Buildium vs. CoStar Real Estate Manager

I'm very happy with the service provided via phone, to me that is the absolute largest draw. I also really appreciate the integrations Buildium offers. I mostly appreciate HappyCo, Petscreening, and Hunter Warfield. None of these are seamless in their communication with Buildium but it's still a vast improvement from having to have separate accounts from Buildium so overall, it is beneficial to our company

Incentivized

Gen-Y and younger will have no problem learning how to use CoStar but its not very intuitive for the older generations (they have to hunt and peck for what they are looking for and have no idea how to manipulate the reporting features)

Incentivized

• It documents the date and time of all updates and communications, which are essential to the companys records.
• It allows external clients to communicate and stay in touch with our company, as well as access information.
• It serves as a large database for all of our customer and client information that is very user-friendly.

Incentivized

• Nothing
• Charging my card
• Nothing

• Hello Sign has been a really rough transition and is not as user friendly as Adobe Sign.
• Customer service struggles to understand what is going on and you have to hang up and call to get someone else.
• Owner portal is lacking in my opinion.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

I have used three property management softwares and know of others who have used additional softwares for managing properties. Buildium seems to be the best of all of them

Incentivized

Overall, the system is good and getting better; however, different roll outs have caused the system to regress. Their latest bank automation rollout was a disaster and continues to be an issue. Since the upgrade, I have not been able to sync our bank and Buildium (download transactions).

Incentivized

I have been able to get through to support immediately and they have been awesome in quickly resolving issues. More importantly, their communication when there is an issue which might take some time to resolve surfaces. Getting updates and resolution are critical.

Incentivized

I cannot rate this since I was not part of that process

Incentivized

Appfolio is my favorite software, and they are constantly making improvements. Buildium is great if you don’t have a ton of property but is not as manageable for advanced accounting and resident information tracking. There are workarounds, but they do need to work on their ease of use for owners.

Incentivized

There is literally not one good thing that I can say about CoStar. They charge my card $450/month because I signed a one-year contract. They provide very little data and properties and most of the time it is inaccurate. Their customer service is atrocious. They overpromise, underdeliver. STAY away from using Costar!

• Buildium absolutely saves time. Having all of our management systems in one place is almost beyond a value at this point because it’s the basic requirement of running an effective property management company.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized