Customer Story
Capital Fund 1: Gaining repeat
investors through software
Capital Fund 1
Established: 2009
Headquarters: Scottsdale, AZ
Capital Fund 1 is a private money lender based in Scottsdale, Arizona. Founded in 2009, the company focuses on helping clients quickly take advantage of real estate investment opportunities. The company works as a direct lender, rather than a brokerage, providing financing for remodels, construction, commercial building, and land-based investment projects.
Asset Type
Debt
Investment Type
Funds
“We are able to save time and get repeat investors because of the Investor Portal.”
Al Bazan
VP of Accounting, Capital Fund 1
Leveraging AppFolio to elevate client experiences & drive efficiency
Capital Fund 1 is currently using AppFolio Investment Manager to help manage investments. We sat down with Al Bazan, VP of Accounting, to hear about his experience using the software for his company, Capital Fund 1. As an accounting executive in the company, Bazan shares the ways AppFolio Investment Manager has polished up their front end through an improved investor experience and is saving the company time on the back end through automatic processes.
What immediate impact has your partnership with AppFolio had on day-to-day business operations?
We previously used a software to service all the loans that we provide in our business, and they had a module that we utilized for our investors, but was pretty antiquated, and the investor experience was not the best. Once we started using AppFolio, I hardly ever heard from our investors with any issues. I've also been receiving very positive feedback. Our investor feedback has changed from the simple stuff: 'how do I register? How do I log in? How do I see my account?' to: 'I love the way you guys are now communicating all the information from statements to our K-1s every year.' So our investors’ experience vastly improved and our back end has also seen results, because now we're not receiving all these calls and we're not having issues with the investors using their portal. When we get a new investor, it's not super complicated. As soon as we add them to the portal, I hardly ever hear from them–and when I do, I only hear good things!
Since using AppFolio, are there any features we've rolled out that you've been particularly happy about?
It was a great experience seeing how the features surrounding Statements have improved. When we first used AppFolio, we reached out to your team and gave feedback that the original statements that were created in the software might be too confusing for investors. They made sense to me, but our investors were more familiar with a different type of report.
And so we reached out to the AppFolio team, and they let us know they were already working on it. But then, along the way, the AppFolio team reached out to us and asked for our input and feedback on the whole process of improving the features. I really enjoyed that your team didn’t decide to do whatever you wanted–instead, you reached out to your clients and asked for their input. Because we were able to point out some things that we would prefer, we felt that our opinion was considered and valued in the whole process, and we were able to get the features we needed.
Has AppFolio Investment Manager helped you make any return on investment gains?
We are able to save time and get repeat investors because of the Investor Portal. We’re able to easily get an investor set up in the portal and that helps free up our team’s time. Then, with the way the portal looks, the way it functions, and how we communicate all our information–the investor sees that experience and is pretty quickly interested in investing again with us. I’ve noticed a difference in that regard: we get a lot of clients wanting to invest again pretty quickly after experiencing the Investor Portal.
If someone was considering partnering with AppFolio Investment Manager, what would you tell them?
I would say that it's a tool that is going to improve the exterior view of your company; for your investors it's going to look a lot more professional, and more modern. And then on the back end, it's going to allow you to save time, to be more productive, and spend so much less time doing manual things. The feature I go back to all the time is the K-1 tool: I can upload all K-1s into the system automatically and it knows where to put them based on the tax ID. That's something we're saving a ton of time on; it's a game changer for us.
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