AppFolio Adds Investment Management Program

Proptech firm AppFolio announced a new product, AppFolio Alpha, an “AI-powered investment management solution designed to provide an all-in-one experience that automatically aggregates, normalizes, and visualizes key property management data,” according to a press release.

The argument for the product that AppFolio makes is the degree of manual collection and manipulation of property management data that asset managers perform. Not only does it take time, but is difficult to manage and scale and susceptible to human error, as is true for all manual data entry and manipulation. Misreadings, transpositions, and putting information into the wrong field are common and can cause errors that are difficult to identify and correct.

“According to research from Pi Labs, almost half of firms spend two to three months of the year managing and organizing data to drive decision making,” the company wrote. “Additionally, in today’s economic environment, asset managers are more focused on optimizing their investments through the use of metrics like occupancy rates, lease expiration, and rent growth.”

To address this, AppFolio says the new product provides a number of benefits, including:

Streamlined asset data collection from property managers.

Data consolidation by first normalizing asset data from different property management systems. That should allow apples-to-apples comparisons and the ability to compare and roll up data.

Key performance indicator displays show important metrics such as NOI, capital expense, occupancy, lease expiration, loss-to-lease, valuation, loan balance, and LTV.

Performance visualization through audits across multiple portfolios

Error-free reporting

Reduction of overhead through automation

The company’s website also says that its software provides “bank-grade security,” which seems to be a reference to having completed an SOC2, Type 2 audit, a type of verification of security in cloud-based systems. They received the SOC1, Type 2 audit in 2021.

The release quoted Sid Beck, in acquisitions at real estate investment firm Enduravest, as follows: “AppFolio’s newest addition to Investment Management organizes our deal metrics into one easily accessible location. Assembling our expenses, rent rolls, budgets, lease expirations, and more in one place gives us the ability to view our portfolio from a 10,000 foot view, or to pull apart each asset granularly, giving us a better sense of our business needs.”

Last year, AppFolio expanded its reach through a platform marketplace and added some features to its cloud-based management products, including a security deposit alternative in partnership with Obligo, a data report builder, and a tool to import bank and reconcile bank transactions.