How has AppFolio Investment Management 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 Management 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 Management, 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 Management?
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 Management can also act as our source record--no more multiple documents and inbox folders, the software is now becoming my database.