Interview with Tim Cassidy, President of Cassidy & Associates Real Estate, Inc.

UNITS

119

YEAR ESTABLISHED

1987

TIME SAVED

50%

Company

Cassidy & Associates Real Estate, Inc.
San Diego, CA

Portfolio Type

Single Family & Multifamily Residential

Previous Solution

Yardi

Tell me a little about your company – what types of properties do you manage?

Cassidy & Associates has been a corporation since 1987 and we specialize in single family residential homes, condominiums and apartment buildings.

Housing units & a separate headshot image of Tim Cassidy of Cassidy & Associates Real Estate, Inc.

What solution were you using before and why were you looking for a replacement?

We used Yardi for 20 plus years. Then I had an intern from UCSB working at our company and he was great and became an employee. He was really into Apple products and believed in making things easy and streamlined. He encouraged us to really embrace technology and use it so that we could save time and stop duplicating our efforts on certain tasks. We upgraded everything: bought an iPad and switched to AppFolio Property Manager!

quote

"The marketing tools are built right into AppFolio and this is saving us a lot of time in our leasing process."

Tim Cassidy
Cassidy & Associates Real Estate, Inc.

What features of AppFolio Property Manager have really impacted your business?

We're Saving Lots of Time
Now our job responsibilities are shifting because we are eliminating many of the steps we used to require in the past. We now use iPads for maintenance and do inspections right at the property – when I'm doing physical inspections of properties or talking with owners, I write up the work orders myself and email them straight over to the vendors. As you can imagine this saves quite a bit of time and is really just one of the reasons we're so happy with AppFolio.

Leasing Units Faster
I think we are leasing our units faster because everyone comments on how nice our marketing is. Posting vacancies via AppFolio has saved our leasing agent about 50% of her time. The marketing tools are built right into AppFolio and this is saving us a lot of time in our leasing process.

Screening Applicants Faster
We also use the AppFolio screening feature and it's really easy to use. With just a few clicks we can access the reports and it is so much faster than our previous solution.

Paperless Office
We are paperless now and download everything for our tenants straight into AppFolio including all leases and correspondence. We don't even keep physical files any more for new residents. Because AppFolio is web-based, we can access this information from anywhere and for a business recovery plan it is fantastic. When we were using Yardi, we were using disks so if the office were to burn down in a fire it would have been a disaster.

quote

"We are paperless now and download everything for our tenants straight into AppFolio including all leases and correspondence."

Tim Cassidy
Cassidy & Associates Real Estate, Inc.

What was your experience like when you switched software solutions?

We found the transition period to be fantastic. Everyone here has called or emailed into the AppFolio support team and we can't say enough good things about how the transition went in terms of AppFolio staff responding to us with everything we needed.

Will you be adding properties / units this year? Will you be adding staff?

We definitely plan on adding more properties next year. As we get our operations more and more streamlined we have more time to focus on marketing and continuing to get more properties. And we definitely will be able to grow without adding more staff.

3-story building with orange roof & a separate image of a pond, palm trees & 2-towered structure.

Do you recommend AppFolio to other property managers?

One of my previous employees contacted me about 2 months ago from Bishop, California and he owns a Coldwell Banker up there and said "Tim, I need to ask you some questions about starting a property management company." I said "Right out of the shoot, I can save you all of the preliminary time and energy investigating software. I have already done it. Just go straight to AppFolio."