The Official AppFolio Blog

The iPad is here, and property managers love it! AppFolio is excited too, and we’ve put together a list of ways you can use the iPad with AppFolio.

The Top 10 Ways Property Managers Can Improve Their Business with the iPad and AppFolio:

1. Bring an iPad to your next meeting with a prospective owner and demonstrate how efficiently you run your business using AppFolio.
2. A leasing agent can bring an iPad when showing a new property. If the prospective resident doesn’t love the place, give them a real-time demo in AppFolio of other properties you have in your portfolio.
3. Enter work orders while in the field – imagine you’re conducting a move-out inspection and you see three maintenance issues, you can submit the work orders immediately.
4. Use the iPad to guide residents through the process to set up online payments right when they move in (don’t collect that rent check!).
5. Mark work orders complete on the fly – save the effort of taking notes, then re-entering them at the office.
6. Take new photos at a property, upload them right away to your vacancy postings…real-time photo updates for your vacancies.
7. Respond faster to issues when you’re out of the office. The iPad is so easy to carry around, you can be at your son’s baseball game and send important reports to an owner.
8. Update a unit’s vacancy and advertise it without going back to the office.
9. Get an iPad tough case and let your maintenance team update work orders in the field.
10. Forgot to call someone important while you’re out to dinner? Look up resident or owner contact information wherever you are.

Do you have other ideas on how you can use the iPad in your property management business? Share them with us by leaving a comment!

Our new online tenant payment system has been live for a couple months and during the set-up process I’ve heard many of our customers ask if they can add a convenience fee to online payments. We strongly discourage this as it has been shown that making a resident pay a convenience fee to submit their payment online lowers adoption. Our customers definitely get the maximum value from accepting online payments when more residents pay online. So it is important to provide incentives that will actually encourage renters to pay online.

Some of our customers are coming up with creative ways to get the majority of their residents paying rent online. A unique approach is to actually add a convenience fee for accepting paper checks – the opposite of the traditional convenience fee to process online payments.

If you think about it, it makes sense. The bulk of the time property management companies spend during rent week is on accepting, receipting, and depositing paper checks. A recent study found that it takes about 5 minutes to process each check – if you’re processing hundreds of checks each month that time really adds up.

By providing incentives for the residents to pay online, the residents save money each month and the property management company saves enormous amounts of time and energy. A win-win for everyone! Of course, you should check your laws in your area to make sure this is okay as it can vary from state to state.