Texas Property Management Company Optimizes Efficiency for Growth and Expansion

A Bit of Backstory

Liberty Management, Inc. has been serving the San Antonio area with property management services for more than 30 years, and has been partnering with AppFolio Property Manager for the last 8 years. Kevin Knight, President & Broker, manages his team and focuses on making his business more efficient, while providing excellent service to his customers.

Interview with Kevin

We met with Kevin to learn how his team optimizes their business practices with AppFolio's technology.

How do you interact with AppFolio Property Manager?

I am looking at AppFolio's dashboard metrics and reports on a daily basis. I really like to check the door count and the vacancies. That's the big one because if they're vacant, owners won't be happy, and we won't be making money. AppFolio is helpful in keeping track of our company's performance.

What features have impacted and improved your business?

AppFolio's Online Payments feature has been huge. It saves us a lot of time. More than 90% of our tenants are paying their rent online through AppFolio. The time we used to spend on processing paper checks for more than 800 properties – that's 800 checks to deposit and keep track of to make sure you don't lose one, or have one slip through the cracks. Then to have to manually enter everything into the software, it's a time consuming process. With AppFolio, we have the tenant pay directly online, then the payment is processed, automatically goes to the bank, and then the record is automatically updated in the software.

In addition, being able to send checks, invoices, and receipts to the owners electronically has been a big time saver for our team. We used to send our owners envelopes that were filled to the brim with documents and receipts. I can't even calculate how many thousands of hours we've saved over the years by automating these processes with both the tenants and owners.

How are you improving communication with your customers?

AppFolio's text messaging and emailing features have helped us communicate with customers more efficiently. If we need to reach a customer, texting is the easiest and fastest way to communicate. You never know when they will look at their email. Everyone on our team communicates with tenants and owners via AppFolio so if we ever need to look up anything, we have the whole chain of events on record. The time savings and the knowledge this provides us is so helpful. If you're a sizeable business, keeping track of all communication and being able to contact customers quickly is necessary.

How are you managing maintenance within AppFolio?

We started with an in-house maintenance contact person, but as we grew, it became overwhelming for our staff to manage. So we began to use AppFolio's Maintenance Contact Center to take all of our maintenance calls for us. The benefit we receive from this service is huge. It made sense for us to use AppFolio's service, and it has been great. We are very happy with it!

What are your plans for the future of Liberty Management?

Growth and expansion. We're planning to reach over 1,000 doors in the San Antonio area, and are looking at expanding further in the Houston and Dallas markets. In the old days, that would have been hard to do, but now, with AppFolio's state of the art software, growing is easy. You can grow as much as you want to, and AppFolio will help you, it will allow you to do that.

How is AppFolio Property Manager a partner in your business?

In my experience, I have tried to use software that has such a complex learning curve. Our staff never used it, and the investment was wasted. I tell people that AppFolio is, by far, the easiest property management software to learn and use for your business.

We have been partnering with AppFolio for over 8 years, and we have never had any outages or other issues that other companies have experienced with their software. I am very comfortable with AppFolio and feel that a cloud-based software is more secure, and easy to access from anywhere.

If you haven't tried it, I recommend you give AppFolio a shot.