Yardi Breeze v Buildium v Appfolio -best software? Tough decision
For all the owners, asset and property managers out there who own mostly residential units 

What software do you use and why did you make that decision?

 can anyone share the pros and cons of the software listed above?

Trying to understand which is the best since they all seem like the top management softwares. Yardi has been in the game for the longest but their breeze is fairly new. Buildium has positive reviews as well which real page owns and app folio seems to be very popular. 

Can’t decide.
[{"id": "hcuat94", "text": "We own and manage around 200 units across 4 properties and have gone through several software transitions. We look for ease of our maintenance workers to use software for work orders, financial reporting capabilities for our investors, and ease of bill paying both taking payments and online portals for tenants. We find these are the three main areas that take most of our employees time and can be \"bottlenecks\" in the operations of our business.\n\nWe recently switched from Rent Manager to Yardi Breeze and I regret it every single day. To start, something was going on behind the scenes where the sales team would ghost me for a week at a time, and even took another week to get the contract out. I called my main contact once and he informed me he was no longer with the company but I received no notice from their side that anything was changing despite the fact we were signing up for nearly $20k in services (we were also implementing their investor management software)... this should have been a warning.\n\nAfter getting the contract signed we immediately scheduled training. Having gone through a similar process with the previous software I was expecting training on the finer points of the software which can be quite extensive and take a few weeks but on day 1 they told us how to upload tenants and day 2 they were trying to get us to enter trial balances to switch over our operations. We didn't even have time to set up proper chart of accounts or have our bank accounts verified in their system. Their training team was obviously extremely unfamiliar with not only their own software but how their software relates to property management in general. Several times the team was attempting to have us delete important investors information.\n\nAdditionally, Yardi Breeze can only automate posting one kind of late fee, so if you take on another property with different late fee structure those will need to be manually posted. There is no place to keep historical notes on a tenant so if you regularly communicate and email tenants you will have to keep those out of the system. There are other items that don't regularly automatically post which is just mainly annoying if you forget.\n\nA huge portion of what we look for are financial reporting capabilities and Breeze does have a ton. But the way the accounting works in the software us much more complicated than others so if you have staff entering bill payments they will have to know how to correctly do journal entries. Similarly with rent payments you have to enter received date and posting date of the check. If your managers aren't aware how to do that this can severely mess up your income statements. The system isnt necessarily wrong but just a much more raw form than what other systems run I feel like your understanding of accounting needs to be a little more in depth to use it properly, which isnt the best if you have managers and leasing agents entering information. With other softwares I could get a good idea of where we stood cash collections wise, with Breeze I honestly dont have any idea unless I sit down for an hour and trace how things are run through prepaid rent account.\n\nLastly, the support is abysmal. With rent manager I would have a response within 2 hours, either with a solution to the problem or the steps they were taking to resolve the issue or find the answer. With Breeze there have been 10 day stretches when they do not pick up support phone or put you on endless hold. Email is just as long.\n\nPros would be their ability to pay bills through management software that are immediately sent out via check or ACH. They also have a good work order platform which is easily used by everyone from our regional manager to the green maintenance tech. Their online payment portal is both good an bad. Each property has a Rentcafe page which tenants can use to login and make payments. But the websites are not user friendly to navigate and cause confusion with general public. They do have the ability to make much more aesthetically pleasing and easy to navigate web pages. This is $1 per unit, per month. We paid for this service but the amount of time to set up the website isnt worth it considering we are planning on leaving the software at the end of the 1 year contract.\n\nHonestly, we went with Breeze despite the warning signs because of the Yardi name. We work with much larger residential owners in the US and know Yardi is a popular choice and been around for a while but that is completely different that whatever you call Breeze. I can honestly say it has negatively impacted our business both in the time it took to transfer over and amount of time lost dealing with issues, difficulty of basic tasks such as bills and taking payments. \n\nI know buildium is popular and we didn't run our own management back when this software was used for our portfolio so don't have a lot to report here. I do recall financial reporting was lacking a little compared to other softwares but that may have changed. I do know it was very easy to use so if you are looking for a software that can be easily used by entry to mid level employees that could be a deciding factor.\n\nWe realized Rent Manager has upgraded their online platform so will be transitioning back in the spring when our contract with Yardi is up. Hope this is a little helpful, let me know if there is anything you would like me to clarify.", "replies": [{"id": "hcv499p", "text": "This is a great response. Exactly why I wanted to go with Yardi breeze as well since their voyager product is so robust and Yardi name as well. \n\nYou just scared me into going with them after your experience. Arent their functionalities for the most part one of the best in the business? Pretty good at accounting reports especially if you are scaling is what I heard.", "replies": [{"id": "hcvfuw3", "text": "Absolutely, we continue to hear great thing about voyager. I have no complaints about accounting in general other than it being slightly different than others. Our bookkeeper says it does take him slightly longer to work through yardi than other platforms. He's booking about 4 hours for each entity rather than 3 but some of that couldn just be a new system adjustment adding time. There are a ton of reports, so I have no complaints there.\n\nWe did love that this product worked with their investor management software. We have each property's structure set up in investment manager and when we run distributions all we have to do is enter the distribution amount for each property and it calculates distributions for each investor, even more complicated irr hurdle structures, and sends it as a payable to breeze. We then just pay that payable and it sends out check or ach to each investor and updates their online account. Takes a much more complicated process and takes it down to two steps. And the investors love logging in to what feels kind of like an online brokerage account for updates on investments with us. That product has been working well for the most part and the training and support team were excellent. It's a little pricey compared to others.", "replies": [], "depth": 3}], "depth": 2}], "depth": 1}, {"id": "hcuvbm7", "text": "The best way to make the choice is to start by pushing aside brand name and reputation. This may be a tie-breaker later but \"best\" is only relevant to your business and portfolio. \n\n1. What are the top 5 things that can't \"break\" during or after your implementation? In other words what shuts down the property (exaggeration) if it doesn't work. Bill payment? payroll? Rent receipts? leasing leads? \n2. What are you really trying to achieve by replacing whatever you are doing now? If it's spreadsheets and quickbooks what will you get by making a change? Try to make this quantifiable instead of subjective. What specific data (reports usually) do you, your team, investors, and the bank require on a daily/weekly/monthly basis?\n3. Are you in a position to start fresh with the general ledger and rent roll? For instance, if the current general ledger is a mess then recreating the structure doesn't make sense. This decision lets you know what and how much data you will need to import and if you will be recreating an existing structure, and get a better handle on implementation complexity = time/money/chance for something to go wrong. \n4. \"conversion\", \"importing\", and \"integration's\" don't exist until you see them firsthand. If the vendor tells you their widget automagically imports everything from your current system have them show you using your sample data. \n\nOnce you have a good handle on 1-4 above it's time to ask the vendors to show you how their platforms actually work, using your criteria and your data. This isn't a canned demonstration or sales presentation, it's you and/or potential users proving out in as near a real-life situation as possible how the system will (1)not disrupt things too much, while (2) solving whatever your top drivers for this are, with (3) a better understanding of what work will need to happen, and (4) trying to eliminate some surprises", "replies": [{"id": "hcybgh1", "text": "Thanks a lot man. Thoughtful response.", "replies": [], "depth": 2}], "depth": 1}, {"id": "hcvbfhe", "text": "My office uses Yardi Breeze.  We do not have most of the issues u/Marsh4854 has experienced (thankfully).  The only difficulty was migrating information from the old Yardi system.  Our support team responds the same day and training for the new system was daily at X time for my main PMs and accountants who use the system most.\n\nIn regards to not being able to hold historical data, we can keep files on each property within Yardi.  My PMs are required to save each email in PDF and upload them to the system.  Perhaps migrating from an existing Yardi platform to Breeze made the transition easier.\n\nMy office owns/manages 80+ commercial/residential properties.", "replies": [{"id": "hcvpqbc", "text": "Interesting. So you\u2019d say you\u2019re content with Yardi breeze?", "replies": [], "depth": 2}, {"id": "hcvquxe", "text": "Thats good your experience has been better. Maybe since we are a smaller group we demand a little less attention. Glad to hear you figured out a good system. What existing yardi platform did you migrate from and why did you decide to change?", "replies": [{"id": "hcybk7g", "text": "Got it. I\u2019m currently in the research process so i can make a decision.", "replies": [], "depth": 3}], "depth": 2}], "depth": 1}, {"id": "hcvtnyb", "text": "I own/manage a few thousand units .... Appfolio is by far the best software.  Fairly cheap ..$1.25/unit and a massive amount of support.  I don't personally use the day to day operations (my managers do and they love it) but the metric reports are outstanding.\n\nI have nothing to do with the company but I HIGHLY recommend them.", "replies": [{"id": "hcwh645", "text": "Thanks. Any other software you looked into? Why this over other ?", "replies": [{"id": "hcycdpj", "text": "Only the software that was being used by the mgmt of a property I bought.  Every single one hated whatever they were using.  Yardi, and Etrada are all I can think of right now.", "replies": [], "depth": 3}], "depth": 2}], "depth": 1}, {"id": "i8530xu", "text": "There are 2 version on Yardi Breeze - basic and Premium. The support for Premium is good with a dedicated account manager. Whereas the Basic version, they provide very less to no support at all. So whoever is having support issues, I guess had taken the Basic version.\n\nThey have a chat feature within the app which provides support immediately.\n\nIf you are looking to scale then Breeze is for you since migrating from Breeze to Yardi Voyager is smooth like a breeze since the backend database is the same only the interface changes.\n\nI have done some 20 to 25 implementations for Yardi Breeze and it is certain Breeze needs to improve functionality wise which it does with every new release once a quarter.", "replies": [{"id": "i85b6lc", "text": "Ya great write up! Thx for that. I ended up going with appfolio. Way better imo", "replies": [], "depth": 2}], "depth": 1}]