Through some of my networking, I've been contacted by a growing property management team to source through some property investment software (50 units, currently using hardcopy files and Excel). The people in this team are retired and one is pretty 'up' on the IT lingo and all, so they have some progressive requirements. However they've made it emphatically clear that they doesn't trust "the cloud" with the security of sensitive information on application and contracts. I've scoured a lot of the forums here on BP for the topic of PM software, but my question has a slight twist to what I've seen already posted.
I've done some initial research in packages such as AppFolio, PropertyWare and Buildium, but is there any software that is non-cloud based (ie housed only on a personal computer)?
The other requirements seem faily typical:
- Expense tracking and rent revenue, etc. (for overall bottom-line net profit and taxes)
- Lease/contract archival (for scanning documentation and storing in the software);
- Lease alerts (ie which property has a lease expiring in 30, 60 days, etc)
- Data backup to external sources (again, non-cloud based)
- Even without cloud-based software, they want to still be able to access the software remotely and securely through any internet connection. (This one seems kind of over my head technically if I'm keeping with the non-Cloud based requirement)
From what I've seen of apps like AppFolio and Buildium, they offer all these and more from which I think they'd definitely benefit, however these all seem to be cloud-based, albeit Saas-certified.
Before I go through the battle of trying to convince them that cloud-based is probably safe enough with this data (after all, these programs appear to be widely used) and probably the way to go, does anyone know of any PM software that has all these requirements mentioned above, though is hosted on the client?
Thanks.
