NOI suffers when property managers miss the forest for the trees.
AppFolio built a platform that takes details off operators’ plates, allowing them to focus on interacting with residents, building community, and maximizing value at the asset, not the unit, level. With the help of AI-Native Architecture, operators are using AppFolio to deliver real performance across their portfolios. We spoke with Stacy Holden, Vice President and Industry Principal at AppFolio, about rethinking performance in the AI era.
The Real Property Management Revolution
Operators should take advantage of the current moment of technological revolution to reframe their mindset.
While performance once meant completing required activities, Holden believes that operators would be best served by adopting a broader view that encompasses value for investors, meaning and purpose for employees, and well-being for residents.
Her perspective is best summed up by the business discipline of Real Estate Performance Management.
“Real Estate Performance Management is when everyone in the ecosystem is thriving,” says Holden. “Residents feel at home, owners see dependable returns, and the business is growing.”
In this approach, operators pursue overarching goals. Daily tasks become a means to achieve those goals, rather than the end result.
“When I see operators who are winning, they’ve shifted their focus to actual outcomes across what they do every day, not just the workload,” explains Holden. “They’re asking, ‘Are residents satisfied and are they staying? Are the investors seeing the returns they expect? Is the business growing in a sustainable way?’ These are questions you can’t answer by looking at your to-do list and how many tasks you’ve completed.”
When operators expand their idea of performance, they often find that their legacy systems can’t keep up.
Diagnosing the Performance Gap
Changing how operators conceive of their business as a whole often reveals cracks in their existing systems.
“For most of the industry, performance meant being efficient and being cost-effective in doing the things that managers had to do every single day, and technology was built around supporting that model,” says Holden. “It’s really caused our industry to face what I call a property performance gap, which is a widening divide between where operators need to succeed and what technology allows them to achieve.”
Disjointed systems may cobble together one-off applications, threatening data integrity and making big-picture analysis impossible.
“It’s starting to impact NOI and the value of the asset,” says Holden.
The AI-Powered Perspective Shift
The AppFolio Performance Platform empowers operators to run their assets according to the principles of Real Estate Performance Management.
The system was built from the ground up with AI-native architecture, creating an all-encompassing data environment that keeps information accurate and flowing across the asset’s entire ecosystem.
“Where AI really shines is across the full scope, where it can connect from a leasing issue to a maintenance issue to resident satisfaction,” explains Holden. “When AI is just bolted on or layered on top and not really embedded, whether that’s a standalone leasing assistant or an invoice scanning capability, you get fragmented data in a fractured context.”
A System of Record stores data and serves as the one source of truth, while AI agents execute workflows under operator oversight, handling the routine so teams can act on what matters.
AppFolio in Practice
Dan Rubenstein, CEO of Hampton Management Associates, says that implementing Real Estate Performance Management through the AppFolio Performance Platform has allowed him to nurture the 40% of leads who inquire about properties outside of business hours.
“We are finding that all this AI is a backbone to help us speed up, understand what problems are, and see trends. This allows us to get better occupancy, better collections, and fewer vacancies,” says Rubenstein. “It’s a win for everybody.”
The AppFolio Performance Platform has transformed his approach to maintenance through its triage capabilities, shaving 2 days off work order times and enabling his staff to be more responsive to residents’ requests. Standardized communications alert residents when their rent is due and send reminders.
“AppFolio has done a great job of taking the mundane tasks out of the business and making it so that it’s automated and there’s less friction to get to the finish line,” says Rubenstein. “We want our people taking action to improve the property and better our community rather than sitting there processing the rent check.”
The portal builds trust with residents and preempts misunderstandings.
“The idea of this big bad landlord goes away,” says Rubenstein. “It manages the entire life cycle of the resident in front of them. It’s very clear, it’s transparent, and there’s no discrepancy.”
The system’s ability to store data on all properties across the portfolio helps prepare for audits and ensures that operators have the information they need in an emergency.
“We can’t put out the fire with AI,” jokes Rubenstein, “but we can get to the fire quicker with the AI.”
Performance-Focused Operators Create Community
When employees are freed from busywork, they can focus on real-life interactions.
Holden cites the example of an operator that designed its maintenance program around the concept of real estate performance management.
“This customer had an initiative called ‘One More Thing,’” she explains. “If the maintenance individual saw maybe a switch plate that had broken or a ding in the wall that just needed to be slightly repainted, they had the time and space to do that one more thing.”
The resident then received a handwritten note informing them of the additional work that was completed. Maintenance staff felt more fulfilled because they were proactively improving the community, residents were thrilled because problems they hadn’t even mentioned were fixed, and investors benefited from increased resident satisfaction and retention.
Rubenstein agrees that the heart of performance is creating community.
“We manage for the long term,” he says. “We overinvest in our properties so that these are communities that will last for years and people want to live in.”
He encourages other operators to ditch static software and try the AppFolio Performance Platform.
“When you have it, there’s no going back.”
Learn more about how you can deliver real performance for your residents, investors, and business.