With a goal of streamlining the many areas of property management, AppFolio has launched AppFolio Stack. As a leading provider of cloud business management solutions for the real estate industry, AppFolio set out to develop a product that integrated its AppFolio Property Manager solution with various partners in the proptech arena.
“We wanted to leverage new property tech solutions that are specialized and really great at what they do,” says Will Moxley, senior vice president of product at AppFolio. “In fact, 55% of large property managers plan to increase their use of property tech point solutions in the next year so the market is going this way, but customers are struggling integrating these into their property management systems.”
Integration with other platforms has been a consistent challenge for property owners and managers, according to the National Multifamily Housing Council. “We wanted to solve this. We wanted to let people leverage these solutions that are specialized in certain areas, but we want to make it easy to integrate them and provide a seamless customer experience when you do integrate them,” Moxley says.
Initial partners of AppFolio Stack include ButterflyMX, Conservice, HappyCo, Knock, Lowe’s, and Property Meld. AppFolio developed its partnerships with close collaboration throughout the integration certification process, ensuring easy onboarding and a seamless user experience. The partnerships came through customer feedback and who offers great customer experience overall.
“One of our core values is that we listen to our customers. It’s in our DNA, and that very much applied in this entire process,” Moxley shares. “We looked at who had traction with our customer base—and future customer base—and that drove our decisions.”
Knock CEO and co-founder Demetri Themelis says, “Integrating with AppFolio Stack will enable our mutual customers to experience an intuitive workflow for the leasing journey, ensuring multifamily owners, operators, and leasing teams will be able to stay focused on their most important work.”
With Knock, prospective renters can schedule appointments at any hour of the day and find the answers to their questions with ease. “Knock’s partnership with AppFolio will provide increased reporting through Knock Analytics, so companies will be able to access data in a single place in real time. Prospective residents will notice faster response times from their leasing teams with more accurate information, as their specific interests will be noted in their file for agents to reference,” Themelis adds.
With ButterflyMX, a smartphone-based property access control solution, and AppFolio Property Manager, customers can support self-guided tours and control access to properties. To streamline data, Property Meld syncs resident, vendor, and property owner data, which provides residents and vendors access to the direct messaging, scheduling, and automated alert features. After the work is complete, bills and invoices are synced in AppFolio Property Manager.
Likewise, Conservice allocates utilities to individual units and provides residents the ability to pay their rent and utilities. This automation of the utility billing process in turn frees up employees to focus on business while providing a seamless experience for their residents. For move-out, AppFolio Property Manager users also have access to HappyCo for property, unit, and resident data allowing for simpler and improved inspection and turnaround time of units.
Through the AppFolio Property Manager eProcurement integration with Lowe’s, multifamily property owners can control purchasing of materials for repairs, managing spending and ultimately boosting net operating income. “We wanted AppFolio to be the single system of record that makes it really easy to streamline these workflows,” Moxley says. “Normally people are having to log into multiple systems and go from place to place then copy and paste data. We said, ‘No, we don’t want that.’”
The AppFolio team is hopeful that AppFolio Stack will help with employee retention because of its smooth navigation. With just a few clicks, AppFolio Stack can be enabled.
Moxley concludes, “We want it easy for employees to use these products as we all know how staffing is really a big challenge for people right now. If you have disconnected systems that are broken or don’t work together, that’s the kind of stuff that causes retention challenges. This new streamlined workflow is important for both business insights, employee experience, and less errors.”
