Fixing to switch to Rent Cafe ....any tips I need to know?

 

It's nice

We currently use Apptex

TaiRae Richey I love Apptex

Kathy Brown I do too!!

It’s great. Super user friendly

Hope you never have to call their customer service. Lol.

I absolutely loved Rent Cafe when I used it. I'm not sure how it's changed over the years, but it made it so much easier to communicate with your residents and sent notices

For what? Website hosting? Resident and leasing portals? Marketing? All of the above?

Katie Butler Roncadori Yes this can offer lots of tips just don’t want to get to crazy on you.

Patience required. In my experience. So slow.

Lisa Malczewski I go 900 miles an hour and that's WITH taking my prescription meds ....that are supposed to calm me down

Lisa Malczewski idk if this is going to be a good switch for me ....I dont do slow

Don’t forget to use the date ranges when searching for a prospect

Don’t do it unless you want to teach yourself through hours of videos. Zero ongoing training support.

Christina Bartlett hi Christina. Please work with your corporate office with training. We have a lot of resources to help

Amy Gregory sorry. We dropped RP because of lack of support. I am the corporate office and I always got the excuse “go watch the video” and each department didn’t know one from another. Tickets would go unanswered for days and we constantly had to follow up. Shout out to my rep Taylor for really trying to help us though.

I hope you blink fast because the webpage expires faster than the blink of an eye. Used it for 4 years now and two different companies and it has some great tools but incredibly irritating when it expires before you can even click the next thing.

Savannah Atkins truth! I just stopped using it when I switched jobs and I’m using appfolio again. I was just admiring today how I don’t get kicked out like I did with rentcafe.

Amazing what a difference it makes!

App Folio - is the best!

Lisa-Marie McGaughey

I love rent cafe. User friendly.

I switched to it a month ago. Let’s just say after the system not doing some basic tasks, I’m switching to appfolio.

Lisa-Marie McGaughey I use appfolio

Janie Nash Burnett I used it for years. I had to get 50 units before I could switch to it. Now I can because I’ve hit 53!

Lisa-Marie McGaughey I was thinking you had used it before. way to go on getting new units!

Hire a consultant to help you Paula Lewis can help!

Michele Crochetiere TaiRae-I’d love to help. PM me any questions you have.

RUN

Buildium is the best!!!

Thank you for all the feedback! I don't get to pick the software bc im an APM. Ive used it for a little bit but not real familiar with it.

Don't

We use both CRM Flex and Rent Cafe Site Manager. I really like it!

Amber Williams Despise FLEX

Don’t

Don't

If you set up buildings in voyager you can email bulk by building and by other filters like resident birthdays, pets etc., automatic emails, bulk texting, resident portal with a bulletin board for residents to trade/communicate, announcements you can post in their portal, reports for resident activity in portal etc (logged in but didn't pay), website design, SEO assistance, etc. The help button can search anything with user guides or videos. Residents can pay online, app, text to pay, Alexa. Just like any other system it's as good as the work you put into it.

I miss rent cafe.

Easy peasy!

If you plan to send any emails out through rentcafe, I suggest doing them in a word document first and copying and pasting instead of typing it out in the program. It times out often and if you haven’t saved the draft you lose it all. I cannot tell you how many times it took me to learn this.

We use it, loading it on each and every new residents iPhone, showing them how to use it to pay rent, sign documents, review community events, etc. A very useful tool!!!

We just use an Excel spreadsheet.

Rent Café can be both, super easy and annoying at different times. It is super user friendly if they understand and get it, but not all do. Only negative thing I have is that if they have auto pay there are a lot of specifics with that. AND if they have auto pay- it does not tell them or notify them that their auto pay is not enough to cover the charges owed (if they set a max amount) OR that their auto pay is ending which can cause people to get late fees and say ''i have auto pay''. We work with Yardi and Rent café so not sure if it's different depending on the system you use but that is one big thing i do not like about it being the delinquency lady. Also, it can be confusing when someone is moving from a community that uses rent café at their current/past place. but overall it's not that bad.