All Forum Posts by: Sergio Altomare

@Ryan S. , sorry for the late reply. I lost track of the thread.

Anyway, I am using the PW widget code in an HTML frame on GoDaddy to give access to tenants and owners, but also to show our listings. It is really easy to set up, but what I love about it is that my listings on my site are always current. Once I list a unit available for rent on PW our web site is automatically updated.

And I finally got the Google Sync to work with PW. The problem was a special character in my password. I worked for months in trying to figure it out, and just went back to my tech support days to isolate the problem to an authentication issue. This feature is great! I can create new lead contacts from listing reply emails I get through our shared Gmail account, and then just synch them through PW to get them in there. It's not perfect for categorizing, but it's nice to maintain contacts in synch and our calendar.

It's interesting to hear of all the new products that others are mentioning. While PW is not the simplest learning curve, there are so many advanced features that we use to make it worth the money, especially the mail merge and desktop file synch. The accounting part is the area that I am struggling with, but it's mostly because of the keeping up with the number of bank and CC transactions we go through regularly.

For those of you who syndicate listings and post HTML ads on Craigslist, be sure to note the recent changes that kill custom HTML templates. It's unknown if this is all cities, but I know it has hit Philly. Check this article:

http://aimgroup.com/2013/11/01/craigslist-takes-down-html-tags-for-for-sale-listings-starting-in-florida/

Looks like it's back to basics...arghhh

Hi @Ryan Swan, yes, I am, or at least will be using the website solutions that propertyware offers (in the process of building our site now), but let me caution you on a couple of things. First, it isn't free. The tenant and owner portals are $12.50 a month, but aren't really usable without getting their web sites module, which is $50 a month. I believe that the portals alone might be able to be linked to, but there are serious gaps that lead you to adding the sites module. The basic web site templates that come with the $50 are really basic and amateurish. They offer custom templates, but at $1k+ a pop. What you really want to pay the $50 for is to get access to the portal and listing widgets, which you can then use on an external site. Just to give you an idea of the difference between buildium and PW, take a look at our two sites. The first is the buildium site, which is the only site our tenants know about now, and the second is the one we are working on - feel free to provide feedback everyone, but keep in mind that it is still a work in progress. I have some finishing up to do and some kinks to work out, but hope to launch it for next month. I am using godaddy web site builder (another $6 a month) to build it out, mainly because I found it to be far more intuitive than wordpress and the like.

www.hearthfireholdings.com

www.hfireholdings.com

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Hi @Ryan Swan we have actually moved on from Buildium and bit the bullet with PropertyWare. It is far more expensive, and complex, but a far more powerful product that has already saved me hours of frustration and time managing our properties. We got to the point where we felt restricted in our ability to grow with Buildium, hence why we moved.

I am a tech guy by day, so I have an easier time figuring out the deep technical components, but I also leverage the more technical aspects of the product, like desktop integration, web site widgets, etc. - these things make it worth my time. I don't recall what our problem with Rentec was, but I remember there being one or two show stoppers for us. I would go through all of the tutorials and try them out for yourself. I can say that one of the most frustrating things with buildium was the way the interface is designed, which is that each field on a page requires a refresh of the whole frame when you change something. It may not seem like much, but it taking 2-5 seconds to get from one field to another becomes a real hassle.

When we signed up for buildium, knowing they were a startup, I was hoping that they would have some rapid development to make their product better, but we were 4 months into using it and only one new feature was implemented, which should have taken a weekend to do. This made me question whether they were a company that I could trust would not make a fool of me in my business.

I can say that migrating to PW was not painless, and it is far from perfect, but just being able to add more than 4 pictures for each property and dump files to the site through windows explorer is huge for us. We are still working out the kinks, but I am a lot more confident in that end of our business than I was before. We are hoping to launch the new service to our tenants by 10/1 - we are using the opportunity to build our new web site along with it. I'll share the new site on BP too :-)

Hope this helps, but let me know if you have any more specific questions.

Steven Hamilton II While the reports and chart of accounts appear to be good, it's getting the data into buildium that not as intuitive or feature rich as it should be. For example, there is no way to import transactions from a bank and no way to track finances for running a property management company. We had to create a dummy property for the business and add debits and credits as if it were another lease. This is how Buildium told us to do it.

@Cat N. Hi, yeah, we ended up going with Buildium, but it is really a no frills product that I couldn't recommend for anyone looking for more than just online management. It has tenant and owner portals and all, but the platform is very immature. Just to give you one small, but basic example, you can only upload 4 pictures for a unit for listing purposes. Accounting is equAlly frustrating.

We only paid $247 for a year, so if cost is that much of a consideration, then it is worth a look. It cannot be compared to PropertyWare or Appfolio, that's for sure. We did a brief pilot of Rented, but it was missing a must have for u, but I forget what that is anymore.

Being that you are managing 40 units, I would consider $5 a month per unit to be well worth it for an advanced and quality product. You should be able to make your operation more efficient to provide enough of a benefit to pass on some of the cost to tenants.

If I were you, I would get a proposal to both PropertyWare and Appfolio and go with the one that comes out to best meet your needs, at the price point you think it is worth. I was in love with PW and really wanted it to work, but the salesperson I worked with was awful and turned us off.

Let me know if you have any more questions and I can try to help out.

Sergio

Patrick L. Ha! Scroll up a bit in this thread, I posted the save review link. I've studied it and it's how I narrowed down our finalists, but I am not sure how current the comparison is. It's certainly a good baseline, but I wouldn't agree that Buildium is better that PropertyWare, which the site seems to suggest. I just signed up for the Rentec free trial (use GOODFORTUNE promocode to not have to put in CC info), so I'm going to see how I like it.

Patrick L. Yeah, and when I mentioned that I can buy a website for a lot less than $49 a month, she mentioned that they have widgets, but the portals would look different. It stinks because it has some great features that I really want, but they have turned me off. This process has been so long for us that I forget why we didn't factor RenTec into the finalist list, but just revisiting their site makes me think it is worth another look. What do you know about them?

Hi Patrick L. I have been negotiating with ProertyWare for the last couple of weeks, but have become increasingly frustrated with the complexity of their business model. Like you said, the added costs for the modules is just a bit much. Right now, the negotiated rate has reached $171 a month, with like $700+ up front. The sales person I have been working with hasn't been all that clear with everything, so while I was OK with paying $87.50 a month (based on my math) it has kept climbing. For example, I want the marketing module, which is $12.50 a month, but in order to get that you have to buy the web site module, which is $49 a month. If one requires the other then why would they even make them separate - ridiculous? I am a technologist by profession so I don't think I need their training program, which they want $300 for. And then they want $300 for the initial setup. I was ready to sign up until I received 4 separate invoices with so many things that weren't even talked about.

At this point my partner and I will probably go with Buildium, since we only have 6 units to manage. I know they aren't nearly as complete of a product as PropertyWare, but they have turned me off with all of the nickel and diming. We plan on revisiting the service as we scale and can justify the costs.

That's great info, thanks a lot Nate Garrett!! I'll be contacting the rep in a few and let you know the results.