AppFolio vs CoStar Real Estate Manager

• It helps us to keep the Maintenance side of the business very organized. Anyone from our organization can go in and know exactly where a work order is in process (new, waiting, assigned, completed). We know if a work order has been printed and if the tenants are still having an issue we know to contact the Maintenance team. We can build on existing work orders by adding a "-2" or "-3" work order and keep track of the history when managing ongoing issues.
• AppFolio makes it easy to see exactly what tenants owe and categorizes charges/credits efficiently on their ledgers. We can tell if there are water/sewer charges, pet fees, electricity allocations, late fees, security deposits, etc... It's all easy to follow and understand and it set up in chronological order.
• I also utilize the Reports and Letters section of this software program quite often. It's great to have a uniform format which helps us maintain the professional element by remaining consistent and accurate. It's easy to run a report with tenant information at a certain property for maintenance and send select tenants letters at a large property without everyone being included. It's very intuitive and the formatting has definitely improved over the past two years I've been using the program.

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• For my role within the company, I find CoStars database of historical information very helpful. Previous users, owners, financing lien holders, tax information and county data are things I look for on a daily basis.

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• There is some reporting that we would like to see for our Owners and Tenants. Their vacancy report is one we wish we could pull in the tenants phone number to be able to have it on our report when we print.
• Maintenance also has reporting that we would like to be able to produce from the keys checked out and keys returned so we can stay on top of checking out our units better. We would also like to do reports from the inspections. Being able to print the units coming vacant at the end of any given month and printing it so we know which unit needs to have painting, cleaning and carpet cleaning done would be very helpful. Right now we export the units and copy and paste into a spreadsheet template to have what we need for our maintenance board.
• The process to remove misapplied rent or how to refund money to a tenant is a several step process we would like to see simplified.

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• In our market (Portland, OR), not enough users implement the tools that could make CoStar so much better. For example, I specialize in medical but brokers and owners don't take the time to mark medical as an approved use in their buildings so I have to search much longer and cross-reference the data by contacting the brokers directly.
• I find it really annoying that when I download documents CoStar doesn't use smart technology to automatically name my files. It is especially irritating since every piece of marketing we post to CoStar has a relevant file name yet when we download the same file we have to rename it.

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• AppFolio has converted prospective clients to actual clients once they saw how my company could use the program to communicate with on-site property management teams and improve the communication and budgeting process.
• AppFolio is expensive, especially for a small company, so that may have had some negative impact on the ROI.
• Overall, AppFolio has also helped improve our ability as a company to communicate with asset manager levels.

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• Since CoStar has linked with LoopNet we have had fewer bad data calls. By which I mean old data from LoopNet that was available to the general public is now more regularly updated through CoStar so we have less confusion with our clients.

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