subscribe-and-save programs, such as Filter King and Remember The Filter, have no property-manager program on any page we could reach and sell to a different buyer.

If one of the unlisted companies publishes a page we can verify, it will be added.

What does the AI Shortlist Index show for this category?

The snapshot above shows the current edition; these figures are from 2026-09. That edition holds 25 ChatGPT runs for this category, one per prompt, captured from the ChatGPT app on 3 October 2026.

Second Nature was named in 95% of runs, FilterTime in 86% and Filterbuy in 32%. ChatGPT named 7 vendors in all, and the other 4 were each named in 8% of runs or fewer.

Beagle was named only in the 2 answers whose prompts asked about it by name, and Homestock USA was not named at all.

Second Nature was named first in 13 answers and FilterTime in 10.

On the prompt from a 5,000-unit operator with its own maintenance techs, ChatGPT led with Filterbuy’s bulk and kitted supply for the techs to install. It listed Second Nature’s direct-to-resident delivery as the option for taking filter changes off the maintenance routes.

The most-cited domain was secondnature.com with 32 of 109 citations, followed by pm.filtertime.com with 22 and filtertime.com with 9.

ChatGPT cited webpossible.com once in this category; WebPossible publishes the Index, so that citation is flagged in the source map. Our reading is that the engine sees the same two property-manager programs our research pass did and treats the rest as general filter suppliers. This is one run per prompt from one engine, so treat it as a first reading.

Which vendors does this page include?

The criteria block above states which vendors qualify for the category and why. A company is listed if it sells scheduled filter delivery to property managers on a page we could fetch, with a verifiable source for its description and integrations.

If you sell into this category and want your Index standing, how we work with proptech companies on AI visibility explains what we measure each month. It also covers why the source map matters more than the answer text, and what the fix costs.

Where to go next

If the filter question is really a package question, the resident benefits guide covers what goes into a package, who sets the resident price and how the package is disclosed. If the filter question is really a maintenance question, because the calls you want to stop are HVAC work orders, read the maintenance coordination and vendor network guide. It covers the software that takes those calls.

The rest of the stack a property management company buys is on the property management software hub, one category at a time. The glossary defines RBP, filter delivery and the other terms used on this page.