Has anyone used appfolio software for property management? The company I work for owns 2 office buildings, 1 building of office condos, and 4 retail buildings (and 1 random 4-unit residential building). Our hotel, self-storage, and huge multifamily residential portfolio is managed by third parties, but our commercial buildings are managed in-house with extremely dated (20-year-old) software. I'm looking for an intuitive, modern property management platform for "small" businesses and was curious if anyone had any recommendations, including an appfolio review.
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I haven't personally used Appfolio but from the knowledge I do have of it I believe it is a better fit for residential management. I have been in commercial management for about 10 years and have used a couple of platforms. Yardi is good but expensive. I used it while I was with CBRE and I recently joined a smaller firm and we thought about getting Yardi and priced it out and it was wayyyyyy more expensive than everyone else. We settled on a platform called RentManager. It is very similar to Yardi in terms of its interface and they only charge $75 per property per month. It also has a mobile app. It seems to have features for both residential and commercial buildings. Their tech support was helpful getting us set up as well.
My company's initial desire has been to switch to Yardi. For commercial, is Yardi pretty intuitive? Good for budgeting, passthroughs, etc.? Read a lot of bad Yardi reviews and am concerned about that switch.
100% anecdotal
One of the sponsors/operators we invest with just switched away from Yardi for everything. They said it does not play nice with their other accounting software and is considerably more expensive than other comparable options.
YMMV
Damnit. Damn the old people making decisions around my company.
If it makes you feel better, we're switching 50,000+ apartments to Yardi as I type this. From what I gather, the operations folks and the back office peeps are pretty excited about it. Apparently Real Rage / OneSite was not the best.
From my experience, Appfolio is for residential. I know it's fine for mixed-use also, but I think it's also expensive for a few buildings (they have a minimum charge of $200 a month), and it's priced by residential units.
Probably not what you care about, but the building I live (40-50 unit residential, major city) in uses appfolio and from a renters perspective, I find it very useful. Pay rent, request maintenance, etc all through the website. Granted, i've always lived in places with pretty old-school methods (check each month at the office, etc) but I definitely think there is value to using one of these platforms and I would expect it lowers % of late payments.
Appfolio is very user friendly and more importantly, designed with an end-user that has no corporate/college software experience. It is rather foolproof and you can quickly train a book keeper to use it efficiently.
On a separate but related note, one of the top 4 cre mf mgmt shops is quietly in the process of replacing yardi. Their battle with 3rd party front end firm entrada has wreaked havoc and the 25k for api access is complete bs.
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