The Official AppFolio Blog

AppFolio recently held a company event called “Hack Day.” The Hack Day concept is simple: Gather a group of creative people for a period of twenty-four hours and see what new ideas, features, and products they can produce. There were only two rules: “Share your results with everyone else” and “Don’t work on something that you normally do”.

A “Hack Day Deputy” was nominated to preside over the event, and we kicked it off on a Thursday afternoon. To promote a creative atmosphere, we made costumes available those who wanted to dress the part. During the breaks, we set up a canvas for group painting and musical instruments for jam sessions. And, of course, we provided food: a group dinner, breakfast (some people slept in the office that night – the majority, more sensible people went home) and a group lunch followed by a celebratory end the 24 hour creativity-run-wild day.

The energy and enthusiasm throughout Hack Day was absolutely contagious. It was hard not to get excited about the visionary projects people had. Some people worked in teams, others worked alone, but everyone worked for the prize of the coveted Hack Day Golden Keyboard. The winner was selected by vote after everyone gave a final project presentation. Our champion Fredrik Valeur, now programs AppFolio software using his signed golden keyboard.

For any business, taking a large number of team members and having them spend a significant amount of time doing anything other than the critical things needed to run the business is expensive. Yet, we had our entire engineering and product teams along with a number of people from other parts of the company participate in AppFolio Hack Day. Why?

One of the reasons we feel we have had so much success with AppFolio Property Manager is that we spend a lot of time and effort trying to do something new and different – something we hope is innovative in a way that allows our customers to be very successful. The area of innovation that I am focused on as the CTO is the engineering of our products, but we also strive to innovate in the services we provide, the way we sell our products and even the way we price our products. AppFolio believes that that innovation is a big part of our success. However, we also know that although some great ideas “just happen” you need to actively promote innovation if you want it to happen in abundance. Of course, we are also encouraged to innovate by property managers, who as a group, are hungry for new and better ways to do things.

What was the payoff for our attempt to stimulate innovation? Hack Day participants generated 50 project ideas that turned into 17 completed projects. A few of these are already part of our latest product release and a few are great ideas that will make it into future versions. In short, there was a tremendous amount of value created for AppFolio and our customers in a very short amount of time.

Tenants have the ability to submit an online maintenance request through their tenant portal. The request ties directly into the work order system – saving a lot of time.

• When a resident submits an online maintenance request it will automatically create a work order in AppFolio. The work order will automatically populate Tenant and Unit information.
• Residents will have historical access to past work orders within their portal and have the work order number available for reference.
• You will be able to receive notification via email anytime someone submits an online maintenance request and will be able to manage the work order within AppFolio Property Manager.

Along with the benefits of online maintenance requests, the tenant portal displays the current status of outstanding payments and past payment history; these details presented to tenants have been shown to improve tenant payment completeness. For tenants to use the portal requires that you send the Tenant Portal Activation letter.

How did you find your way to AppFolio?
I worked for ExpertCity (now Citrix Online) from 2002 to 2004 so that was my connection to AppFolio. I was in Portland, OR when I heard about AppFolio through a friend and I was desperate to get back to Santa Barbara. I made the call and came down and after meeting with Brian and Albert I was sold. I think there were about 20 people at AppFolio at that time and I was one of the first on the marketing team. In May, I will have been here 4 years.

What types of projects do you work on at AppFolio?
I work on all of the awesome projects, like this Newsletter! Specifically, I design and administer all of the product websites like AppFolio Property Manager and RentApp, as well as our 5 blogs. I also manage our SEO efforts for these sites. I create all of our advertising whether it is in print or online. Additionally, I created many of our product and customer testimonial videos.

What are your favorite types of projects to work on?
I get excited when the Appo-Tini / Appo-Pinot parties roll around. The invitations to these events are fun because I can cut loose a bit and flex my design muscle. I also enjoy working on the internal projects as well, like developing a logo that a department needs for a team building event. I really appreciate the variety of responsibilities – I’m always challenged with something new.

Where do you draw your inspiration?
I usually start the search for inspiration online. I definitely fall back on my design education and the things I learned from the great artists and designers of the past. I also look to the natural world for new color schemes because they always seem to work. Tropical fish are a good example of this. So far, I haven’t seen a color scheme gone wrong in nature.

Can you tell me a little about your tea drinking habits?
I have always enjoyed tea but recently I got into loose-leaf teas. It all started at Savoy Café & Deli in downtown Santa Barbara. I had sampled a number of their teas and decided to make a purchase – it was not a trivial amount. Right now I have 15 different teas including herbal blends, white, green, oolong, black and pu-erh. I find that loose teas are more flavorful and definitely more complex in their flavor. It is kind of addicting because it’s fun to try different teas and, of course, there is the whole caffeine component to it.

Your life changed recently with the birth of your first child. How is it going?
His nickname is “the Boss.” So now I have a new boss. He is 8 months old, a great sleeper and such a happy little boy. It’s a lot more fun than I was anticipating. He has definitely taught me to slow down, and I was always okay with just being there and observing but now it’s a little different. Sometimes I just hang out and watch him play, like for an hour or two, because he always wants someone close by or to be held. It can be very meditative in a way. It has helped me to be in the moment even more.

When a resident wants to break a lease and you are a property manager it can be a real challenge. A broken lease means you’ve suddenly got a vacancy to fill, and often it’s a hard one to fill if people choose to leave at awkward times of the month. Certainly, filling a unit when a resident has moved before the completion of their lease can be a big job. However, there are a few ways to simplify the process.

Check The Lease
This is your industry, and you know that whatever the lease says is law! Make sure to review any clauses in the lease relevant to the tenant moving out early. For instance, is the resident required to pay rent for the remaining part of the lease? This will help you determine how to proceed next.

Explain That They Are On The Hook For Rental Losses
Once you’ve reviewed the lease, make sure that your resident is aware of everything in it. For instance, they may not realize that they’re responsible for paying rent until you can find a new renter. Educate them, and you may find that they’ll work hard to come to an arrangement with you.

Come Up With Ways They Can Help
If the resident is willing to provide some assistance in finding a new person to fill the vacancy, it could really speed up the process. Once the resident knows they’ll have to pay rent until there’s a new renter, let them know they can recommend someone, help do some basic marketing, and show the property when they are available. Of course, you still want to take care of tenant screening yourself, but the resident can help with the rest!

Despite your best efforts, there is always the potential that you will come across an uncooperative resident. This could mean that they fail to help with the process of finding a new person to fill the vacancy, or that they skip out on the rest of the rent that they owed. In this case, it might just become a legal battle. In the meantime, check out some ways you can improve your vacancy ads to fill your units more quickly.

Networking is incredibly important for a property manager. After all, you want people to be familiar with the services that you offer, and you want to build a network of people that may become or refer residents. You are in a customer-focused industry, so open communication is essential. Social media makes it possible for you to easily connect with those that can help you do your job well. But you’ve got to consider how to brand yourself on sites like Twitter and Facebook if you want it to become an effective strategy.

Here are some things to think about when you’re ready to make that social media appearance.

How far are you willing to go with communication?
These sites can provide a gateway for residents to contact you to discuss issues, or you can use them to field queries from renters interested in your vacancies. But do you really want to go there? Do you have the time to invest? Social media is SOCIAL. If you’re not going to have time to communicate with people on Facebook or Twitter, it’s probably best not to set up a profile at all. But if you can commit to posting on a regular basis and fielding at least some questions, maintaining a social media presence can really help to build business.

Who are you going to be?
You want to be a resource in the property management community. But what specific community do you want to reach? Are you going to focus on your specific niche, such as your local area? Or will you branch out a bit more in an attempt to capture the attention of more people?

Will you offer social media incentives?
Offering incentives via social media can help encourage people to follow you. Simply doing a giveaway for anyone who performs a specific call to action (e.g. follows you on Facebook) can help increase your exposure. Likewise, you can offer am incentive for new residents who find you on Facebook or Twitter—perhaps a discount on their first month’s rent, a month of free parking (if you normally charge), etc. You could even offer a small incentive to those who submit rental applications online and post about it in a status update. This will also help generate some hype and encourage others to do the same.

How will you show vacancies?
Using social media to advertise vacancies on your property is a great idea. But you’ve got to consider how you’ll do that. Will you simply post a small blurb about the available properties on Facebook or Twitter? Post an image with a caption? A video tour of the whole residence? Or will you link to a complete vacancy ad? You might need to do a little trial and error to see what resonates most with people.

There is no reason why you shouldn’t take advantage of the social media tools available. Just put some forethought into your approach before you launch! Also, if you’re interested in more tips on using Facebook as a property manager, check out our webinar.

Contractors really play a major role in the success of any property manager. They are responsible for keeping your properties in a welcoming condition that impresses both property owners and residents.  There is just one problem – we are also liable for their work.

It may sound like an obvious point, but it is something that new property managers and landlords fail to think about. Regardless of who does the actual work on your property, in a circumstance where a job is done badly, and it leads to an accident or injury, you cannot chase your contractor for compensation. It just is not the way that typical contracts are drafted, and in most instances, you wouldn’t have success in winning such a court case.

Why is this? Well, the contractor works for you. So no matter what the circumstance, you need to compensate a resident or visitor that is put in harm’s way due to improper maintenance on your property. Secondly, property management is always responsible for inspecting the state of the property. You may not feel as though you should have to check on the work of your contractors, and ideally, you shouldn’t have to when working with people you trust to provide quality work. But, from a legal position, if you failed to inspect the work to ensure that the area was safe, you took on all liability. Using a property management app can help keep tabs on the work happening throughout the property to ensure you don’t miss dropping by when necessary.

This is why it is essential that you are careful about who you choose to contract with. Likely, when running a large property, you will be working with numerous contractors who provide different services. This means you have to put a lot of faith in a lot of people. Screen them carefully, ask for referrals, and make sure that you’ve got a sound contract that allows you to dismiss them if they are doing an unsatisfactory job.

If you’ve ever attended the NAA or NARPM Annual Convention, then you know how inspiring and exciting it is to be surrounded by people who are passionate about what they do. AppFolio’s User Experience (UX) Team recently attended our own professional conference, IA Summit 2012, and we wanted to share some highlights of our experience.

The “IA” in IA Summit stands for “Information Architecture.” Just like building architects, IAs plan and design – but instead of structures, IAs design websites and software. Sounds pretty simple, but like Property Management, IA and UX is a people-oriented profession. We spend a lot of time researching and thinking about what people need from their software in order to achieve their goals as efficiently and painlessly as possible.

IA Summit covered a lot of ground this year – social media, organizational culture, and information overload, to name a few – but there are three talks we want to highlight here.

The first is “Clutter is King: The story of Filing, Piling, and How People Really Get Things Done,” a high-level exploration of two main ways that people manage paperwork. That’s right, at our high-tech conference we talked about paper, and two behaviors that you probably know well: piling and filing. Turns out most of us organize by piling papers in our office. It’s a great method because the most recent items are always on the top where we need them – but there are downsides, like losing things in the middle of the pile. So what does that tell us? Well, for one thing, using the file folder metaphor to organize documents on our computer may not be the most intuitive way to work. Take a look at your computer desktop. Do you store a lot of miscellaneous items on your desktop, in virtual piles? Yeah, me too. And do you know where the item is that you need when you need it? People are good at spatially organizing things, and this has implications for how we can design software.

Speaking of clutter, here are a couple pictures of some collaborative design methods we practiced in a workshop. Just look at all those post-its!

The second talk we want to share with you is “Deconstructing Delight: Pleasure, Flow, and Meaning.” The gist of this talk is that it’s not enough in our high-tech world to simply not annoy our customers – our goal should be to delight you! But how do we do that? We looked at examples of delightful user interfaces (TripIt.com and Zipcar.com) and analyzed what they have in common. The three principles these web experiences share are pleasure, flow, and meaning. Of course, my instinct was to identify instances of and opportunities for incorporating these three principles in AppFolio.

The third talk you might be interested in is “User Research is Unnatural (But that’s OK).” This talk was all about how to make usability testing a little less artificial so the the research participant can relax and so we can gain better insights into how to improve AppFolio. Watching our customers use AppFolio is the best way to understand what what works well, and what needs improvement. Based on feedback from our customers, our design and engineering teams are able to make changes to improve the overall user experience. If you’d like to participate in user research, contact us!

We also found a little time to explore our host city, New Orleans. If you’ve never been, I highly recommend it – as a local told me, you have to go out of your way to get a bad meal.

We had an especially memorable meal at Bistro Daisy where our waiter served us Creamsicle Baked Alaska for dessert and here’s some amazing art from a young painter named Justin. Can you guess which one came home with us?

And of course we had to try beignets from the legendary 24 hour Cafe du Monde.

But beignets don’t travel well, so when it came time to bring something home to our fellow AppFolians, we selected a King cake. It tastes a bit like a cinnamon roll, and there’s a little plastic figure of a baby embedded somewhere in the cake. Who ever gets the piece with the baby is King for a Day (and has to bring the next cake to work)!

Here’s our Scrum Master, Heidi, hoping she gets the baby. And here is Malcom from our Quality Assurance team, our King For A Day!

You know it’s been a great conference when you return home with renewed energy and passion for your work. AppFolio’s UX team is more determined than ever to create great user experiences across all channels, and we’re already implementing some of the strategies we picked up at IA Summit 2012!

Everyone has a past, and when you are screening potential residents for vacant properties, you may be tempted to forgive and forget – a criminal history, that is. Is it really a big deal if a resident has something in their past if they seem responsible enough today? Could you lease a property to him/her anyway?

The problem with welcoming someone with a criminal past to live in your property is that there is a major liability issue. If your resident commits a crime that results in legal ramifications, the property and management could be held responsible. This is particularly true if the criminal activity has a negative impact on the neighbors – your other residents. If there is drug activity around children, an assault occurs with another resident as a victim, or there are some other dangerous activities taking place on the property, then you could be in trouble.

This is why criminal background checks are also such an important part of tenant screening services – you can’t claim ignorance here. Whether you were aware before they moved in or not, you still play a role as the property manager, so being diligent is essential. If you still feel strongly about renting to someone you think has turned their life around, then look at all of the other factors. Ensure that you get a grasp of their recent job history, their credit standing, and even personal references. All of this may indicate that you may have a resident that’s turned their life around, although that can never be guaranteed.

At the end of the day, you’ve either got to play it safe or go with your instincts – and after many years of screening prospective residents as a property manager, you’ve probably got them honed. (Check out this post on exactly how to do it with AppFolio.) Just make sure you always remember that you’re taking a risk. It could also be something that requires discussion with the property owner to get a grasp for their feelings on the issue. Some prefer to avoid people with a criminal background regardless of the circumstances.

Be aware, though, that in the case of people convicted of drug use The Fair Housing Acts protect anyone convicted of such crimes. However, conviction for other drug-related crimes may be fair reason for refusing an applicant. The safest thing to do is to always seek legal counsel.

Nadeen Green is a fantastic educator in the Fair Housing industry and we were honored to have her as a presenter in the Webinar yesterday co-hosted by Grace Hill. Nadeen Green, Senior Counsel with For Rent Media Solutions, covered a variety of topics ranging from service animals to criminal background checks. She also addressed when you may have to let your residents change the locks on their doors due to a domestic violence case.

We had a record-breaking registration and reached the maximum capacity for GoToWebinar! Here’s the recorded webinar and the presentation slides for your reference. Following the recording are a few of your questions we didn’t have time to answer.

Q&A

Can you charge a pet deposit for service animals?
No, because a service animal is not considered a pet. Thus there is no pet deposit (although a resident is responsible for any damage beyond reasonable wear and tear for a service animal). There is no pet rent either.

Are you required to allow aggressive breeds or breeds on the restricted pet list if they are considered service animals?
It depends on what the courts have said in your jurisdiction. There are cases both in favor of the landlord and in favor of the person with the disability.

What documentation is required to serve as proof of the need for service animals?
If the need is not obvious (such as would be the case for a guide dog for a person who is blind), then the landlord can require third party confirmation that there is a fair housing disability and that the disability results in the need for the service animal. Note that the landlord cannot ask what the disability is, how service it is, or why the animal is needed.

You recommended having people sign a model release when posting photos on Facebook, etc – can you tell us where we might find a sample release form?
There are good model releases that you can find online. I would be more helpful but that would have me cross the line of providing legal advice.

In the case of domestic violence and the requirement to change the locks. How is it handled if the person listed on the restraining order is also on the lease?
In the States where domestic violence victims are protected, the landlord is allowed to deny community and apartment access to the abuser (if there is valid court documentation) even if the abuser is a leaseholder.

Related to the new LGBT requirements for HUD housing, does this mean that we shouldn’t ask the “M/F” question on an application, or that it would not be allowable to question the answer provided?
I believe you can ask, you just cannot question or dispute the answer that the person gives you.

Are victims of domestic violence that are released from their lease charged for normal move out/turnover/cleaning charges?
Although nuances will be covered by the various domestic violence laws, I would think that only significant cleaning issues would be chargeable back to the resident.

Do you have any websites that provide even more information on Fair Housing or additional resources to recommend?
HUD.gov is a good starting point. Vendome’s fair housing coach has good information. “Googling” of fair housing will provide a lot of resource information too. Don’t forget to reference apartment association magazines and Websites.

As a property manager, part of your role is to oversee the moving process for residents moving in and out. Typically, you will be aware in advance when this is going to occur. This allows you to complete the necessary maintenance tasks between residents, and helps ensure that you have had the opportunity to collect any rent or fees that may be outstanding.

However, things do not always go so smoothly – particularly not with today’s economy, when individuals are struggling to pay their bills, including their rent. In some circumstances, people choose to abandon the property outright, rather than dealing with the immediate consequences of having to pay outstanding rent and face embarrassment.

When dealing with an abandoned unit, there are a number of steps that you need to take.

1. Check The Lease To Verify How “Abandonment” Was Defined
This should be a component of any lease. Legally, the situation has to meet the outlined criteria before further action can be taken. This is can be complicated matter. Some residents may take everything and leave the keys to the property behind. Others may leave behind their furniture and personal belongings, but take the keys with them. People aren’t always thinking rationally in these circumstances, so there is no way to anticipate what their actions may be when choosing to abandon their residence.

2. Do An Investigation
You can’t simply decide that a resident who has not paid their rent has abandoned the property. You need to issue a 3-day notice, as well as an abandonment notice. If the resident doesn’t respond to either, check to see if their vehicles are still on the property. Also, try contacting them via any information that you have on file for them.

3. Have The Property Declared Abandoned
If the property meets the abandonment criteria of the lease and you have attempted to contact the resident to no avail, then the property can be declared abandoned. However, it is typically necessary to have a public notice issued.

4. Verify Your State Laws For Unclaimed Property
Most states require that you hold onto any personal belongings left in the property for a set period of time in case the residents decide to claim it. Failing to do so could lead to legal complications.

5. Document Everything
While going through the process, ensure that you document all actions you take and all things you observe with regards to the abandoned property. This data offers you protection should anything be contested. Rental property management software can help simplify this process.