The Rapid Implosion of Propertyware

What to learn about customer service & communications from a PR disaster

I have been a Propertyware customer for over a dozen years at this point. In fact, not only have I been a customer, but for most of those years I was a staunch advocate of the platform. Before Rentvine came on the scene, Propertyware was really the only web-based property management accounting platform with an open API (a system that allows for connecting software to other software and sharing information). The closest competitor was Rent Manager, but it was a remote login system instead of a cloud-based system, creating other problems, and the user experience was even more difficult than Propertyware’s, which many consider far outdated at this point.

The biggest competitor was always Appfolio, but Appfolio still to this day does not have a truly open API, and anyone wanting to connect to Appfolio must jump through a mountain of hoops. Don’t get me wrong, Appfolio has made enormous strides in recent years with their Appfolio Stack marketplace, but it is NOT an open API by any stretch of the imagination. The other competitors (Property Boss, Yardi Breeze, Buildium, Promas, etc.) just aren’t on the same level as Appfolio or Propertyware. So those of us looking for a robust property management accounting platform that also allowed us to own our own data and connect it as we wanted to other software really only had the choice of Propertyware. For those reasons, I was an outspoken fan.

Things have rapidly deteriorated at Propertyware, however. Less than 5 years ago, in late 2019, RealPage acquired Buildium (RealPage is the holding company that owns Propertyware and an assortment of other businesses). To many, this was a major red flag. Why would RealPage want to acquire a competing software that is so fundamentally different from their own product that the two could not possibly be combined? And RealPage didn’t get this for a steal, either. They paid over half a BILLION dollars for it. Clearly this was not a minor deal and RealPage must have real plans for Buildium. The conspiracy theories started quickly that RealPage would be letting Propetyware wither on the vine and putting all of their focus on the shinier (but far less capable) Buildium. Always the skeptic who eschews any sort of conspiracy theories, I didn’t take this seriously at the time. But I did start to notice that Propertyware’s presence in the industry was fading. While RealPage hosted a user conference for SFR in 2019, nothing was scheduled for the following year or any year since. Propertyware stopped having large booths (or any booths at all, in some cases) at conferences. The people at Propertyware that many of us had known for years started to leave and take other jobs. Even the best connected Propertyware clients found themselves having zero points of contact at Propertyware. Where I used to have the head of Propertyware’s cell phone number saved in my contacts, I now didn’t even know who my account manager was, or if there was one.

Fast forward a year. RealPage announces that it has entered into a deal with private equity firm Thoma Bravo to be acquired; that deal closed just months later in April of 2021. The conspiracy theories got a big boost from that news. Now not only does RealPage own two competing products under the same roof, but RealPage is owned by a PE firm, with PE firms being well known for slashing and burning their acquired businesses to extract maximum value out of them, frequently at the expense of the acquired businesses and their customers, employees, and other stakeholders. It was fuel on the rumor mill fire.

But then things got quiet for a while. Not much was happening with Propertyware, just the occasional minor software update, and while Buildium rolled out a new API, there wasn’t an abundance of new features on that platform, either. Not all that surprising, as a PE firm is unlikely to dump a lot of money into software engineering, but it did cool down some of the talk that Buildium was the golden child and Propertyware was going to be sacrificed in its favor.

Then along came August of this year. Seemingly out of nowhere, while I was at the NARPM Southern States Conference in Florida, a bunch of smaller Propertyware users got bizarre emails from Propertyware telling them that they were going to be moved over to Buildium in just a few weeks. They weren’t asked to make the move. They were just told that they WOULD be moving. This obviously created a sense of panic in every other Propertyware user that they would be next on the chopping block. Rentvine did what any sane business would do and jumped on the opportunity, letting Propertyware users know that Rentvine has an open API, custom reporting, portfolio-based accounting, and a lot of other Propertyware similarities in a much more modern package. Being at the Southern States Conference at the time, I ran to the Rentvine booth and started discussions about transitioning my own PM business, even though I had not gotten the email from Propertyware. Meanwhile the Facebook groups lit up with complaints from Propertyware customers, and it seemed that the conspiracy theories that had been lingering for years were coming to fruition. Propertyware had a PR disaster on its hands in such a small and tight-knit industry.

It Gets Worse

Things quieted down a bit again, but only temporarily. Larger Propertyware users began to think that MAYBE they would be left alone, at least for a while, and have some time to plan for a future transition.

That was until this Thursday, when Propertyware somehow found a way to make it worse. An email came out from Mike Mauseth, now the head of the RealPage division called “Mixed Use,” which includes Propertyware, Buildium, and HomeWiseDocs. First, that’s a red flag right there. Propertyware doesn’t even have its own division, and hasn’t for a long time now. When RealPage needs to reach out from the highest levels of the business to their customer base, they don’t even have a dedicated Propertyware Senior VP to talk to us. We get someone whose time is divided between several major products, including a competitor to our software. But that red flag is just the tip of the iceberg.

Instead of starting off this email with an apology (which was long overdue) for how they handled things in August, the email starts with an attack. An attack on “competitors and people previously affiliated with Propertyware,” accusing them of “misleading reports” and “misinformation” about RealPage and Propertyware. Worse, they accuse these people of “stok[ing] fear in an attempt to harm RealPage and line their own pockets.”