TrustRadius Insights for AppFolio Property Manager are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Clear Overview of Work Orders: Many users have praised AppFolio Property Manager for providing a clear overview of work orders, allowing them to easily track the progress of maintenance tasks. This feature has been particularly helpful in keeping the maintenance side of their business organized and efficient.
Efficient Tracking of Tenant Payments: Several reviewers appreciate how AppFolio Property Manager makes it easy to track tenant payments and categorize charges and credits efficiently on ledgers. They can quickly see if tenants owe various charges such as water/sewer fees, pet fees, late fees, etc. The system's chronological order organization further enhances usability.
Useful Reports and Letters Section: A number of users frequently utilize AppFolio Property Manager's Reports and Letters section. They find it helpful to have a uniform format that maintains professionalism and consistency when generating reports or sending selective letters to tenants without including everyone. The user also notes that the formatting in this section has improved over the past two years.
We use this as a one stop shop for leads, tenant management, bill pay, etc. Has our lease templates and we’re able to handle every need besides calling through AppFolio.
Pros
Reporting
Vendor Communication
Documents
Cons
Better custom reporting
Reporting for letters
Likelihood to Recommend
In daily use, AppFolio makes the move in process easy where we can accept online payments for move in costs, handle all lease signing electronically, convert from applicant to tenant and have them do a move in inspection.
We set this up to use with a variety of properties we manage and to handle our investments.
Pros
Maintenance Requests
Work Flows
Cons
In my experience, no Office 365 support
Administration of users (in my experience, severely lacking)
Azure/Entra Sync
User Support (honestly, I think you would be better screaming into the wind)
Likelihood to Recommend
I think if you wanted something to work with your Google accounts and never had any support request. This might be a fit. If you need something robust for anything bigger than a mom & pop out fit - in my opinion, look elsewhere. I think if you want something closer to enterprise level, flee from AppFolio Property Manager.
We use AppFolio Property Manager in all aspects of our property management business. From advertising properties, keeping track of prospects, running applications, executing leases, collecting rent and receiving communication from residents, submission, assigning and tracking of work orders, entry and payment of bills, accounting to residents, vendors and property owners, income statements to owners
Pros
track rent charges and tenant receipts
resident work orders
marketing of properties
Cons
accounting is not in line with other property-management software
tasks are not streamlined - numerous steps required for simple tasks
In our experience, customer service is nonexistent
In my opinion, user interface sub-par
Likelihood to Recommend
The AppFolio Property Manager App is user friendly and easy to use. The receipt and recording of rents is apt as is the work order flow. When we signed up for AppFolio Property Manager we communicated to every point of contact from the sales agent to the implementation team, that our revenue model stems from marking up bills and services 10%. Everyone told us repeatedly that this was EASILY accomplished through AppFolio Property Manager. Once we spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours on implementation, we now realize that those representations were, in my opinion, false. In our old software, markups could be accomplished at the bill level (click a button for markup or discount and input the percentage). In my experience in AppFolio Property Manager, to mark up a bill or service, numerous steps are required. First you must create a work order where detailed information must be input (who creates a work order for a home-depot bill?); close the work order and then go to the work order page, select the work order and "create bill" from the work order; enter all the same detailed information plus additional information; mark up the bill and save; then go to payables, insert bank account and vendor to find the bill - then pay the bill. In my experience when entering 100 home-depot charges on the other software, we would go to vendor, select "mark up" and the percentage, then enter the 100 charges by property; save the bill and then pay it. This might take 20 minutes. In our experience in AppFolio Property Manager, for us to make our profit which enables us to stay in business and pay our AppFolio Property Manager fees, rent, payroll etc., we have to spend ALL DAY creating work orders for every separate home-depot charge and then hop through all of the other hoops and do it 99 other times. My entire office is so frustrated and we cannot focus on marketing, leasing, work orders or getting new business because we are spending all day jumping through all of these hoops to achieve our mark up. In our experience, we reach out to customer service again and again and are only answered by bots. The bots are no help so our issue escalates to a real person. The person is no help and escalates the issue. Ive been told 10 times that i will receive an emailed answer to my question - but no email has arrived and our issue remains unaddressed. In our experience, we are then pointed to "suggestion boards" where there is nothing but dissatisfied AppFolio Property Manager customers who are not receiving answers to their issues. To say that we have buyers remorse is an understatement
It has streamlined our application process for our rental units. It has also streamlined the background checks and has allowed for online payment of their rent and deposit. It has made everything easier to search for information. It has shortened the time it takes for an applicant to apply for a rental unit and get accepted since everything is in a one stop shop with appfolio. We are able to connect it to the investor management appfolio portal, which has allowed us to see how successful our properties are with our investors.
Pros
Easy to use application process
Easy for our renters to pay their rent online
Easy to connect to our investors who have invested in these properties
Cons
Being able to integrate our old system into appfolio in a more streamline easier way
Be able to seperate some "owners" from the investment management and property management
Allow for additional customization based on how our organization operates
Likelihood to Recommend
We have 6 apartment buildings that we manage. Every month we were having to drive to each location to collect rent checks. Since using appfolio, we only have a couple of renters that still send in a paper check, the rest pay online, so we are ensuring that our renters are paying on time.
Once we have an applicant apply, the old way was to take their scanned application, review, and then pay to have a background check conducted. Now, with appfolio, we are able to have them apply, sign off on the background check, and pay their deposit all in one shot. It has allowed our property managers to focus on other property items rather than conducting background checks.
We started using AppFolio when our previous property management software stopped doing updates. They were bought out and destroyed by a competitor. For years AppFolio performed very well and the customer service was excellent. You put in a request for support and somebody from customer service actually called you within a few hours and walked you through the issue and how to correct it. That good customer service is NO MORE! You have to initiate an online chat that 3 times out of 5 doesn't answer your question or solve the problem. The more options they add, the more they charge, the less they give...
Pros
ACH Payments to Owners
Reports to Owners
Maintenance Request Forms
Cons
Customer Service
Templates
Handling of Rental Prepayments
Simplifying Move Outs
Providing Management Fee Reports
Simplifying Rental Increases
Explaining Templates and how to adjust them
Likelihood to Recommend
Don't attempt to use this software for summer rentals or short-term rentals. It's impossible to handle taking security deposits for the next tenant coming in when the current tenant is still in residence.
VU
Verified User
General Manager in Professional Services (1-10 employees)
We use AppFolio to manage our HOA. We previously managed in house; however, recent lack of interest and ability to move to digital platforms required the migration to a management company. This added $13k in expenses per year and prevented the HOA from being able to [focus] on any improvement projects.
In 2020 we made the decision to migrate back to in-house management, but [we] needed a platform that allowed us to manage all aspects of the HOA digitally.
Pros
Accept payments
Store documents
Print and mail annual reports
Cons
Difficult to email select audiences
Can't create online applications for all user groups
Hard to set up automatic dues for any other time period than monthly
Likelihood to Recommend
We needed a platform that we could easily migrate our HOA into from an outside management company, but one that allowed for the majority of business to be done and maintained in a cloud based environment.
Onboarding was very thorough and allowed us to really break down the processes and make sure that we had all of the areas of management identified.
Where we struggled was in the post launch support. You have to reach out to the support team in a forum rather than by email and phone and then wait. That piece has made it a little more difficult to smoothly launch certain features like email, setting up reoccurring fees, and things that the homeowners really should see very little stumbling in from their board.
Our entire company uses AppFolio Property Manager - [it's] predominantly used as a portal for our residents. AppFolio Property Manager is the most common way we receive rental payments.
Pros
Prior to purchasing AppFolio Property Manager we used a texting app so we could mass text tenants. AppFolio allows us to text them by their unit along with their guarantors (if needed.) We use this feature daily. It is so convenient when we need to reach out residents quickly.
The online payment system makes it easy for our commercial and residential tenants to make rental payments. The system has also lessened the work of out Account's manager since it's all in once place now and we do not have to enter payments into a separate system.
Navigating AppFolio Property Manager is extremely easy. When we have new hire, it does take any time for them to become comfortable with the system. The main page dashboard makes it simple to get from point A to point B and beyond. The Search engine on AppFolio Property Manager is so efficient. You can search almost anything- phone number, first names, last names, addressed, license plate numbers to successfully find what you are needing.
Cons
We work with mostly college students. As you can imagine there is a lot of roommate drama which brings lease changes. Or perhaps tenants forget to renew their lease agreement and new residents sign and we have to move people around to different addresses. There is NO feature that will allow you to delete a tenant. There is not way to make changes of address once someone is entered. And the "tenant transfer" feature is not useful for us.
We have some issues using the email feature on AppFolio Property Manager. The "letters" feature will allow you to send out an email/ letter and will attach it to everyone's account. If I want to send a personalized email- I have to send it to one resident and BCC the other tenants and their guarantors, anyone blind copied will not have the email attach to their account. So this feature becomes almost unusable for us because of that.
Sometimes it's difficult to receive customer support. The chat feature is helpful but, most of the time the question we have is not easily answered and we are passed off to several other people.
Likelihood to Recommend
AppFolio Property Manager for our residents is phenomenal. It serves us and our residents very well as far as them having access to their portal. I find the program difficult to use from a data entry standpoint. There are many features on our end that make usage for us much more difficult.
AppFolio Property Manager is used across our entire corporate office for all accounting functions for both property, and non-property-related entities of ours. We also utilize their Investment Management add-on which ties our investment entities and related investor distributions directly into the property management software. One of the main reasons we use AppFolio is that it makes it easy for us to navigate many LLCs/entities in one system (i.e. we do not need separate files for each entity but can access everything via one login).
Pros
Multi-entity accounting management
Checking printing: We have multiple bank accounts tied to our account and utilize blank check stock. Appfolio automatically prints the routing numbers and account numbers at the bottom of the blank checks based on which property we are paying a bill from.
Tie-in with their Investment Management tool gives our investors a great resource while keeping our investments in sync with our accounting software.
Cons
Customer support is horrendous. It can take weeks to get a live person on the phone and once you get someone, they typically will need to escalate your issue.
If you have multiple bank accounts at different banks, the bill-paying feature has trouble properly defaulting to the right bank account.
Multiple bank accounts also have issues tying incorrectly to the Cash section of the balance sheet.
Likelihood to Recommend
I think it is one of the best solutions out there for the price. Cheaper solutions don't have the same features (i.e. check printing for multiple bank accounts). If you need personal support or are not overly tech-savvy, you will be better off with a higher-end product that delivers more personalized service. If you are a tech-forward organization that can figure out your needs and features on your own, then I think Appfolio is a great solution.
VU
Verified User
C-Level Executive in Professional Services (51-200 employees)
AppFolio is being used across the company and houses our resident files. It has helped us make our move-in process almost completely electronic. It also allows easy access to resident ledgers and accounts. In addition, Appfolio’s set-up helps us stay organized, from scheduling tours to preparing for move-ins, everything we need is at our fingertips. Reports are also housed in this system.
Pros
Ease of use
Customer Support & FAQ Articles
Organization of the Website
Ability to Customize
Application Screening
Constant Updates to Site
Cons
Customer service hours could be extended
Quicker application results
Ability to better keep track of follow-up for prospects
Likelihood to Recommend
We are able to manage the move-in process from scheduling a tour to the day of move-in through AppFolio. On the management side, budgetary things are managed in this system as well. When it comes to a true tool that’s easy to use and effective in helping to manage a property--this is it! Leasing consultant performance can even be tracked easily in this system.
