Cozy transition to Apartments.com

[Courtney Walker]

Looks like Cozy is transitioning to Apartments.com https://cozy.co/future-of-cozy/

[Chuck Blakeman]

See the 25 issues I’ve encountered attempting to use Apartments.com for the last 3 ½ months.

In general, my experience in trying to use Apartments.com software feels very much like:

a) they programmed this without any input or user testing from real-life landlords. if so, and it certainly comes across that way, this is a huge mistake - making a product that THEY think their customers might want, and never bothering to see if it is.

b) their software makes it clear that they think they know exactly how my (and every other) apartment owner should run their business. I have no input in contracts, emails, late payment processes (they force us to use only one option, there are MANY ways to charge late payments), etc. This comes across as “we know better” vs. “what do our customers need to succeed?”.

Following are just SOME of the issues I’m encountering. This is not an exhaustive list by any means. I feel like I’m being used to Beta-test their product before they bring over all the Cozy folks, and not like an apartment owner whom they intend to serve:

1) I set up a contract using their template (huge mistake) and somehow it went straight to the potential tenant without me ever seeing it or approving it. I had no idea how it looked, what the fine print was, etc. Their CSRs claim it’s not possible (I’ve heard that on most of the 25 issues below). But even if I mistakenly hit some button to send it straight to them, it should NEVER go without a popup that says, “You haven’t reviewed this lease, are you sure you want to send it?” Or if somehow the software thought I had reviewed and approved, even then it should NEVER send ANYTHING to my tenants without a popup, “are you sure you want to send this?” Never. Always a failsafe button because tracking pads are too sensitive and someone can easily brush across it and cause an action unintentionally. NEVER send without a confirmation popup that you actually meant to do it.

2) The tenant signed it and sent it back to me, again, without me seeing what apartments.com had written, approved and sent to her. The next day, I asked their CSRs to help me find and view that lease so I could see what I had committed to. They instructed me exactly how to open the lease, and as I was sitting there with the CSR, I got an email from the new tenant, “WTF, why are you changing the lease I just signed?”.

a) No one told me that opening the lease would automatically change it, b) No one informed me that opening it would automatically send an email to my tenant, which I also did not see or approve, telling them I’m reneging on the lease. They canceled the lease - cost me $1,350. Again, there MUST be a popup that gives you the option of cancelling an action because it was unintended.

3) In this process, I learned I cannot edit their contract to take out all the things that don’t pertain to my tenants or my property – we have no pool, no parking garage, no spa, no restaurant, etc. Their contract is 17 pages long and about 9 of it applies to my tenants. But they won’t let me change any of it. That contract comes across to my tenants as some giant corporation covering their butts with no interest in being helpful to the tenant. The tenant has to wade through so much that doesn’t pertain to them, causse them to have questions, and creates the impression that I’m only concerned with covering every possible scenario, and have no interest in them as tenants. Either they MUST make that contract editable, or landlords like me will NEVER use it again. Not being able to use it removes one more reason why I would use their software, and being uneditable furthers the impression they are not customer-oriented, “we know best”, and we’re all being shoe-horned into their way of doing things.

4) I only learned after a few weeks of attempting to use their software that they regularly send emails to my tenants without

a) me knowing they even sent one,

b) getting a copy so I can see what they sent, or

c) having the ability to edit them. These are MY customers not THEIRS, and they shouldn’t email my customers without my approval, let alone blind to me

Again,

a) a popup - “This action will generate an email to your tenant, do you want to proceed?”, along with

b) “View that email here”, and ideally if I don’t like the content,

c) I can edit it.

But the first two are absolutely mandatory. You DON’T email other people’s customers without that party knowing you’re doing it, and you DON’T do it blind. Give me the chance to see the email. I understand all of their emails supposedly exist somewhere in their Help Center, but that does not help me. I don’t know when one even went, let alone which one - completely blind to me - makes no sense in any software program to do things blind to someone else’s customers. Their software exists to serve ME, not the other way around. Or at least it should.

5) In “Residents”, their drop-down for “Current, Upcoming, and Ended” is not intuitive at all. When I called and asked their CSRs why I couldn’t see someone I had just set up, they had no answer. Took five days and as many calls with up to an hour on the phone for their CSRs to find out that I had to change from “current, to “upcoming” in order to see someone whose lease hadn’t started yet.

a) If someone I just set up is not “current” because their lease doesn’t start for a few days, it should not allow me to set them up while I’m in “Current”, otherwise I will expect to see them their (as did all of their CSRs).

b) The first choice I should be presented when I get to Residents, is “Current, Upcoming or Ended?”, and I should only be able to set up a future tenant in “Upcoming”, not in “Current”. Huge waste of a week and many hours, over something so simple and completely non-intuitive that none of their CSRs could figure it out, either.

6) Attempting to set up a new tenant in Unit 203, I encountered an error message that said there was already an existing lease for that unit.

a) It should tell me what lease it’s talking about and take me to that lease, but instead it just left me guessing. It needs to give me a click right to that offending lease.

b) I have never set up anyone in Unit 203 - I had not even used their software before (and the previous owner did everything manually, so they weren’t the issue, either).

7) We couldn’t remove the partially setup tenant above, and their CSRs had no answer, either. Their “remove” button regularly will not remove someone, but gives no reason why it won’t remove them. Their CSRs never did figure that one out. A week of mucking through this and I realized the work around was, IF you could find which the offending lease was, change the date to a past date, and only THEN can you remove it. If Apts.com feels this is necessary to not let someone be removed that I want to remove, it should give a popup, “Lease is still active, change to past date”, or something. Again, huge waste of time and energy over something so simply, yet programmed in such a non-intuitive way.

8) With the CSRs fooling around with all the above for a week, they mentioned the only option was to force-archive the partially filled out tenant and start over. They did this three times, and every single time it generated an automated email to my tenant telling them their lease had ended, was started up with a different lease, ended again, started, ended, started. All in one hour on the phone with their CSRs, and once again, with no knowledge MY customer was getting bombarded with confusing emails I’ve never seen, reviewed, approved, or edited.

How does that make me look as a property owner? Fortunately this tenant did not pull out like the last one, but this is completely unacceptable - again sending emails I had no idea they’re sending, and no idea what the emails said so I could respond to the angry tenant when they wrote, “Why did you send me that email that my lease was terminated?”, Me - “What email? I didn’t know you got one.” They MUST stop sending my customers emails that are blind to me. Let me know they are going, and give me the content, and give me a popup that requires me to approve them being sent.

9) In the above process, their customer service reps archived some units after THEY created four duplicates (two dupes still exist in Residents for 203 a month later). I went in to “Properties” to look at the 12 units to see if the four 2BRs had been set up correctly (we converted four 1BRs to 2BRs), and now it won’t let me out without changing something that it won’t let me change. One of the archived units is saying “error”, but doesn’t say what the error is and won’t let me type anything to change what is there. So I can’t save my Updates in this screen. Never have resolved this one.

10) I had a tenant say they paid me their deposit and cleaning fee (we do monthly furnished rentals) up front a week ago for their upcoming lease that starts 4/16. But I never got an email that they paid, and don’t know how to find out if they did, and it hasn’t hit my checking account. I asked Apts.com to respond with:

a) did they actually pay 1) the deposit and 2) the cleaning fee, and

b) did it or when will it hit my checking account and

c) how do i find that information?

No response.

11) In their “Residents” tab, it is a wasted step to require that I hit search after changing the popup from Current to Upcoming. And better yet, just make all three visible in a row up top to be clickable without a drop-down.

12) Two of the four Unit 203 incomplete setups are still in the “Upcoming” folder, and none of their CSRs or their Supervisors have any idea

a) which one is the real tenant, or

b) how to remove the one that isn’t?

I took a guess and tried to “remove” one of them, and got this message, "You cannot remove the last resident with whom this lease was originally created. If you need a new lease, terminate this lease term then set up a new resident from the Residents Dashboard.”

Except we already set up the same tenant four times, and two of them somehow got archived, two are still Upcoming. So setting up a fifth replica is not the right answer. And will removing one of these generate another “Your lease has been canceled email” to my tenant? OMG. I’m guessing at that point they’ll punch out and find something else to move into on the 16th.

13) In the “Payments” folder - Unit 203’s three payments (deposit, cleaning fee, partial monthly payment) did not clear from 4/6/21 to 4/19 (today). They show as “pending” but she has not received any notice on why, and neither have I. I can’t get a response as to why they haven’t cleared. It’s my money.

14) I just had a new tenant apply and I hit “accept” and can longer find any information on this new tenant. I can’t find the application anywhere, and no information or contact info on the tenant either. I can’t even send them our lease to sign because I don’t have any contact info. But I’m guessing they got auto-generated emails and are waiting for me to respond. No response for Apts.com on this, either.

15) No way to continue setting up this client in 203 – requested multiple times to Apts.com – their poor CSRs are totally confused by the software, too.

16) Found a back door into setting up a tenant in 201, but it tells me there is another active lease for this unit. There is none, and no one has been set up in here before. Again, if they’re going to stop me from setting up a tenant because there is an existing lease, PLEASE tell me which lease is conflicting and let me click through to it. This happened on a Friday at 5pm, and their call center was not open until Monday and I’m now dead in the water until then! Never did get this resolved – just did a lease myself and am taking payments on the side until I get Apts.com to respond (or move to another platform – more likely).

17) The order in which we are required to set up the financials for a new tenant makes no sense. First, Apts.com asks me about future months, then they ask me about this month, and lastly, on a separate page, they ask me about deposits and other setup fees. What is the very first thing a landlord wants to collect? The deposit. Why would they bury that in a future page and instead have us to address future months first? And the term “prorated rent” is too technical for collecting rent for less than a full first month. And finally, the need for the landlord to compute the daily rate and then multiply it to figure out the first partial-month rent is not customer-friendly. There will be a ton of mistakes made doing that, and those are annoying extra steps when the software should simply compute the number based on the monthly rent and how many days there are left in the first month. Very clunky, non-user friendly, and inviting serious financial mistakes that will make landlords mad at Apts.com for not doing this automatically.

18) I’m trying to change the photo of the property on the main page. I scrolled over the old photo and it gave me the option to upload a new one. I hit “Save Updates”, and it would not allow me to complete the update, but instead showed me an archived unit that has a name that created an error in their software and says, “This is not a valid deliverable unit”. But it won’t allow me to edit the unit and change it to something that makes sense to your software, and therefore I’m not able to change the picture of the property. Their CSRs don’t know – passing it to their techs, who never get back to me.

19) I updated photos throughout and deleted the old ones two days ago, and on the “Renter’s View”, the old photos of the building before it was renovated are still showing up, including the red brick exterior, which is now painted gray.

20) In the renter’s view, the apartment complex is showing the wrong exterior photo and below that a blank box with the title “2 Wks Ago” above the apartment complex’s address, and below the blank box that should be a picture, is the word “Unavailable”. The apartment has multiple units that are available right now, and that are marked that way in the “Rental Manager’s View”. The CSRs continue to give the same answer they’ve been giving for three months, “It shouldn’t do it that way.”

21) When I click through on that blank box that should be a picture, and that says “unavailable”,

a) it takes me to a screen that says, “there are no available floor plans or units” - not true, there are four right now

b) it lists one studio that is unavailable, and 11, 1-bedroom units that are unavailable. We have seven one bedroom units, not eleven, and one of them has been designated as available for a number of days.

22) In the Renter’s View, an exterior picture of the apartment complex is showing up that doesn’t exist anymore. The building is no longer red brick, it is painted gray and black. See “Rental Manager’s View” - the gray and black photo is the only one to choose from, the red brick one was deleted, and the gray one is chosen as the “Main Photo”. But the red brick one that doesn’t exist and ISN’T picked as the “Main Photo” is still showing up in the Renter’s View. This is misrepresenting the property. How do we get this fixed, along with the other 21 issues?

23) Why the H do 85 photos show up in the summary view of my apartment complex? I have about 20 photos in the general info photo gallery, and those are the only photos that should show up. The rest are specific to individual units and are only set up inside those unit listings.

24) This morning I called and asked why an old photo of the building was showing as the “Main Photo” in the summary of the property, when clearly another photo has been selected as the “Main Photo”. They manually removed the wrong one, and now NO PHOTO IS SHOWING UP AS THE MAIN PHOTO!

25) And now there are empty spaces where Apts.com manually deleted multiple photos from my profile. Empty spaces where pictures should be just make me look like I don’t know what I’m doing. Why are there empty spaces? Should the photos just no longer be there? How do we get those empty spaces to go away? CSR, "It shouldn't be that way. We'll look into it and get back to you." Well, the first part might be true.

I wish this list was comprehensive, but it’s just the ones I’ve bothered to email them about.

@LucasHall is right when he said, “I suggest you pick software that you can commit to for 1-2 years at least. Switching software is painful, especially after your renters setup online rent payments.

Having already set up seven of twelve tenants in Apts.com, I was desperate to make it work and not make my tenants start all over again somewhere else after just three months. Maybe I can help you not recreate the same experience for your tenants.

Maybe they’ll get this software right, but it’s not right, right now. And it ticks me off that I’m they’re beta-tester w/ whom they never communicate, before bringing all the Cozy.com landlords across.

Caveat emptor.