Liberty Management Inc: Increasing Productivity and Profitability with AppFolio Property Manager
Kevin Knight’s father started Liberty Management Inc. (located in San Antonio, Texas) twenty-five years ago. Over the years the business has grown to a portfolio of over 500 properties. Kevin is the President and owner of Liberty Management and he manages his business with a commitment to bringing the highest standards of professionalism to the property management profession.
“[With Tenant Pro] we
felt like we were working with one hand tied behind our back and that’s one of the reasons we went to AppFolio Property Manager.”
The Challenge
Liberty Management selected Tenant Pro years ago, as it was one of the first Windows platform programs designed for property management. Like many early property management software programs, the Liberty Management staff found the technology to be difficult to use and the support provided didn’t meet the needs of their growing business. “We felt like we were working with one hand tied behind our back and that’s one of the reasons we went to AppFolio Property Manager,”
says Knight. He explained that, “[Tenant Pro] had very poor support and a lot of the problem was the program itself, which was very limited.”
Easy Data Migration
The conversion process between property management software is often a very stressful time – the thought of converting from one property management software to another is daunting! In contrast, Knight chose AppFolio Property Manager for just this reason. “One of the really big things was the support we had bringing in our data because we did it quickly and had years of data to bring across,”
says Knight. The data migration process from Tenant Pro to AppFolio is automated and complete with no need to enter data manually. Liberty Management also found that they were able to better track many details about their customers and properties with AppFolio Property Manager.
Getting the team comfortable with AppFolio also proved to be an easy process for Kevin’s team. “There are lots of tutorials and the support is great. It has a short learning curve for property management software,”
Knight says.
The Features that Matter
Being able to access desired property information from any Internet location was just one of the great features that Knight’s company values. “AppFolio is web-based, so you can access information from anywhere,”
says Knight. “I travel a lot and really appreciate the ability to access the information remotely.”
He also points out many other advantages to being web-based. Knight explains, “You don’t need the hardware or IT support. We also used to back-up our property data twice a day with our old software.”
During this time the system was unavailable, meaning they couldn’t access property or accounting data. He says that with AppFolio Property Manager they no longer need to regularly back-up data because AppFolio handles this. The result is they are saving 30 minutes every day, which equates to15 hours of more productive time a month.
“With AppFolio, we’ve freed up more than 35 hours
a month to focus on our growing business.”
Another AppFolio feature that Knight praises is the ability to organize and manage all of the details. “We’re able to track a lot more data than we were [previously] able to track,”
Knight says, “It’s a huge deal, being able to stay on top of everything. Before we would have to run back to our files and grab data from there. AppFolio holds double the amount of data we had in Tenant Pro.”
Liberty Management is also enjoying the day-to-day features of AppFolio Property Manager. “You have a communication log [in the software], so every time you talk to a tenant, you can note it in the communication log,”
explains Knight, citing that this is one of the features that really sold him on the product. Knight also mentions that his team appreciates being able to utilize the email features in the program. “We use the emailing feature in AppFolio to save time and improve communications with owners. We weren’t able to email from Tenant Pro,”
says Knight.
The Results
The conversion from Tenant Pro to AppFolio proved to be both easy and profitable for Liberty Management Inc. Because the data migration, training and support were all included, Knight’s team was able to be up and running within a very short period of time. When asked to compare AppFolio’s support to that of Tenant Pro, Knight replied “There’s no comparison. There really isn’t. Tenant Pro had very poor support.”
Productivity also has significantly increased for Kevin’s company. Knight says, “With AppFolio, we’ve freed up more than 35 hours a month to focus on our growing business.”
