Customer Story

Marterra Properties: Seamless Property and Investment Management

Headquarters

Newport Beach, CA

Investment Type

Syndications

Asset Type

Multifamily, Commercial, Single Family, Office

Established

2014

Marterra is a real estate investment management and property management company based out of Newport Beach, California. Primarily focused on long-term investments from both individuals and corporate entities, the firm has about $60 million under management and a real estate brokerage team that sells about $50 million per year.

Leveraging AppFolio to scale

The team at AppFolio sat down with Daniel Morgan, CEO at Marterra properties to hear his thoughts on how the AppFolio Investment Management has helped them and their customers manage their investment portfolios better and scale their ROI.

What was it like managing your investments before AppFolio Investment Management?

Before AppFolio launched AppFolio Investment Management, we were using AppFolio Property Manager for part of our business to manage everything on the property level, and then on the investment side we would work out of spreadsheets. While it worked, it was kind of clunky. Now that we also use AppFolio Investment Management, it’s more seamless.

The Investor Portal has made a difference. It feels slick and sophisticated, and it’s easier to use than some of the other platforms we used at big groups I’ve worked before. The last shop I worked at was a $1 billion fund and they didn't even have an Investor Portal.

Really, it's the connection between AppFolio’s property management software and investment management software that creates kind of a magical experience.

Daniel MorganMarterra properties

A rectangle made out of light blue dots.

Are there any kind of clunky or strenuous processes that you’ve been able to streamline with AppFolio Investment Management?

The calculations of cash-on-cash returns and the ability to calculate your waterfalls directly in the software have really helped streamline this process because you can essentially eliminate the role of an analyst. In a smaller shop like ours, that's a lot of the stuff that I end up doing. It allows us to focus on higher-value activities like trying to source and structure deals–the actual work of real estate investment management versus the reporting side.

Really, it's the connection between AppFolio’s property management software and investment management software that creates kind of a magical experience. We're able to seamlessly report metrics from AppFolio Property Manager to our investors. That's been really cool. AppFolio’s Investment Management software has really been a great way to present the data that’s happening on a property level.

How has AppFolio Investment Management improved the experience for your investors?

Investors like logging in to the Investor Portal and seeing how much they've gotten back. When they see that the total lifetime cash returned, sometimes they'll call and say, "Hey, let's go do another deal". Also, from a fundraising perspective, being able to show people a portal that they can log into and talk to them about how the property management software and investment management software seamlessly works together to give us this information is a pretty good experience for the investor to be able to see.

When it comes to fundraising, investors have had a much more seamless process with how paperwork is processed–the investors have had a much better experience. Document tracking is cleaner, getting signatures is easier, and once they've then committed and they're in a deal, they have a great user experience where they can log into their portal, check their balances, see all their tax documents and it all works seamlessly with the property management software, which really creates a magical experience for them.

How do you feel knowing you have a partnership with AppFolio?

I'm probably one of the biggest AppFolio evangelists, both on the property management side and on the investment management side. AppFolio's 100% an asset to our company. I really do see my relationship with AppFolio as a partnership. We wouldn't be able to do most of what we do without AppFolio.

We wouldn't be able to vertically integrate and do the property management. And if we didn't have property management in-house, I don't think we'd be able to do a lot of the deals that we do. When it comes to buying a deal, at the end of the day, it's a three-legged stool and management has a really important leg in that stool. And without having a good property management partner or in-house property management, it's hard to do a deal and be comfortable that you're going to be able to execute.

It feels like AppFolio is kind of our research and development in-house innovator. So we can just focus on the tactical stuff. And as they roll out new features, oftentimes we'll roll out new strategies.