Unlocking time-savings and revenue: A look inside Dickson Realty
Dickson Realty
Established: 1973
Location: Reno, NV
Portfolio: Multifamily, Commercial
Multifamily Units Under Management: 1,500+
As one of the largest real estate brokerages and property management firms in the Reno, NV area, Dickson Realty is no stranger to never-ending to-do lists and juggling multiple processes. And to streamline their operations and continue growing, the company needed a more robust property management tool. Since choosing AppFolio, the sky continues to be the limit. We sat down with Matt Lipkowitz and Carmella Curitti to get their AppFolio story.
Two year unit count growth
700 (100%)
Time saved on processing bills
“From days to hours”
“AppFolio has been a huge help in continuing to allow us to grow our operations.”
Space to seize new opportunities
Many owners of a successful real estate brokerage are content sticking to just that. But the owners of Dickson Realty, a family business, saw the opportunity to grow by expanding into property management.
“For 30 years in a row now, we've been the largest real estate company in our area, on the residential side for sales and units and volume. We’ve had a property management arm on the residential side for well over 10 years. We're up to just over 1500 doors.”
Technology to power their process
Like most brokerages, Dickson’s team consists of independent contractors. This structure continues into the property management arm of the business, though not without challenges. But with the right technology, they keep everyone aligned.
“It's an interesting situation with our residential property managers because they're all independent contractors, they're not employees of the brokerage, which makes it difficult when you try to align everybody to get them on the same process. But AppFolio has been a huge help so far. It’s helping us get everyone under a more uniform process that can easily be replicated, which ultimately makes our team way more efficient.”
Time for a more efficient system
Managing anything at scale brings operational challenges, and real estate is no different. Carmella describes the overwhelming feeling of having to manually process hundreds of bills one-by-one, and how AppFolio eliminates that entirely, giving her team back their most valuable asset: time.
“I saw how many invoices we receive from City of Reno Sewer. I was shocked — ‘you guys enter this one at a time?’ Then I stumbled upon AppFolio Smart Bill Entry. As you scan in 200 invoices, the system starts to memorize some of the entries, like the vendor name, the amount, invoice numbers, even GL accounts. It was a game-changer.”
But it doesn’t end there:
“So then I started exploring the task manager and discovered this thing called bulk upload. And voilà, it's a CSV file where I can enter all 200 invoices into a spreadsheet, hit the control find, and just change the date. So it takes me 30 seconds to update all the information, and then maybe at the most half an hour to change the amounts, for 200 invoices. It’s cut our invoice processing time from days to hours.”
Maintenance: From cost center to profit center
Matt shared how switching to a robust property management software has not only streamlined maintenance operations, but has made them income-generating.
“We used to have to chase our maintenance techs down for time sheets, details on what work they did, receipts related to the job, what property they were for — all that. There was so much manual backend work that for a while we weren't collecting any fees or billing back anything back to our clients. But now, our maintenance team has everything within AppFolio, on their phone. They can do talk-to-text, and explain everything that they did, and take pictures of the receipts and assign it to a property. With AppFolio, we’re capturing revenues, rather than losing money.”
Accounting made easy
With intuitive property management tools, the entire team at Dickson Realty is empowered to assist with day-to-day property management accounting.
“You don't have to have an accounting mind to be able to operate AppFolio. As long as you have an understanding of how property management works, and how rents are received, and how bills are paid and owners are paid. AppFolio does a very good job of assisting you through everything and making accounting as easy as it can be.”
Confidence that comes with partnership
No matter how tech-savvy our customers are, questions always arise. With AppFolio, Matt and Carmella always feel confident that support is there whenever they need it.
“I'll reach out to our personal representative and she usually does a phenomenal job pointing us in the right direction or connecting us with a team member that specializes in that area of AppFolio. It’s a huge help. It's nice to know that you do have a point person that will push things along.”
Matt Lipkowitz
Chief Financial Officer, Dickson Realty, 1,500+ units
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