ADDA vs RealPage: Which is a better fit?

Marianne T.: Hello, my name is Marianne, I'm a president of a property management company. I give RealPage a three out of five. For more reviews like this, click below. We weren't using any software when I first started using RealPage. We had considered Yardi and AMSI and we chose RealPage simply because of the way ownership and management of the data was stored. It wasn't really about ability of the system. We chose RealPage over Yardi and AMSI at the time because we had better control over the data and the storage of it. It's different now per se because it's more cloud-based, but initially, that wasn't the case. Today they're all pretty much the same. So that's really not a deciding factor. The onboarding process was quite cumbersome. It entails a lot of spreadsheets, a lot of self-directed integration. It's not what you would expect. You expect to have more support. And then the integration, every company I've worked at that has used RealPage, whether new or converted, never uses the accounting function. For whatever reason, every company I have run has chosen to maintain their existing accounting functions, which means more work because it doesn't really mesh. So I think their onboarding process and integration is a bit lackluster. I would say to anyone that's currently seeking new software, you need to really think about what it is that's important to your business. For example, in today's world, we just assume that all software has the ability to do mass communications by email and text. That's not necessarily the case. And I learned that the hard way. As recent as 2020, RealPage did not have the ability to do mass text and email. They were just integrating one to one texting, which is quite useless. If a water main breaks on a property, you want to be able to notify hundreds of people in mass by text that there's an emergency shutdown of water and that's not an option. So to me, that's crucial. If that is a service you're used to providing or want to provide, make sure that's part of your questioning because when you assume that it's there, it may not be. And they also run on an a la carte menu. So they pitch it that a la carte is preferable, but it's not because every module that they have that you're picking from their menu of services means a separate onboarding, a separate transition, and now their onboarding is completely self-guided. So they give you an information sheet of how to do it, which I also learned the hard way was not very inclusive of all the features. And they also consider some features to be global and property. So if it's a global function, you can update it in your master community and it pushes it out to all of your properties. If it's a property feature and you have two dozen properties, you now have to enter those changes or updates property level. So 24 times. And then if you go back and realize they were missing a piece of instructions for the property level, you're back in those 24 sites again. And I went through that numerous times. So it was extremely frustrating and definitely needs to be looked at, really, really thought out because they're quick to pitch how wonderful they are, but you really need to know what it is you're looking for before you make the decision.