The Official AppFolio Blog

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.

Hopefully you’re already taking advantage of AppFolio’s iPhone App! If you haven’t downloaded it yet and you’re already an AppFolio customer, just go to the App Store and download it right away. Also, it is rated 4+ stars.

Once you download it you can:

Access all of your contact information really fast.
Access contact information for all of your residents, owners, properties, units and vendors. You can see the phone number and even map the address (which looks very beautiful).

Contact people easily.
From the app you can send emails or even choose the coolest feature “click to call”.

Take photos in the field and upload them instantly.
While you’re prepping a vacant unit, conducting an inspection, documenting something good (or bad!) or taking marketing photos you can easily attach the photos to the record in AppFolio. A lot of customers rave about the quality of the iPhone 4 photos…and the rumor is the iPhone 5 is coming in September!

The data is synced automatically to the AppFolio iPhone application so it is always up to date, too.

Let’s face it, sometimes the business of property management can be quite hectic so anything you can do in order to create efficiency, while also being as ‘green’ as possible, is most welcome. Below are a few ways AppFolio helps get you there.

Utilize AppFolio’s Online Tenant Payments (ACH) and encourage all of your residents to participate.
This will not only cut down on the amount of paper checks being used, but it’ll save you so much time during rent week, as you will no longer have to sift through stacks of checks, manually entering them into the system. Online tenant payments with ACH is fast, easy, and free…most of all, it’s green. We’ll even create a marketing package (refrigerator magnets, rack cards and posters) for you, so that you can spread the word to your residents! Check out these examples:

Add Owner Packets to the Owner’s Portal or email them.
This cuts down on the amount of paper you are using to print and mail documents to your owners, since your owners can login to their portal and retrieve their statements and reports and decide which ones they’d like to print, if any.

Use technology as much as you possibly can when it comes to marketing your properties.
With AppFolio, we give you the tools to quickly and easily advertise your vacancies online (Craigslist, the Internet, and your website). The ease of the entire process saves you so much time, while allowing your properties to receive maximum visibility. The bonus is that unless you really need to create print outs, you are saving even more trees!

Bookmark your AppFolio data onto your iPad, iPhone (or other smart device).
This is extremely helpful when you are on the road and need the number for a vendor or tenant. It saves you from having to call into the office, or even, from having to go back to the office to obtain the information you need. Not to mention, you won’t have to lug around papers or even your laptop! From your iPhone: Open Safari > Navigate to your AppFolio > Click the plus sign at the bottom of the window > Select Add to Home Screen. From that point, you’ll see the icon on your iPhone’s desktop for AppFolio.

About Vanessa
Vanessa Green is an active member of our Client Services Team and has been working with property managers for many years. She works out of our Dallas office and loves helping our customers every day. In her free time she is a mom who also enjoys photography, technology, shooting, coffee, and road-trips.

Last week I gave an invited presentation at the MIT Enterprise Forum. The topic was “Cloud Computing and Software as a Service (SaaS) a $160 Billion Market Opportunity.”

The audience was delighted to learn about cloud computing and the vision behind AppFolio and about our web-based solution for property managers.

What is Cloud Computing? It is Internet-based computing where shared resources, software, information, and massively scalable IT capabilities are delivered on demand “as a Service.” But the real advantage of Software-as-a-Service is that it can be accessed from anywhere, any device, using just a simple browser. Users can be working from PCs, Macs, iPhones, and even new iPads. This is exciting!!

Cloud computing represents the next major computing cycle after Mainframe Computing, and PC & Client/Server Computing [Wikipedia] because it dramatically reduces the IT complexity. As Nicholas Carr, the author of “The Big Switch,” likes to point out, 100 years ago large companies stopped generating their own electricity and instead plugged into the newly built electric grid. This freed them up to focus on their core business instead of electricity generation. The same exciting transformation is happening today with Internet cloud computing. It allows companies to focus on their business and customers, instead of managing servers, databases, backups, and the complexities of information technologies.

Annual worldwide IT spending today is close to $400 Billion [IDC], 95% of which is delivered by on-premise IT solutions. Only 5% is delivered by IT Cloud Services. But this is changing quickly. No wonder IDC predicts that cloud computing is a $44B opportunity, Gartner predicts $56B of cloud services revenue, and Merrill Lynch estimates cloud-computing revenues will soon reach $160 billion.

There is a tidal wave going through the IT industry, the future of computing is web-based and property managers are definitely embracing web-based technology. When you’re no longer required to be at your desk to access and share information, you can get so much more work done!

Property Managers – In addition to web-based property management software, what other kinds of Software as a Service applications are you using to improve your productivity?

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!