How to Connect PropTraka to Zapier and Automate Your Property Admin

Every property business runs on a handful of small, repetitive jobs. A tenant pays rent, and someone copies the amount into a spreadsheet. A maintenance request comes in, and someone messages the plumber. A new tenant signs, and someone updates the master list. None of these tasks is difficult. All of them are easy to forget on a busy day.

PropTraka connects to Zapier, which means those small jobs can now happen on their own. Zapier is the bridge between PropTraka and the 8,000+ other apps it supports — Google Sheets, Slack, Gmail, QuickBooks, Xero, WhatsApp Business, Trello, Google Calendar. You build the connection once, in a visual editor, and it runs quietly from then on.

Here is what that setup actually looks like.

What You Need Before You Start

Two things. First, a PropTraka plan that includes API access — that is Premier or Enterprise. The Developers tab, where API keys are generated, only appears on those plans. Second, a Zapier account. The free tier is enough to build your first automation and see whether it earns its place.

That is it. There is nothing to install and no server to configure.

Step 1: Accept the Invite

Open Marketplace in your PropTraka dashboard. The Zapier card sits at the top with an Accept Zapier Invite button. Clicking it adds PropTraka to the list of apps your Zapier account can see.

This step exists because PropTraka's Zapier app is distributed by invitation. Accepting the invite is what makes PropTraka searchable inside Zapier's app picker for your account.

Step 2: Generate Your API Key

Go to Settings → Developers and generate a key. It will look like proptraka_live_ followed by a long random string.

Two things worth knowing. The key carries specific permissions — reading payments, reading market data, managing webhooks — rather than blanket access to everything in your account. And it is shown to you once. Copy it into a password manager immediately; if you lose it, generate a new one and revoke the old.

Treat this key exactly as you would treat your banking password. Anyone holding it can read the data its permissions allow.

Step 3: Connect PropTraka Inside Zapier

Start building a Zap. When you choose PropTraka as the app, Zapier asks for your API key. Paste it in.

Zapier checks the key against your account and confirms it is valid before letting you continue. If it rejects the key, the usual cause is a stray space at the beginning or end of what you pasted.

Step 4: Pick What Starts the Automation

PropTraka emits eight live events, and any of them can start a Zap:

• A payment is received — including payments that arrive through the M-Pesa callback, through bulk reconciliation, and through manual revenue entry
• A payment is overdue — fired on the 3-day and 7-day overdue checks, carrying the full amount owed for the cycle
• A tenant is created
• A lease is created — every route into a new tenancy, whether added manually, converted from an applicant, or imported from CSV
• A lease is expiring — at 90, 60 and 30 days before the end date
• A maintenance request is created — including requests submitted by tenants in the portal
• A maintenance request is completed
• A trust score is calculated

Payments are the event most landlords automate first, and for good reason: it is the one that touches money, and the one that most often gets copied by hand into a second system. Lease expiry is the one most worth automating second — it is the event where acting early is worth the most money, and the one easiest to lose track of across a portfolio.

Step 5: Pick What Happens Next

This is where the automation earns its keep. A few that Kenyan landlords and managing agents set up early:

Rent payment → Google Sheets. Every payment appends a row to a running sheet. Your accountant gets a live ledger without you exporting anything at month-end.

Rent payment → Slack or WhatsApp Business. The team sees payments land in real time. Nobody has to ask "has unit 4B paid yet?"

Maintenance request created → Trello or Asana. Each request becomes a card in whatever board your maintenance team already works from.

Maintenance completed → Gmail. A closing note goes to the landlord or the property owner automatically, which is exactly the kind of small courtesy that gets skipped when things are busy.

New tenant → Google Calendar. Lease dates and inspection reminders appear on the calendar the moment the tenancy is created.

Test the Zap once, switch it on, and it runs without you.

How PropTraka Sends the Data

Under the hood, PropTraka delivers events as webhooks, and the delivery is built to be verifiable and self-limiting.

Every payload is signed with HMAC-SHA256 using a secret unique to your endpoint, and the signature is sent in the X-PropTraka-Signature header. A receiving system can therefore prove the message genuinely came from PropTraka and was not altered in transit.

Deliveries time out after 10 seconds so a slow endpoint cannot hold up the queue. If an endpoint fails 10 times consecutively, PropTraka marks it as failed and stops sending, rather than retrying into the void indefinitely. You can inspect delivery history, and re-enable an endpoint after fixing it, in Settings → Webhooks.

If you would rather point webhooks directly at your own system instead of going through Zapier, that path is open too — the same signed deliveries, no intermediary.

Start With One

The temptation with automation is to map out ten workflows on day one. Resist it. Build the single automation that removes the task you most dislike doing, live with it for two weeks, and see whether it holds.

For most Kenyan landlords, that first one is rent payments flowing into a sheet. The month-end reconciliation that used to take an evening simply stops being a job.

Then build the second one.