Intern Seeking CRM Advice — AppFolio Lacking for Commercial Lead Tracking

[Sebastian Clutch]

Hi everyone,
I'm a marketing intern at a property management company that manages both residential and commercial properties using AppFolio.

While AppFolio works well for residential, I’ve found it seriously lacking when it comes to commercial lead tracking. My project this summer is to build a centralized lead tracker, ideally something that can later transition into a CRM. Right now, I’m starting with a manual process in google sheets to avoid data duplication, but I want to implement something long term that consolidates everything in one place. If anyone has any solutions for commercial lead tracking, as well as any CRM that is effective for residential and commercial lead tracking that would be greatly appreciated.

[Evan Polaski]

@Sebastian Clutch, Appfolio is NOT a CRM.  I know the Appfolio sales team, as well as Juniper Square, and all the other investor portals try to talk up how they are a CRM, but they simply are not.

Salesforce is your most powerful CRM, and likely overkill for 99% of situations
Hubspot is a great option, and depending on contact list size is fairly affordable
GoHighLevel is another one that is becoming more popular, but I have never used directly.

There are a ton out there, and I am biased to Hubspot, because it is the one I have the most experience with, but the general contact record tracking, customization, ability to build dashboards, etc are all great in Hubspot and adequate to track contacts that may fall into various buckets: i.e. you can build your broker lists, your investor lists, your tenant lists, track your calls to each, setup up custom email campaigns for each separately, etc.