Buildium reduced my workload by approximately a factor of 5!

Overall, my experience has been fantastic. I took my time onboarding over a period of about 3 months, then I ran the software concurrent to QuickBooks for 2 months, cutting Quickbooks off on Jan 1 and using Buildium exclusively.

Pros

Residents having 24/7 access to their account to make payments and submit requests is a huge time saver. Requests go to the right place automatically and payments are deposited into the proper account. Accounting is a breeze since it is all done online - reconciliations take no time at all!

Cons

I wish it were easier to add residents to leases that have already been signed and to assign leases mid-lease.

Overall a Quality Property Management Software Platform

Overall Buildium is a really good platform to use especially if you want things to be automatically done or updated. I like that customize dashboard that lets you know when leases are expiring and need to be renewed. They also allow you to auto list properties for rent. This is extremely helpful for us. One down side of this platform is the inability to send debts to collection like other platforms have. Overall, I would recommend Buildium as long as they were made aware of the extra charges and services they continue to try and promote to tenants.

Pros

The thing I like the post is that it automatically applies late fees to accounts. It also auto notifies tenants once they make a payment on their account. I like that you can email every tenant using one email instead of trying to email them individually. The site is very user friendly with a customizable dashboard to help you get a quick snap shot of your rentals.

Cons

I don't like some of the auto emails that get sent to tenants to help sell some of the products Buildium is promoting. For instance, they want all tenants to have insurance and will continually email them to get them to purchase insurance that Buildium gets a cut of. They also are encouraging tenants to set up ACH payments, which if you don't have the top account level, charges the owner to use the service. I feel like Buildium continues to try and do add ons from both the tenants and the owners which is frustrating considering the amount of money we pay for the software.

We've been using Buildium for about 2 years, long enough to get a good feel for its strengths and weaknesses. My overall impression is that this is a good product for small to medium size residential property management firms (10-100 units). If you have fewer than 10, this product is overkill. If more than 100, you'll probably find it too simplistic. The product is geared to residential properties and residential associations. Managing commercial portfolios with it can be difficult. The Good: Accounting functionality is pretty strong. GL, AR, AP, budgets and property ledgers are handled seamlessly. Very easy to use even for beginners. I like the global search functionality. You can pretty much find anything using it without navigating through the menus. Pricing is relatively inexpensive. It's cloud-based, so you don't have to maintain any software on your own computers. You can access it anywhere with a web browser. Some people see this as a negative, but we've not had any issues with Buildium being down unexpectedly. The scheduled maintenance times are generally late at night. Support is good if you're having problems with the standard functionality. In general I would say the support staff understands their product well. And you can get them on the phone to explain things. That's becoming less common with companies today. Document management is hit & miss. I love that I can post a PDF receipt for every expense right there in the ledger. However, documents at the property- or owner level are less helpful. It's just one big bucket per property or owner. Having a folder structure would be a big help. (Not there today.) Buildium offers tenant bill-pay through an online portal for rent payments, and also outbound electronic payments to property owners. It's done through a 3rd party vendor and at additional cost. This is a double-edged sword. Very convenient; it makes the bookkeeping entries for you automatically. But if you're doing outbound payments, make sure to treat it just like an online banking account (long passwords, be careful of who in your office has access to it, etc.) Allowing for extra security questions or letting users limit the IP addresses that have this outbound payment functionality would be helpful. The Bad: As noted, you'll get frustrated if you're trying to use this for commercial properties. The designers make assumptions that you're doing residential. CRM functionality is practically non-existent. This is an accounting package. They do have some decent (and customizable) postal-mail templates and can do mail-merge so you can send notices to tenants and owners. But this does not extend to email. You'll need another product to do CRM and do double data entry between systems. There is no integration layer or API, so no chance of integrating this with your CRM system or generating custom reports. The reports, while nice-looking, are as-is and not customizable in any way. You're stuck with what they give you. They make some odd design decisions sometimes. For example, you can't generate an association owner invoice for an owner who lives someplace other than the managed property. The invoice is always addressed to the managed property, even if you entered a different mailing address for the owner, as if an association owner would never rent out the property. These types of oddities abound, and the product support folks will never acknowledge it as a problem. They'll tell you to fill out an enhancement request, which may be considered for implementation someday, or may not. You'll never know. Providing a way to customize reports or providing an API would help in this area. In Summary: Buildium is good at what it does, but what it does is pretty limited. You will likely be happy if you're in their demographic sweet spot (10-100 residential units). It's cheap enough to sign up and try it out to see if it's right for you. If you manage commercial properties, have a very large or complex portfolio, or need integrated CRM capabilities, it's probably not for you.

Will never use another program

Buildium had always been the go to for me. It's user friendly for staff and extremely user friendly for my residents and older residents that aren't as technologically inclined. Anyone can use it. And when my older residents are confused they can call the hotline and get customer services from the team rather than calling is office during off hpurs.

Pros

The ease of importing all of our data and getting everything set up specifically for our hoa property. Everything we needed and none of the rental stuff we didn't. The team assisting us in seeing up the system has been incredible.

Cons

There is nothing I dislike. I would love to have the ability to shower multiple chargers on statements for dues and assessment and have those both track. But the team has shown me a way we can do that until the update team has created that ability.

Definitely Worth a Try

Overall, I think Buildium is a good company and I think they are struggling with the fast growth process, as many companies do. The cost of their program is less than Appfolio and the folks that work for them are better at helping out with issues. I found Appfolio's phone support to be mostly snarky know-it-alls and patronizing 20-somethings with an attitude who seemed to be bothered by my questions . Buildium support has never come across that way.

Pros

The set up process and assistance in doing it was quite seamless. The ongoing support is there if you need it and the tutorials, although not great or always up to date, do help you figure things out without having to call in.

Cons

The close-out of a tenant can be awkward and not intuitive. The return of security deposits with interest and charging of fees is clunky. Also, when a lease runs out, the system doesn't roll them over to month-to-month. It simply just closes out the lease on line and makes it look like the tenant doesn't live there anymore or owe any rent. This is both frustrating and stressful because if a tenant owes money and decides not to declare that, they could potentially get away without paying rent. There needs to be a change in the rollover of the leases in the system so we don't miss collecting rent.