What were some of the key things that you were looking for, in terms of functionality?
Being able to easily access information, get information into the system, to share it with others, and turning data inputs into actionable information that we can share. AppFolio has very good functionality for managing investments. With other systems, you have to buy your core system and then to tag on a component with an integration that might be with a third party. As a small organization, we don't have a full time technology group to support all these integrations. Maintaining a staff to maintain systems with third parties gets very expensive, so we didn't want to do that. AppFolio was a one-stop shop able to support the whole organization across multiple disciplines.
How does AppFolio help you in your day-to-day?
With AppFolio Investment Management, it's a whole set of features and functionality that we're able to deliver, integrated seamlessly with the AppFolio Property Manager. We maintain all of our members' information in there: their ownerships, our operating agreements, all the things that support members of the LLCs. They have 24/7 access to a secure portal to answer their questions, instead of us fielding a lot of questions, which is time consuming. Doing distributions before was difficult, because you had to look up wiring instructions for each one. Now, when we do ACH distributions, every step of the process is a lot easier and more transparent. It's easier to share information internally and with our investors.