Collaborating with AppFolio on new product features

Since 2013, Redside has used a very user-friendly back-end accounting system called “AppFolio“. As we’ve grown, so has AppFolio and it’s now a more diversified publicly traded company based in Santa Barbara (Nasdaq: APPF). We now utilize many of their features helping us from the moment an applicant applies on-line, to when they provide on-line work orders and make their payments on-line, to when they move-out. Over the last 4-5 years we’ve greatly appreciated their help and their genuine interest in listening to product change suggestions.

A number of AppFolio employees were in Seattle this week and asked to spend half the day in our offices. We were thinking 2-3 folks may drop by, somewhat to our surprise, nine developers and engineers showed up at our office yesterday. After a 45 minute discussion of additional features we’d like to see, they rolled up their shirt sleeves and went to work on one of them, a comparative balance sheet showing two different points in time for a specific account. As you can see in the picture below, the conference room was full at about lunch time when they showed us a working demonstration of this–they had coded it on the spot!

It’s got a few more tests to go through before being rolled out to the masses but it’s very close. We really appreciate their listening and AppFolio’s ongoing commitment to improving what is already a very good product for us, our residents, and our owners.