Customer Story

PrideCo Capital Management: Saving time while providing a professional investor experience

“That process would usually take about an entire day. With AppFolio Investment Manager, it now takes about 2 minutes.”

Brandon Small
PrideCo Capital Management

Partnering with AppFolio for growth & stability

PrideCo Capital Management currently leverages AppFolio Investment Manager to manage real estate funds. The AppFolio team sat down with Brandon Small—who is responsible for operations, workout, and investment research at PrideCo—to discuss how PrideCo Capital Management evolved from a single-family real estate company to a thriving investment advisory and lending partner. Small shares the ways PrideCo leverages AppFolio Investment Manager software to help build confidence and provide an exceptional experience for investors.

How would you describe your business flow before you partnered with AppFolio?

PrideCo started as a single-family office. Over subsequent years, we became a multi-family office with three primary partners, where we gradually started offering some of the same services and investment products to other families.

PrideCo then grew to become an investment advisory service for wealthy families. One of the new strategies we implemented was adding lending and doing one-off loans for families. Every deal was kind of like re-inventing the wheel in terms of the approval process. It was cumbersome, time-consuming, and frustrating.

What made you decide to adopt real estate investment management software?

When PrideCo added lending as a strategy, we decided to leverage software to help with our workflows, because it was becoming very time consuming. Preparing to share account information took about 45 minutes to upload data and send that information to each investor—and that would be sent to multiple different entities, investing entities, and multiple contracts. That process would usually take about an entire day. With AppFolio Investment Manager, it now takes about 2 minutes.

How has AppFolio Investment Manager affected the way you work with investors?

Investors really like small private funds like PrideCo. However, we aren't able to do much marketing and it can be time consuming to constantly and professionally present how much we know and share investment growth--but it is important to do so since investors want to have a professional and nice experience, like what they get from other major finance entities.

We were able to solve for this with AppFolio Investment Manager and the Investor Portal. The Investor Portal creates a professional experience for the investor and gives them access to information that they can log in and view every day. In the past we would have to create PDFs showing each investors' balances and email them once a month, plus make multiple phone calls. Now, investors can log in whenever they want and view that information.

About a month after we implemented AppFolio Investment Manager, we had a few investors that were waiting for an experience like this to reach out and say they have additional money they'd like to invest with us.

Has communication with investors improved with AppFolio Investment Manager?

Definitely. Prior to using the software, we never had enough time to do more than send a short and sweet, yet professional email. Now we can keep things simple by providing more. Our email communication is very to the point: we'll update them when something new has been posted to their portal and provide a link. It cuts down the clunkiness of having to include all the information in an email. Also, it's more secure. They are able to access all their information through a protected and secure portal, without email attachments that can be hacked. Security is very important when you consider we are talking about million dollar accounts.

What would you tell someone who is considering partnering with AppFolio?

I like the simplicity the software provides. I hit one button to share out our monthly updates. AppFolio Investment Manager can also act as our source record--no more multiple documents and inbox folders, the software is now becoming my database.