Prop. Management Software for SFR, New Construction, & Inventory

[Jarod Puckett]

We own and self manage about 800 single family properties (90% Single Family Homes and 10% multi family), build new construction for rent (no custom builds or for other people; however one of the LLC's holds a general contractors license so it bills back all expenses of the build to the entity building the house and most payroll is ran through it as well), we have a warehouse with over 10K skews for material we buy in bulk (shingles, flooring, hot water heaters all the way down to individual plumbing connectors and paint brushes) and we buy about 200 properties a year with the vast majority of them needing extensive rehabs. The other issue is all of this is owned by about 15 separate LLC's so the intercompany bill backs are extremely time consuming. We are currently using Sage 50 for accounting; AppFolio for the property management; Quickbooks Time (formerly Tsheets) for time keeping and GPS tracking of W-2 maintenance workers and leasing agents; Follow-Up Boss for our leasing agents for VOIP and CRM; and Buildertrend for the major rehabs and new construction.

We have been searching for a new property management system to consolidate as much under one roof as possible. We are looking for a system that can streamline the intercompany bill backs, consolidate but keep individual books for all of the LLC's, organize the scheduling for the new construction, GPS time keeper that can track the time employees are working at specific properties and tie their time directly back to a work order and the ability to mark up inventory and payroll when billing back the other entities to cover overhead of the ware house, payroll taxes, insurance, etc...).

SAGE Intacct- We are  considering using Sage Intacct for the accounting, but AppFolio is not open to them tapping into it via an API. Currently we are having to enter all revenue transactions from AppFolio (we have never used their accounting feature, because it doesn't work for anything out side of property expenses; their inventory feature is a joke, most of the accounting functions are for management companies and not owner operators). Keeping AppFolio is not something we are interested in as their customer service sucks and most of the new roll outs are very limited in function compared to their marketing of it. For example, their loan tracking only works for a loan that is tied to one property. It can't track a loan that is tied to 2 properties let alone 50 or 100+ properties. We do enjoy the layout of the software and it would be a perfect system if it was an open API and their customer service wasn't a robot that just tells you go list your suggestions and let other users vote on it! 

Highlights of Sage Intacct: streamline method to consolidate financials, intercompany due to/due from accounts and the ability to create an invoice and receive it in another company automatically with no double entering the charges and descriptions. It has a real inventory module for ordering, receiving, organizing, etc...

Yardi Voyager: We have demoed several of the property management systems and were hoping Yardi Voyager would solve most (if not all of our problems), but the demo did not go well. The lady doing the demo couldn't answer basic accounting questions. Their website lists several features that sound amazing such as their loan tracking abilities, the intercompany consolidations, etc.... However, we are somewhat concerned about the usability of their software in the field for our leasing agents and managers as most of them receive payments using their mobile devices, take pictures and do inspections in the filed using the AppFolio App. We are not set up like a traditional multi family operation as most of our properties are SFR and we can't have an office with a computer at every location.

Propertyware: seemed extremely dated, time tracking via GPS isn't an option and seemed very dated compared to AppFolio. The ability to add custom fields would be extremely helpful and would be a better system that TAGS in AppFolio. The Tags get to be hard to visual and organize the more you add to a property or tenant.  

Buildium- was not one of our first choices as it seems like it is less powerful than AppFolio, but does have an API so may be a choice if we go with Sage Intacct for the accounting. 

Real Page One Site had several features such as their accounting system is built off of Sage Intacct and they have the ability to Geo Track clock-in and Clock-out times for maintenance items but they are not set up to manage Single Family Homes (they are looking for a work around, but so far it looks like that is out). 

MRI - they had several surprising features, but it was still somewhat constricted on their work order organization being summarized at the multi family level and not a way to look at all work orders for every property, they are looking at the inventory ability, but was not positive they could do everything we needed on the inventory and I can't remember if they have a time tracking system, but their leasing CRM with VOIP phone numbers was very similar to that of Follow-up Boss and seemed much better than AppFolio. They also were struggling to give us comfort that their system could be set up to handle all of the SFR properties. The demo went better than expected and we have not ruled this out yet.

Salesforce Field Services- We have done a quick demo on this and for managing our maintenance team it's one of the best systems we have seen. However, AppFolio and will not communicate with them so we are going to pick that conversation back up once we pick a system. Assuming another system doesn't have a similar feature. 

Rent Manager- I am waiting on a demo for this software. It seems like it is a dated software but does have some interesting features that may make it a contender for the ability to have an open API. 

Folio3: This system is built off Oracle Net Suite but seemed limited as it doesn't have a way to market properties and push them to online websites such as Zillow, Zumper, etc... we could pay to have an integration built but that may not be cost effective. They also don't have a good time tracking app. However, they did reach back out to us and they may be open to developing some of the features I mentioned previously so we are waiting for them to reach back out. 

I'm hoping that someone can recommend a software that could house everything under roof or maybe 2 to 3 systems that could talk to one another and solve us having to manually enter data 2, 3 and sometimes 4 times. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.