Last modified on October 13th, 2023
By Rae Parker

At the 11th annual AppFolio Customer Conference, more than 800 of our customers from over 35 states joined us in Santa Barbara. Every year, we look forward to welcoming our customers to help them unlock their potential and give them the freedom to focus on what matters most. This year’s conference focused on providing our customers with key insights into market and tech trends and clarity on what their business needs to succeed. We also unveiled powerful new tools to address their biggest challenges and power their business forward.

Throughout the week, attendees experienced hands-on training from product experts, first looks into our newest features, and opportunities to reconnect with industry peers and the AppFolio team. If you couldn’t make this year’s event or want to relive the highlights, read on to receive a glimpse of what took place at the 2023 AppFolio Customer Conference. 

Your key to extraordinary starts with AppFolio

AppFolio President and CEO Shane Trigg kicked off the conference. During his powerful opening welcome, he shared with our customers that our industry is facing new obstacles and challenges, but that doesn’t mean we have to change our ultimate destination. Instead, we should find new ways to operate, drive productivity, and create exceptional experiences for residents, homeowners, owners, investors, and property management teams. 

He went on to share that our industry should continue to embrace change and the technology that comes with it: “In these extraordinary times, AppFolio’s greatest opportunity is continuing to be an extraordinary partner that delivers constant innovation so you can thrive in any environment.” By making consistent investments in technology, security, reliability, and people, AppFolio can continue to deliver exceptional value in ways that can benefit your business.

​​Each quarter, we recap the latest innovations and feature enhancements made within our software aimed at helping your business make tremendous strides. Take a look at what was released in the first, second, and third quarters.

Powering your future with AI

Our industry centers on repetitive tasks such as entering data and pulling reports, and we know that each process takes away valuable time from your team that can be used to serve your customers better. 

Sr. Vice President of Product Will Moxley took to the stage to give customers a first look at how generative AI can create content from a simple prompt. Realm-X is the newest addition to AppFolio Realm, our suite of AI-powered capabilities for the real estate industry. Realm-X, the property management industry’s first-ever generative AI conversational interface, uses generative AI to streamline leasing, maintenance, and accounting workflows and eliminate repetitive tasks, freeing you to focus on building connections and driving business performance. With Realm-X, you can ask it any question, tell it to handle common tasks, and teach it to automatically execute tasks. “The innovations AppFolio is delivering will redefine our space,” said Will. “AI is creating an extraordinary opportunity for our customers to enhance productivity, deliver differentiated experiences, and unlock growth.” 

Fueling growth with innovation 

Realm-X wasn’t the only feature that took center stage at this year’s Customer Conference. As part of AppFolio’s ongoing commitment to delivering differentiated experiences to not just property managers but also residents, vendors, and owners, our customers can take advantage of the following new capabilities:

• New AppFolio Stack™ Solution Partners: With over 40 App Partners in the AppFolio Stack™ marketplace, we’ve continued to rapidly expand our integration offerings to now include Solution Partners. This program offers easy access to some of the best accounting and consulting solution providers in the industry.
• Bulk actions: Eliminate repetitive tasks such as unit move-outs and lease renewals. This functionality allows you to select and handle these tasks in one streamlined workflow, saving you significant time. 
• Leasing Signals: Make thoughtful pricing decisions using your unique pricing strategy and explainable pricing suggestions based on public data.
• Leasing CRM: Provide ​leasing agents with a single location from which they can manage their pipeline. This service can help you gain ‌clarity and efficiency in your leasing process by tracking all leads from first contact to move-in.

As we continue to make strategic investments into our technology, we will always listen, learn, and innovate based on our customers’ feedback to help them achieve their goals and overcome any obstacles. 

Building for tomorrow with Jason Feifer

In his keynote session, Editor-in-Chief of Entrepreneur magazine and author Jason Feifer shared what he knows to be the single most important skill for property management professionals: the ability to be adaptable. 

He shared how change happens in four stages:

• Panic: Everything feels completely disrupted. You start feeling uneasy or experience a false sense of loss.
• Adaptation: Now that you’ve gone through the initial panic, what is it that you have to work with?
• New normal: Using what you now have, you can start to build a new foundation and something that feels more stable.
• Wouldn’t go back: A moment arrives when you realize that you have something new and valuable. After all you’ve been through, you come to the conclusion that you wouldn’t want to go back to a time where you didn’t know what you know now.

Jason summarized his keynote by letting the crowd know that throughout ‌history, there has always been some “thing” that changed the course of how we lived and worked. We didn’t automatically accept defeat but instead used these new tools to create our own path. “People started to do what only people can do: innovate” Jason said. “When a machine comes along and does something that a human used to do, the human doesn’t just sit around. You start to think, ‘This is amazing! Now I’ve liberated some of my time, and now I can put that towards greater things.’”

A year’s worth of impact in three days

After a successful 11th year, we couldn’t be happier to spend our time seeing familiar faces and meeting new ones, sharing the latest innovations and industry trends, creating magical moments, and providing our customers with their own key to extraordinary.