Propertyware Reviews

This software offers everything you need. Once you figure out how to use it.

You really have to have real life examples to practice and perfect this software.

The maintenance portal is easy to use.

In the maintenance section - when a tenant places more than one issue in the same request, it would be helpful to be able to break it down as example: WO #935A to allow you to close out individually when completed. Otherwise, you'll need to keep the entire WO open until such time as all work has been completed.

Its easy to use once you get the hang of it.

It takes too long to upload images and half the time only half of them load

The accounting aspect is critical and Propertyware nails it. I do wish you didn't need to be an actual accountant or bookkeeper to figure out how to make adjustments. This part is difficult and can take a lot of time to figure it out.

The Statements need to be more customized. I have several owners that are LLC's that want to see their Reserves broken out on their monthly statements.

Unlike most software in this space, Propertyware is highly customizable, even having an open API available in its top-tier package. This makes the software flexible based upon your individual processes, rather than having to tailor your processes to work within the software, as is the case with Propertyware's competitors.

Technical support has improved over the years, but it is still not to the level I would like. No one likes calling tech support and getting someone halfway around the planet reading from a script. This is really my only complaint with Propertyware.

Support team is great. Every time I called all my issue were resolved regardless of the issues complexity.

There is some functionality that is missing making some of my task harder with manual overhead. My suggestion have been noted as future development that may or may not get implemented.

The customer service line is always very efficient and they have a very good attitude to help.

Sometimes the processes are very complicated to follow.

It was easy to operate.

Nothing

Ease of entering payments, reconciliations, bill payment, good variety of mgmt reports

The accounting does not really coincide with accepted accounting principals, consequently I have to double check accounting entries before preparing tax returns. Support representatives service below par at times also hard to communicate with them sometimes.

This software is easy to use and very well organized. I also love the customer service!

I wish that it would offer an amortization schedule and Land contracts! I think that will be a great opportunity for many people including our company.

Flexibility, information. Property ware is user friendly for the most part. Navigating in and out of different screens is easy. Trying to create a report is confusing though.

Trying to create a custom report is confusing

Accountability, ease of using, support is helpful.

Sometimes the support staff isn't knowledgeable. It would be nice if they also worked on Saturday. The property management company should get paid a percent of credit card processing.

Very easy to use. love when you do have problems there is online learning that can walk you through.

from time to time the date is off by a day. When you are trying to archive something and you have a lot sometimes it starts to jump if you do 1 at a time.

I can easily get help from customer service

nothing as of now. I'm happy its not that difficult using property ware

We are a property management company with 150 doors and have been using Propertyware for over three years. Propertyware will do an excellent job of property management, but there are numerous problems. And it is very expensive.

They have a lot of great ideas, but they only implement them to about 90%. We are so angry and frustrated with the problems in PW that we have made the difficult and costly decision to cancel service and move to another software platform.

Propertyware does have many positives, but you can research those for yourself on their website or in other reviews. You need to know its shortcomings before making a decision:

1. PW is fond of saying something new is coming. Be prepared to wait. We have been waiting three years for them to release an Android app. The iPhone app has been out that long, and is already in version 2. Their tech keeps saying the Android app is coming, but it's still not here.

2. PW launched apps for both Android and iPhone for mobile inspections. I was even a part of the beta development. The beta was a whirlwind of development over two weeks. I was amazed at how quickly the tech department was writing code and updating the software to fix problems and make it better. PW launched the apps immediately after the two-week beta, and then, no more updates! The apps are flawed to the point that they are unstable and unusable in the field. Six months later, PW has done nothing.

3. Mobile from a tenant’s perspective. PW is not compatible with web browsers on mobile phones. More and more applicants want to apply online using their smartphones. Some people have a smartphone but no computer. PW will not accept a payment for an application or for paying rent on a mobile phone. We have complained to tech support, but they have not done anything to address the problem.

4. If you pay extra, PW can host your website. This is necessary to integrate rental listings, ePayments, portals, and online applications. In theory, this would be a good thing. However, the provided templates are awful. I regularly have to explain to people how to find the online application. I have asked PW to redesign the Apply Online tab to make it more visible. No luck in three years of asking. And PW really needs to hire a graphic designer. Not just for the web templates, but also for the graphic interface of the software and the automatically generated print brochures.

5. PW is confusing and poorly laid out overall. The main tabs should be better organized for one thing. There are four tabs for accounting across the top: Money In, Money Out, Banking, and Management. Under each tab are additional functions. You might think that is good, but it's confusing. It takes a significant amount of time to learn where to go to find the information or function that you need for any accounting work.

6. Generally speaking, PW has too many layers. It can take five or six clicks to drill down to the layer that has the information you need. Not only does this slow productivity, but it can be frustrating when you are on the phone with a tenant or owner. You have to pay careful attention to which layer you are on, especially before uploading a file. Place the file in the wrong screen, and it will be difficult to find later. Notes and Documents can be posted at every level. That means you have to open multiple levels to make sure you find the documents you need.

7. The search box is supposed to be universal, meaning that you can search for any information within PW very quickly. Just not vendors. If you need to find vendor information, don’t go to search, and don’t go to Contacts. That would be too easy. You have to go to Money Out, and scroll down the long list of vendors.

8. PW had a brilliant idea for training. They decided to create modules and track how far an individual completed each module. They even have tests at the end of each module to make sure the person understood what they learned. This is great for employers tracking employee training progress. The training is on a basic level in PowerPoint format. I'm not against PowerPoint, but the problem is that PW originally had an amazing and deep selection of videos and recorded webinars that explained PW’s functions clearly and extensively. They even had them grouped into categories. It was awesome! But when they launched the PowerPoint training, they removed the videos. We requested links to the videos, and even asked if the videos were on youtube. PW refused to give us any access to the videos.

9. There are no digital signatures, not even on the applications. So when getting referrals from other landlords who require a signature from the applicant, we must use Docusign as an extra step. The development team at PW is finally beginning to talk about implementing digital signature. However, they have made it clear that you will have to pay extra for that option.

10. Be prepared to pay extra for everything. It costs extra for more than 1 GB of storage for rental agreements and other documentation, inspections, or the upcoming eSignatures.

11. PW has an alert page, which we use regularly like a to-do list. Once again, it's great idea that is poorly executed. The alerts come in randomly instead of by date. We have to look very carefully to make sure we do not miss an important alert because it could have been buried in the long list. We would like to see the option to group the alerts by type or even importance into folders. Right now, it is a hodgepodge of chaos with only tiny symbols to show what type each alert is. And we would like the ability to select multiple alerts to delete at one time, instead of having to delete each one individually.

12. Move out procedure. The move out procedure could be better. It would be nice to have a move out checklist similar to other systems. Also, PW does not allow you to enter a forwarding address without doing the final accounting. We don’t want to refund a deposit until all the expenses and repair bills have come in, yet we can’t enter the forwarding address until the deposit is refunded.

Their "custom fields" option allows you to record just about whatever information you want or need onto every (unit/building/portfolio/contact/work order/lease/vendor/etc./etc.). On top of that, the system is robust enough to then allow you to create reports that provide, filter by, sort by, and otherwise use that custom data, which means it's useful for tracking just about everything. Which is HUGE for a big, complex mess like property management.

Also, while their support system is occasionally (not always or even often!) slow, they do always follow through, and they're tenacious about getting to the bottom of problems. Also, they do actually pay attention to and actually (occasionally) implement new-feature requests, which is really rare in my experience and alone makes them awesome.

It looks like it's from 1990...and it *acts* like it's from 1990. Which is to say there are lots of small, annoying inconsistencies in the way things are treated that add up to a significant headache without ever actually making you feel like any one thing is enough to make you switch services. For example, you can right-click on a link to any property, lease, or contact and open it in a new tab -- but you can't do that for Work Orders; for whatever reason, they're called through Javascript instead of through a URL, *despite HAVING a unique URL* that you can easily link to. So why is that one thing alone unable to be right-click opened?

For another example, you can set a pop-up message to show up whenever you view a property/contact/etc, and that works just fine IF you get to that page by clicking a link to the page. But if you've already been to that page and you use the Back button to get to it, the software deposits you at whatever point in the page you were at when you left...and the pop-up is still way back up at the top of the page, so you have to scroll all the way up to close it, then scroll all the way back down to where you actually want to read (because it greys out the whole page when the pop-up pops up.)

Easy to use. Helpful, manages everything under one place.

The refresh button doesn't work. I constantly have to reload the page and a few clicks back to regain access on the page where I was at.

It's been a bit of a learning curve, but it's working well for us now most of the time. I like that it is customizable, I feel like there are more features than we are currently using, but hope to be able to discover other ways to make it useful for us.
I can see that there is room for improvement and appreciate that they seem to be working on making improvements.

Application Process is more difficult than it should be. Applicant prospects often can't complete without calling in for help. They become very frustrated. It's difficult to determine what their problems are, seems to work differently for everyone depending on the browser they are using, etc. See my answers to "Vacancy Management" rating question.

Customer Service experience is Very hit or miss, sometimes awesome and sometimes takes a very long time to get what amounts to a bad guess.

I was happy to see the company was working with a software that combines so much property management information.

I spoke on view previous responses when working with the accounting.

The billing features are easy to use and fairly easy to fix if a mistake is made. The eCheck option has made paying vendors with actual checks a thing of the past and now everything gets direct deposited into their account.

A feature that we've requested be developed many times is the ePay/Banking feature for vendors. It allows you to put in their banking info, but the "Billing Email" is useless. All vendors receive a remittance email when payments are made showing a breakdown of invoicing and pmt amounts. It would be highly useful if the Billing Email actually functioned and would send the remittance emails to that specific address. Otherwise, your remittance emails go to the email that's populated in your general vendor information. Often times, that email is a sales person who accepts work orders and not the accounting department. Payment info is often lost or not forwarded to correct employees. Also, if there's more than one email on your general ledger, the remittance email won't send to anyone at that company. Making the Billing Email feature under ePay/Banking would be highly beneficial to users and it's a shame it's completely useless.