Data Visibility in Property Management
The day-to-day of a property manager is close to impossible without some help from a computer. To run a successful firm keeping up with every aspect of business is crucial. Tracking maintenance, monitoring collections, and tracking other facets of daily operations would be impossible without some form of specialized software, not to mention monitoring the business as a whole. For this reason, many property managers turn to property management systems such as AppFolio to fill these needs.
Last week an AppFolio blog post delivered some insight into the platform’s ability to take over manual tasks in order to, “cut costs and spend more time focusing on higher level initiatives.”
The article specifically points out the value of data visibility. For a property manager, keeping tabs on operating metrics, efficiency, and business performance is crucial to staying competitive and achieving success:
“You don’t have a way to get the data you need — like the status of your vacancies or overdue rent payments — that can show you how your properties are performing holistically and help you make smart decisions. Along with the inability to make better-informed decisions, when you don’t have instant access to all of your data, you have to spend more time communicating and relaying information to team members. All of this opens up room for more error, which can cost your business.”
These daily tasks are just as annoying as you could imagine, and AppFolio does an adequate job of resolving these frustrations when it comes to the plain duty of recording and retaining various records.
Where the platform misses the mark is in the actual analysis of the data. As the platform is so generalized and inflexible, AppFolio is simply unable to provide the level of detailed reporting and meaningful analysis that is necessary to run a property management business at peak efficiency. This leads to users manually exporting data, collating it all in Excel, and crunching numbers themselves on a repeated basis.
Where our team comes in, is to provide automated solutions relevant to a firm’s exact needs. Our platform, Rapid Property View (RPV), integrates directly with AppFolio to augment its record keeping capabilities with unprecedented analytics, reporting, and customizability to your team’s existing workflows.
Our ability to customize RPV to your processes completely eliminates the need to manually pull reports and perform analysis by hand, and as a result, as AppFolio described, saves firms a significant amount of time and money.