I wanted to take time and talk about cloud based property management software available to landlords and property managers today. Over the past year and a half, we took it upon ourselves to evaluate options that are available on the market, and narrowed the choices down to the three companies that offered all the modules that we were looking at, which was Accounting, Marketing, Reporting, Leasing, Inspections and Tech Support. Three companies have definitely stood out in the crowd: Appfolio, Builduim and PropertyWare. I would like to add that I didn’t get far with Builduim and abandoned the evaluation early on and since have used both, Appfolio (appfoluo.com) and PropertyWare (propertyware.com). So, there are two, Appfolio and PropertyWare. They were evaluated based on the following criteria:
- Monthly Cost,
- Overall Ease of use,
- Ability to create new, custom reports,
- Ability to print directly to printers (not via a pdf file saved to your hard drive first) for checks and other documents,
- Presence and ease of use of the Marketing modules,
- Presence and ease of use of Online lease signing,
- Presence and ease of use and Ability to do renewals online through the software,
- Inspection module and ability to print/save reports to our documents and tenant portal,
- Payment processing cost and ease of use,
- Presence and ease of use of the Accounting module,
- Presence of Tenant and Owner portals and their management,
- Response time for tech support calls.
Based on all this criteria, the table below will show our findings, all criteria was based on a 5 point scale, with 1 being not acceptable and 5 being excellent. If there is a zero listed, that means that option is not available at the time of this writing.
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If you are considering new property management software or switching to a new solution, I hope this article gave you some basic understanding of the two competitors.
We have used Appfolio software solution for a little over a year and have now switched to PropertyWare, Is one better than the other? You decide. You have my scores. We, as a company, needed more flexibility and more management control. Has the either software been perfect? No, but there is nothing out there that’s perfect. Please feel free to call me if you have more questions, my direct number is 404-954-1623. Or you can email me at info@alhpodland.com.
ALH|Podland Rental Homes Property Management offers a full range of real property management services. Trust your Atlanta property management service needs to ALH|Podland Rental Homes where we aggressively market your rental homes to faster fill vacancies, maintain your home(s) minding the cost factor and focus our efforts on timely communications with both owners and residents.
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