AppFolio Property Manager

Pros

I love the ability to track collections, maintenance orders, and Tenant info/documents from my smartphone. This software gives me the option to have any staff work remote as needed and still do our jobs at 100% capacity.

Cons

Appfolio does a nice job at continuing to develop better features. One area that needs improvements is the ability to do inspections. It takes forever for photos to upload while at the property and uses a ton of data. Would be nice to be able to have the inspections saved locally to the phone and then upload all at once while on WiFi. This would speed up inspections drastically. Improving inspection templates is also needed.

Pros

We love the ease of use, flow of the interface, and the online integration, the cost is inline with other comparable software, so you definitely get what you pay for. We wish we could make use of all of the features the software has to offer, as there is so much to choose from. Their customer services is upstanding, and we make good use of the 24 hour tenant maintenance support line. We've used Appfolio for 6 years now, and so far we've had a good experience.

Cons

The cons while important are minimal. We face underlying program issues, such as with rent charges. The system is set up for 1st of the month rent charges ONLY, but we have different rent due dates ranging from the 1st to the 15th. This causes havoc for us as some tenants with due dates other than the 1st get charged twice in the longer months. We have to pay them back and it can be very frustrating for them as they have to wait days for their funds. As well the tenant's online portal doesn't always show the correct amount owed as it automatically includes charges for the upcoming month, which confuses most tenants. The ease of use is also a double edged sword since if not careful, as with a lot of programs, you can make system changes, and data or journal entry mistakes that can be difficult to fix. While the customer support is helpful they are not always the end all, so you might be expected to fix your own problems if needed. In some cases customer service can only take you so far. If the issue is long lasting they may start to wane on their responses to you with assistance or be unable to help you. But this is explained when you begin orientation so you should take the responsibility of educating yourself on the system before using it.

Pros

It is fairly user friendly. Onboarding team was friendly.

Cons

1.- Customer Support is your worse nightmare. 2.- I can no longer receive over the phone payments, 3.- It has been very difficult for many of my users to login. 4.- It takes me too many steps to move from one function to the next and tabs open and accumulate making your viewing experience confusing.5.-The onboarding process and the way the information was placed made me think they had an unexperienced person doing a fill in the blank job. I don't believe they understand what they are really doing while importing the information from one software to the next.

Pros

This software is amazing. It has so many features from initial contact with prospective renters all the way through the rental process. It allows you to initiate online payments to vendors and owners. It is capable of creating HTML packets for posting to websites manually. It also posts automatically to about 30 other websites. It is awesome.

Cons

It has taken a lot of work to learn and I’m still learning a lot and I’ve been using it for 7 years. You have to treat it like learning a new language and dive in to understand each facet of the software.

Pros

Appfolio has not only a lot of functionality, but is easy to use across our entire organization. It has become the primary backbone of our property management business and we truly view Appfolio as a Partner, not a technology service provider.

Cons

Our primary critique with Appfolio is that they tend not to let other good real estate tech products plug into their software via API. In other words, they like to build new products/functions in-house instead of via partnership or integration. There are pros and cons, but in general I would like to see Appfolio play nicer with other prop tech products.