We built this because we needed it.
WaterDuty started as a tool for our own portfolio. We're a small group of real-estate investors who got tired of finding out about leaks the way everyone else does — when the bill arrives.
$2,000. One leak. One bill.
One of our SFRs sprung a leak. Nothing dramatic — a slow, steady run somewhere we couldn't see. Tenants didn't notice. We didn't notice. The utility didn't notice in any way that reached us until the next billing cycle.
We found out the way every owner finds out: the bill arrived at roughly four times its baseline. Two thousand dollars, gone, and the only reason we knew anything was wrong was a piece of paper showing up a month after the damage was done.
We sat with that for a while. The question we kept asking each other was simple, and it kept stinging:
“Why did it take a bill to tell us?”
The data existed. The utility had hourly readings on that meter the whole time. Nobody bothered to look at them on our behalf, and we had no good way to look at them ourselves.
At scale, a leak a year isn't bad luck. It's the baseline.
The first time a leak hits, it feels like a freak event. Run the math across a handful of doors and it stops feeling random. Run it across a portfolio and it's a line item you should be budgeting for.
1 property
One meter, one tenant, one fixture set. A leak in any given year is bad luck. You can run the portfolio on instinct.
A handful of doors
The probability stacks linearly. Across five or ten SFRs, a leak somewhere in the next twelve months stops being unlikely — it starts being plausible.
20+ properties
In every portfolio we've talked to, the question isn't if a leak happens this year — it's when, and how long it runs before someone notices.
Treated as a predictable expense, a leak per year is something you watch for, catch in hours, and absorb cheaply. Treated as a surprise, it's a $2,000 bill landing twice every other year.
What property managers can't (and won't) do for you.
No knock on PMs. They're managing turnovers, vendor calls, lease renewals, and a thousand other things. What they're not doing — what no realistic part-time ops person is doing — is sitting on hourly meter data for every property you own.
The way it gets done today
- Bills get reviewed monthly, after they arrive.
- A spike gets flagged once — usually weeks after it started.
- Anomalies live in someone's head, not in a system.
- No baseline per meter. "Looks high" is the threshold.
What WaterDuty actually does
- Hourly meter data, pulled where the utility supports it.
- 60-day historical backfill at discovery — baseline ready immediately.
- Every property in one ledger. One screen, every meter.
- Email alerts the moment a meter trends over its baseline.
The realistic alternative isn't a property manager doing this for you. It's hiring a part-time ops person to walk meters and audit bills — call it a few hundred dollars a month, minimum, for a portfolio that justifies it. WaterDuty is $1.99 per meter per month, flat. No base fee. We built the price so that catching one leak pays for years of monitoring across the whole portfolio.
The watch a great ops person would give one building — applied to every meter.
That's the whole framing. Not magic. Not AI marketing. Just continuous, structured attention paid to data the utility already collects.
Hourly readings + 60-day backfill
Connect a utility account once. WaterDuty fetches 60 days of history immediately, so detection is live the moment the account is wired — no warm-up window.
Which utilities we support →Spending caps per property
Set a monthly $ ceiling on any property. WaterDuty checks against estimated cost each cycle and emails the moment a meter starts trending past it.
Owner statements + utility ledger
Tag properties with their owner contacts. Generate clean monthly PDF or XLSX statements. Water, sewer, and gas (where the utility ships them together) in one ledger.
Pricing →Today: email alerts. SMS and WhatsApp alerts coming soon — we're finalizing carrier approvals.
We built the tool we wish we'd had.
Try it on your own portfolio for 30 days. Just connect a utility account and watch the same screen we use to watch ours.
Start the 30-day trial— The WaterDuty team