How Sunbelt Properties empowers its dispersed team to be best-in-class

Mike and Danielle’s backgrounds converged seamlessly to form a new breed of property management business:
Mike: “I’ve always had a passion for real estate. I started at a private equity group acquiring multifamily real estate. We worked with third party managers. I had a lot of opportunities to see what worked well and what could work better.”
Danielle: “I was in the military and I was a Denver police officer and I retired early due to a service injury. I got into property management because it was a natural transition. A lot of property management is dealing with issues and problems and being a problem solver. It takes someone with objective thinking and task management skills to effectively manage real estate, which all came from the military and being a police officer, and so that translated naturally to property management. I had my own rentals, and eventually I started managing other peoples’ properties. I grew a property management business of 800 single family home homes in the Charleston, South Carolina area, all through using AppFolio.”

Mike and Danielle had a problem: they owned properties in multiple territories, each managed by a different third party company using a different property management software.
“The primary challenge that we experienced early on was ‘how can we manage properties in five states? And how can we provide metrics that are the same across the board when you're dealing with multiple property managers, multiple third party companies, and everyone's doing everything different in their business?’ So Mike and I visited a bunch of property managers and we realized that the biggest challenge that they were having was that everything wasn't on the same software. So with that really the only way to fix that was to bring it in-house, on one software, with identical processes and procedures with all the same employees, so that you get the same experience across the board. AppFolio helped us do that.”

From the start, Mike and Danielle built the culture of Sunbelt upon a foundation of respect and authenticity. This has given them a competitive advantage when it comes to attracting and retaining talented team members. According to Lauren Niziol, Sunbelt's Director of HR,

“I would characterize the culture at Sunbelt as safe and collaborative. We recognize that we have properties all over, in five different states, so the question early on was, ‘How do we bring all of these people together?’ It’s a fast paced job, but there’s still space to have fun. We’re friends with people that we’ve never met face to face.”

Happy employees means happier residents — and better business

To avoid the expenses that come with employee and resident turnover, Danielle and Mike lean on technology to get to the root of the issue.
“AppFolio has helped us attract and retain employees because it's so easy to use. Even If you’ve never used a property management software before, you can pick it up very easily, it's very intuitive. Everything that you do naturally flows. Our employees that come from other places or other industries can't believe how easy it is.”