An owner with a handful of shops, units or small offices is in the least well served position in this category. Residential products cannot hold a commercial lease's recoveries and reviews. Commercial products can, and are priced, implemented and supported for portfolios ten times larger. The practical answer is usually a deliberate compromise rather than a product, and it is worth choosing which compromise rather than discovering it.
What a small commercial portfolio actually needs
A lease register with terms and dates, rent raising with steps and reviews, a service charge that can be budgeted and reconciled across a small number of tenants, arrears, and documents. That is a much shorter list than a full commercial product delivers, and a much longer one than a residential product supports. Write your own list and compare against it rather than against a feature grid.
Compromise one: residential product plus a spreadsheet
Hold tenancies and rent in a residential product and run the service charge reconciliation in a spreadsheet once a year. This works when there are few tenants and simple apportionment. It fails when the apportionment has caps or exclusions, and it fails silently, because a spreadsheet will produce a number whether or not it is right.
Compromise two: commercial product on a minimum
Several commercial products will sell at their floor, which for a small portfolio means paying a great deal per unit but getting the lease logic. This is the better answer where the leases are complicated, and the thing to negotiate is implementation rather than licence, because setup is priced for a larger buyer and is the part you can most reasonably ask to be scoped down.
What to insist on either way
That the lease terms live somewhere structured rather than in the documents alone, and that the service charge reconciliation is reproducible by someone else. Those two survive a change of software, a change of agent and a sale. Everything else at this size is convenience.
Questions people ask about small commercial property management software
Can residential software run a few shops?
For rent collection, yes. For recoveries, reviews and options, no, and those are the terms that produce money and disputes.
Is a spreadsheet acceptable for a small service charge?
For simple apportionment with few tenants, yes, provided somebody other than the author can follow it. Caps and exclusions are where it stops being safe.
What should be negotiated on a commercial quote?
Implementation scope more than licence price. It is priced for a larger buyer and is the most reducible part for a small portfolio.