Gozen Hartman
Chief Operating Officer & Co-Founder, Fairlawn Real EstateEstablished: 2015
Location: Champaign, IL
Why AppFolio: \ Rapid growth can be just as dizzying as exciting. To eliminate manual, time-consuming tasks, provide more transparency, and give team members more opportunity to disconnect, Fairlawn Real Estate realized they would need to switch to a new property management platform. They discovered AppFolio, and the rest is history.
Multifamily,
Commercial,
Student
Student
Multifamily Units Managed
5,000
Unit Growth Since Inception
1,500%
“We were growing like crazy and it really forced us to take a step back and focus on the foundation. AppFolio is constantly innovating and adding new services, and making our business better.”
The numbers
“We founded the company with just under 300 units. Today we are just under 5,000, so it has been a whirlwind. In fact, this past year alone we’ve grown by 25%. One of the things that is really important to us as a company is to improve the assets that we take on.”
A reliable growth partner
“We didn't feel that our previous property management solution was very scalable. Its reporting functionality wasn't really meeting our needs as we started to grow and get more sophisticated. From a frontline operations perspective, there were a lot of repetitive tasks. It was not a fully integrated solution for us.”
Tools to help the business grow
“AppFolio represents a fully integrated solution for us. You can go from listing to lead to lease to move out to post-move out accounting. Our previous solution was very fragmented in that respect, and having everything under one roof, everything accessible to everyone has been a game-changer.”
Lisa, the AI Leasing Assistant
“Lisa has fundamentally changed the nature of what we do on the front lines and has taken a large amount of repetitive work off our team members’ plates. She is able to follow up with all of the leads that come in, and we're able to focus on other parts of the sales funnel. Driving higher occupancy and being close to 100% everywhere means that we can drive higher rents as well.”
Communications and Online Leases
“Before AppFolio, after communicating with a resident, we would then take that email and copy it into the system so that we had a record of it. If we wanted to send a lease, we would create that lease in Microsoft Word and then send it via a different system and then load it into our property management system. With AppFolio, these functions are all integrated. It's all under the same roof. It allows for a seamless operation, and it saves so much time.”
Accounting
“AppFolio recently introduced a corporate accounting tool, which is fantastic because previously our property accounting was in AppFolio and our corporate accounting was in Quickbooks. We have now moved our corporate accounting into AppFolio, which is really wonderful.”
AppFolio Sites
“Having our websites under AppFolio allows for full integration of our availability. With those websites, we're not having to go to multiple systems and make updates like we used to.”
Smart Bill Entry
“We receive thousands of bills each month. Smart Bill Entry has cut the time it takes to process each bill in half.”
Ideal compatibility
“AppFolio Investment Management pulls the source data from AppFolio Property Manager, which the Fairlawn Capital team uses for their investor reporting. It's all under the same platform. It makes things way more efficient. Our investors love it too. They are able to log in and see the status of their investments, their distributions, any legal documents. It's a one stop shop for information.”
The bigger picture
With Gozen at the helm of a truly efficient property management company, she has more bandwidth to take a step back and look at the bigger picture in terms of direction and talent.
“What gives me the greatest satisfaction in my work is improving things. Taking something that doesn't exist, maybe a procedure, and figuring out the best way and then rolling that out across the organization. And the same thing goes for our workplace.”
“We want to make it a better workplace than it could otherwise be. Teaching and training people how to better do their jobs to make their day to day easier is what gives me the greatest satisfaction.”
Gozen Hartman
Chief Operating Officer & Co-Founder
Space for more 
Understanding the connection between job satisfaction and wellbeing, Gozen provides her team with the tools that give them space for wellness.
“I think that the goal is to be happy and healthy as often as possible, and giving space for wellness gives space to do the things that contribute to that. AppFolio has eliminated a lot of tasks that are repetitive, manual, and cumbersome. It has given more transparency into performance across the organization.”
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