The Official AppFolio Blog

For property managers, safety is key. When you manage a property, you’re responsible for a great deal, and the safety and upkeep of your property is one of the most important priorities you have. Without proper upkeep on your property, you’re setting yourself up for problems. However, if you manage many different properties, it can be hard to keep track of everything that needs to be done.

Not to worry. One of the best ways to stay up to date with maintenance is to use property management maintenance software. It helps you keep track of both regularly scheduled maintenance tasks and one-time issues. It also gives you the ability to access your data and deal with problems from anywhere.

Legal Issues for Property Managers
As a manager, you accept the responsibility for the safety of the residents and staff on your property. This includes their health and physical well-being. If residents are injured on your property, they may choose to take legal action against you, citing poor maintenance practices as the reason they were hurt. This could prove to be quite costly for you and can damage your reputation. You can help protect yourself from liability by simply using technology to manage the maintenance of the properties.

Preventing Hazards on Your Property
Hazards come in a number of different forms. Property managers have to be conscious of both physical and biological hazards. Physical hazards like broken steps are often easily fixable and even preventable with routine maintenance. Routine maintenance can also help prevent leaks in plumbing, gas lines, and HVAC units.

Biological hazards are also preventable, despite their more ominous name. For instance, inspect your property regularly for mold and mildew, and if any is found, clean it up promptly. The sooner you take care of potential hazards, the better off your residents will be.

AppFolio’s Work Order Feature Helps You More Easily Maintain Your Properties
With AppFolio’s property management software, maintenance doesn’t have to be a constant headache. You can access information about your property and manage work orders from within the software to get the problems fixed promptly. By responding to maintenance requests quickly, you’ll be able to take care of minor issues before they become more serious ones that threaten the safety and well-being of your residents. Who can argue with that kind of efficiency?

Did you catch how to best handle negative reviews online? We hosted an action-packed Webinar with Grace Hill on the topic of how property management professionals can best monitor, manage, and maintain their online reputation. Speaker Charity Hisle is regarded as an emerging leader within the multifamily industry and she shared her expertise on how to manage review sites like ApartmentRatings and Yelp. This webinar was filled with questions and Charity was nice enough to write up some more answers below.

Yelp has removed 3 legitimate reviews from our website through their autofilter. Is there anyway to get the reviews back?
I’ve investigated these types of claims before and here’s what I found. In one case, the user was new and without even a profile picture. The only review posted was for the community and it was GLOWING. In another case, the user wasn’t new but they had previously left very positive reviews for other communities across the country. There is no way to get the reviews back EXCEPT if the reviewers start really using Yelp and Yelp’s algorithm picks up the activity and validates it as authentic. This is why soliciting reviews is bad – because Yelp will grow suspicious if only positive reviews are visible.

What is the best way to defend your site on apartmentratings.com?
A membership, responding appropriately to concerns and complaints, and using the site regularly will build credibility, visibility and authenticity.

Any top suggestions on the best way to generate reviews – hopefully positive ones?
Email marketing, signs in the office, and requesting prospects (preferably before they even move in) to leave a review. Share them on Facebook and in testimonials on your website and future email marketing campaigns to build credibility for your community.

What do you think about posting a sign in the office saying, “Like us? Have you reviewed us online yet?”
LOVE IT! Share a picture and let us know how that works for you!

Can you provide a list of all the search sites please?
Search all of these sites for your community name: Google, Set up Google Feed Reader, set up Google Alerts, SocialMention, Kurrently, Twitter Search, HyperAlerts, Bing, Yahoo, Yahoo local, ApartmentRatings, DoNotRent, Yelp, Citysearch.com, etc.

Can you ever get negative reviews removed?
It depends on the website. ApartmentRatings will remove ratings that violate their terms of service. Yelp also has guidelines that, if violated, may result in the review being removed.

How do you claim your Google Places site?
Get started here.

Is it worth paying the companies that offer to pay to fix your online reputation?
I read an article the other day about black hat reputation monitoring. Basically, some companies hack into the website to remove the negative postings and post code that prevents the postings from displaying in search. This is illegal – so please be careful who you hire!

Most of our bad post results from security deposit disputes. Residents feel they weren’t responsible for the damage that was caused to the unit. How do you suggest we respond to those posts without sounding defensive?
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure! Perhaps start with all new and current residents (flyers/email/website). Explain the most common damage that takes place during the normal course of residence and how to prevent the damage. In the case of reviews already posted, if they are older than 12 months, let them go. If they are current reviews, perhaps explaining the common types of damage, why your community needs to recover the costs of repair, and offer to speak with them offline (provide your name, contact info). Find more from Charity’s site, Socially Engaged Marketing

Our friends at Multifamily Insiders have a survey and if you take a few minutes to share your thoughts, you get the results for free, so you can see what strategies other apartment communities are using: Share how you handle ApartmentRatings.com.

In every business, it’s important to know exactly what is expected of you. Being a property manager is no different. As a property manager, your responsibilities are numerous and often time consuming, but property management software makes it easy to tackle your tasks. Some of your responsibilities are legal obligations and must be performed to keep your units safe and habitable. Even the services that aren’t mandatory, however, will keep your residents happy, boost your reputation, and ensure your units remain occupied.

Obligations for Property Managers
As a property manager, your responsibilities begin before your first resident moves in. You’re expected to perform inspections on the entire property for potential hazards to the health and safety of your residents. If you find an issue, you’re obligated to fix it. You’re also required to provide maintenance services in the event of an emergency. Plumbing, heating, air conditioning, and electrical are just a few of the maintenance areas that are typically your responsibility as a property manager.

Property management goes beyond providing a plumber when your residents are having trouble with their toilets, however. As a property manager, you’re also in charge of looking out for your residents and their interests.

Other Services Property Managers Perform
Being a property manager means more than taking care of maintenance requests. You’re expected to screen your applicants in a fair and legal way, ensuring that both current and future residents are taken care of. A leasing agreement that protects both you and your residents is one of the most important things you can provide, even though it might seem like just a few sheets of paper. A good leasing agreement defines the terms both parties will be living by, including financial obligations like monthly rent, security, damage, and deposits.

Even with the most comprehensive contract, however, you’re also expected to be a responsive property manager. There is no substitute for customer service.

Being a Responsive Property Manager
Even if you’re managing your property from a distance, it’s important to be responsive to your residents. AppFolio’s property management software can help you take care of business from anywhere. You’ll be able to answer questions from residents, respond to maintenance requests faster, and review rental applications all from your office, even if your “office” is on the beach. There’s no reason not to have your finger on the pulse of your property.

Do you manage multiple properties? Are they all making the profit they ought to? If not, could it be that you’ve overextended yourself? The truth is, when you bite off more than you can chew as a property manager, profit margins can suffer.

The profitability vs. cash flow question is one that many property managers have to tackle at some point in time. The good news is, if you have enough properties to manage that you’re spread thin, it means your business has been growing and you’re probably collecting more cash. But it is important to consider how this affects the profitability of your business.

The Profit vs. Cash Flow Dilemma
When you find that one or many of the properties you manage isn’t turning an adequate profit, you need to ask yourself why. Usually, there’s no single reason. Instead, a series of issues generally explain why a property is bringing in less money. Some of those reasons can include:

• Maintenance issues
• Problems with rent collection
• High number of vacancies
• High costs for people / employees
• Don’t have enough time devoted to reporting on and measuring important metrics

Solving the Dilemma: Focus on Technology
If you discover that you’ve got a problem, you can either cut back on the number of properties you manage, or find ways to improve the performance across your business. The biggest cost to profitability in our industry is the number of employees you need to manage your portfolio of properties.

But really, what you need to do is find a way to improve your efficiency. When you cut down on the time, effort and money it takes for your team to manage the portfolio you’ll be able to handle a higher volume of properties with better profitability.   Relying on new and improved software  (like web-based property management software) is one of the most important investments you can make to improve profitability.

We recently spoke with Bill Nye (CEO of Caviness and Cates) and the owner of Bill Nye Training to better understand his view on how property managers can increase profitability.   He really credits his investment in AppFolio’s property management software with helping his team manage more units without investing in additional employees. “We immediately saw a great impact because we could do so much more with our corporate staff.”  His plan is to grow from 1300 units to 2000 units without adding staff to his corporate headquarters – you can see how this will make a dramatic impact on profitability!

John Mosby is a president of M3 Property Management and a partner at M3 Multifamily. His companies own and operate apartment communities in the 100- to 300-unit range. John uses AppFolio’s property management software, and a while back he was kind enough to let us interview him about his experience with our tools. Check it out.

If you don’t have time to watch the whole video, here are just some of the nice things John has to say about AppFolio:

Q. Can you tell us a little about your background?
JJ – I am originally from Denver and moved out to California to go to photography school. I am formally trained as a photographer and while I was in school, I took classes in graphic design.  When I graduated I landed a job doing web design and within 6 months realized I was more interested in whether the website was easy to use than the aesthetics of it. That is what launched my career into usability and user experience.

Kate – I used to be a technical writer and administrator and saw how often people got really frustrated with the technology in their office. I just wanted to make it easier for people to get their jobs done so I went to the University of Washington in Seattle and graduated with a degree in human centered design and engineering. That is a human computer interaction degree that focuses on user research and usability.

Q. Please tell us what you do at AppFolio.
Kate – As the interaction designer my role is to try and figure out what people actually need in the software and then use that information to inform the design choices that the teams are making and then test those features. The cool thing about AppFolio is that user research is integrated throughout the entire process.

JJ – I am a senior interaction designer and I work closely with the engineering team to collect feedback from customers on new features or functionality that we add to AppFolio to make sure that we optimize the user interface so it is really easy for our customers.  Sometimes we conduct interviews with customers before we start working on a new feature to learn how they would use it and what their expectations are in terms of how the feature works. Before we get into the prototype or development phase, we do usability tests.  During these tests we have quite a few customers who have allowed us to observe remotely as they use some of these new features in AppFolio.  We will ask them to perform a number of tasks and see how intuitive the user interface is and then use this information to continue to improve on the user experience.

Q. What is the AppFolio Usability Lab (other than a cool room with couches)?
JJ – We get everyone involved in these studies so that the engineers can actually see AppFolio customers using the software live through screen sharing. When we moved into the new office, we wanted to create a quiet environment to watch these studies. So we built out the “Usability Lab” which consists of 2 rooms: one is a very small room where we actually conduct the usability study and typically only the “facilitator” is in there. They are the ones who are walking the customer through these studies and telling them what the tasks are. The other room is the “Observation Room” where people can hang out and watch customers as they are using the software.  It can also be used as a napping room…with comfortable couches.

After the study, we talk about our observations and sometimes we can make changes to improve the design as quickly as that day.

Q. Do you have an example of something that the customers have helped design through these studies?
JJ – Yes! We did extensive usability testing on our guest cards and screening features. We were able to release something and then get incremental feedback and make improvements based on what we saw.

Q. What do you like about your job here at AppFolio?
Kate – I really like how the people at AppFolio are so bright and engaged with their work and really care about what they are doing and it encourages me to continue focus on doing my best every day. That fact that our customers love using AppFolio makes it a fun and exciting place to work.

There are a lot of companies, especially technology companies, that are really seeing the value of usability and more jobs in this field are being created and the field is starting to get a lot of recognition.

Q. What do you like to do outside of work?
Kate – I am pretty active and I love being outside. Now that I live in Santa Barbara, I have a garden for the first time. I do the Foundation workout at AppFolio during lunch too.

JJ – I trained for the marathon and do CrossFit but now I will be doing the Foundation workout with other AppFolians. One of our customers just opened a CrossFit gym in San Francisco and he told us that he is able to open this gym with all of the time he is saving using AppFolio to run his business because he is so much more efficient. We love that.

Q. What is your New Year’s resolution going to be?
JJ – I am a singer in a band and my goal is to finish our album. We have been recording an album for some time now and I wrote some of the songs.

Kate – Next year, I would like to cook more dinners at home and not eat out as much.

It can be a time consuming process to send statements and reports to the owners of your properties on a monthly basis. Owner Reports are often a requirement for Property Managers and can also be a great chance to continue to reinforce with your customers that they made the right choice by selecting you to manage their properties.

When we first built AppFolio’s  residential property management software we realized that when you have to print and mail these statements, it is extremely expensive (postage, paper, time) and definitely a huge hassle!  So we made it really easy to customize and send the Owner statements along with any necessary reports.

The Owner Statement outlines all of the most basic activity on the property, as well as more in-depth and you have the option to attach specific reports if more detail is necessary. Work orders can also be included with any package of reports to show what has been done to the property during the time period in question and any maintenance costs incurred. We get really great feedback about the layout of the statements – they are very easy to read and understand.

These are also posted to the Owner’s Portal so your customers can have easy, online access to their monthly statements in just a couple of clicks.  Here’s some recent feedback from a very happy customer:

“As I was enjoying my holiday break in North Carolina, I found myself in a car full of family members traveling to Raleigh to visit my niece who is in school there. We were playing a game of Monopoly on my sister’s iPad when I remembered I needed to send Owner Statements. We paused the game and I logged onto AppFolio. In less than 5 minutes, I had emailed 400+ statements and resumed our game of Monopoly (which I won on the way back from Raleigh).

Woo Hoo! No angry owners and a happy staff not having to deal with a bunch of phone calls. Thank you, AppFolio!”

Did you know that AppFolio can help you to improve your vacancy ads and get more resident applications for your properties? There’s no hocus-pocus about it. We simply give you one central space to collect all of your data, then provide you with the tools you need to seamlessly turn that data into beautiful vacancy ads. With better vacancy ads, you can achieve maximum occupancy rates and increase your revenue.

AND you can do it in just three easy steps:

1. Prepare Your Vacancy Ads
AppFolio stores all the information regarding your properties and saves you from the hassle of managing it in multiple places. You can then quickly and easily take that information and with a few clicks post on popular listing sites. Simply pull up details such as a description of the vacant unit, its amenities and the terms of the lease using AppFolio’s universal search function. Once you’ve located the information, edit it as needed. You can add photos to the listing by simply dragging and dropping, and don’t forget to add a link to your YouTube video before previewing the listing. Including media in the ad itself makes the listing more attractive to potential residents.

2. Post Your Listing
Once you like what you see in the preview, you can start posting to your own website, Craigslist and other listing sites on the Internet. Craigslist is one of the most popular places on the web for applicants to view property listings, and AppFolio allows you to post directly to Craigslist, which is so much easier than posting manually over and over again!  Wherever you decide to post, your ad gives viewers the option to apply immediately online or fill out a guest card. You’ll get many more applications for your properties when you make the process so quick and easy.  The information applicants provide goes straight into AppFolio, saving you the hassle of entering data manually.

3. Track Your Success
Once you’ve started listing vacancies with AppFolio, you can easily track the performance of your ads. AppFolio keeps a record of your marketing efforts so that you can see what’s working. For instance, you can track guest cards by lead source so you know where your listings do best. You can also see what happens as you highlight amenities, change the rent or change the description of your property. You can then use that knowledge to make all of your listings more effective and really figure out which ad sources are helping you fill vacancies faster.

Wish you could have AppFolio’s property management software with you when you’re out of the office? Good news—there’s an app for that! AppFolio Property Manager is available on your iPhone. With the help of our property management app, your important contact and property information is at your fingertips wherever you go. We’ve also recently updated the App and now you can add and edit notes and workorders while you’re in the field.

Here are just a few real-world situations in which the AppFolio iPhone App can be very useful.

Improve Response Times
Let’s say you’re out in the field and realize you’re missing a key piece of information about a property, vendor, owner or tenant that you need in order to complete a task. Maybe you go to make an urgent call, only to realize that the only up-to-date contact record you have is on your computer back at the office. No worries. AppFolio for iPhone is synced with data you’ve stored online in AppFolio Property Manager, so you’ve always got the most up-to-date information just where you need it.

Property Inspection
One of your units has gone vacant, and it’s time for an inspection. In the past, you’d load yourself up with your laptop, notepad and camera, and just HOPE that you’d be able to get a decent wi-fi signal at the property. Now, all you need is your iPhone. Take inspection notes on your phone and attach them to a property record. If you run into a problem, your tenant, owner and vendor information is readily accessible through AppFolio’s property management app. You can create and edit workorders while you’re on the property and save a trip back to the office.

Faster Marketing
When the property is viewer-ready, you can easily take pictures with your iPhone and upload them directly to AppFolio Property Manager. From there, it’s just a few clicks before those photos are live on your vacancy postings, ready to draw in new applicants.