Hello, everyone. Welcome to AppFolio's 2025 Investor Meeting. We are thrilled to be holding this event from our corporate headquarters here in today's sunny Santa Barbara, California. It's great to see so many of you here in person as well as streaming online. I'm Bill Schroeder, Vice President of Finance at AppFolio, and I'll be your host today. Today, we'll begin with Shane Trigg, our President and CEO, kicking us off with AppFolio's vision and strategy. Kyle Triplett, our Senior Vice President of Product, will then talk about how we are differentiating to win. Lisa Horner, our Chief Marketing Officer, will discuss our go-to-market strategy. We'll take a short break. After the break, Stacy Holden, our Vice President Industry Principal, will host the AppFolio Customer Panel. Who doesn't love a good AppFolio Customer Panel? We'll conclude with a financial overview by Tim Eaton, our CFO.
For today's meeting, we'll ask you to save your questions for the Q&A portion of the program. At that time, we'll take questions both in person and from those streaming. We'll conclude the program around noon Pacific. At that time, for in-person attendees, we'll head outside for lunch, weather cooperated for us, which is great news. We'll say goodbye to those streaming today's event. This presentation contains forward-looking statements that are based on management's beliefs and assumptions, which are formed from currently available information. Forward-looking statements include any statement that refers to possible or assumed strategy, trend analysis, future product developments, future market conditions and size, and other characterizations of future events. We assume no obligation to update any such forward-looking statements.
For greater detail about risks and uncertainties, please see our filings with the SEC, including our Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2024, and the most recent quarterly report on Form 10-Q, which you can find on our Investor Relations website. This presentation also includes a discussion of non-GAAP operating margin. A description and reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures to AppFolio's financial results, as determined in accordance with GAAP, are included in the appendix to this presentation. Before we hear from our first speaker, Shane, enjoy this short video.
I feel very passionate about impacting positive change and getting to create positive environments for people to thrive at work and for them to live. My name is Danielle McCarthy, and I'm the President of AMC. We are a privately held family-owned business. We operate 12,000 apartment homes in Southern California, and we're a vertically integrated operator with in-house investment management and construction, which gives us alignment across the full asset lifecycle. At AMC, we refer to our residents as VIPs. This drives us to provide excellent service from the day they tour all the way through move-out. High performance to me means exceeding expectations. In order to do that, you have to have metrics in real time showing you how you're performing, how you're delivering service, and what the needs of your investors, your VIPs, and your team members are.
The team that supported us through the entire implementation process was outstanding. We feel it now with our customer success rep. They genuinely care about our product and our operations just as much as we do. Something that AppFolio has helped us do that we thought was unthinkable years ago was communicate so rapidly, so frequently with our VIPs. We created a RealmX workflow called the VIP Lifecycle, which automatically sends touch points, texts, and emails to our VIPs at 90, 180 days after they've moved in because we genuinely want to hear about their experience and make sure that they feel connected to us even after the leasing process was over. We're sending 130,000 text messages a month, so it's trimmed the work in half because everything automatically lives within their profile. We didn't just invest in AppFolio for today.
We bet on it for the future, knowing it's the platform that will power what's next.
Now, please welcome Shane Trigg, AppFolio President and CEO.
Hello, everybody. All right, thank you, Bill. It's great to see all of you in person here. Thank you so much for coming in our beautiful office here in Santa Barbara. As you know, it's been raining cats and dogs, so the sun came out for all of you. So happy that happened. I also want to welcome everyone on joining us, all the investors joining us via live stream. Thank you for being here today. This is my second investor day as CEO of AppFolio, and it's an honor and a privilege to be here with you today. You will find that we've made tremendous progress since our last investor day in 2023, and we've done that by focusing on our customers, by delivering industry-leading innovation, and being disciplined operators. Today, we're going to share the AppFolio story.
We're going to give you insights into our business, our vision, and strategy, and how we're creating value for our customers. You will also get to hear from some of those customers, so we're excited for you to get to know them a little bit and hear their story and how they're experiencing AppFolio. Now, everything in our strategy really focuses on some very clear outcomes. It's really about growing units, revenue, and margin by advancing the foundations of the AppFolio performance platform. We have a lot to talk about today, so let's get started. Now, in 2026, it's hard to believe, but AppFolio will be 20 years old, having been founded in 2006. In 2015, we went public, and in 2023, we declared our sole focus on real estate, recasting the vision and mission for the company.
Through that focus, we are on the precipice of crossing $1 billion in revenue, putting AppFolio on a very exclusive list of public technology companies ever to cross that milestone. Our durable leadership principles of creating happy and growing customers, delivering industry-leading innovation, and delivering exceptional service, balancing growth and profitability, and investing in great people and culture have positioned us for long-term sustainable growth. As we enter our 20th year, it feels like, in many respects, we are just getting started. That sentiment is due to our deep conviction in our vision and strategy, the significant opportunity ahead, as well as the trajectory-changing transformation we've achieved over the last three years. Now, I became CEO in Q1 of 2023, and it was pretty evident that we were going to have to quickly change our behaviors to create a better future for our customers.
I told our investor community that we would keep it simple, clear, and disciplined. To the credit of all AppFolians, our teams and people, we've been able to do that, and we've been able to transform our financial performance. Look at the difference in our business over the past three years. Year-ending 2022, we finished at $472 million in revenue, and now in 2025, we're guiding to the midpoint at $948 million in revenue, doubling our revenue over that period of time. Our revenue per employee has gone from $264,000 to $532,000. Our non-GAAP operating margin back then was negative 1%, and now we're guiding at the midpoint at 24%. Our operating cash flow has increased from $25 million to $177 million year to date, and our operating cash flow per share has gone from $0.72 to $4.87 year to date.
Now, while transforming our financial performance, we made a commitment to become the undisputed innovation leader in our industry. In many ways, this is a visual roadmap of our strategic evolution. From opening up our platform with AppFolio Stack to creating premium tiers like Plus and Max, to delivering Realm, our AI suite of products, to reimagining the resident experience with Folio Space, we have been intentional with every decision by focusing on delivering exceptional customer value so we can capture that value. Turning innovation into customer value is creating tremendous success for our customers. Make no mistake, we are winning because our customers are winning. It shows in our results. In 2022, since then, we have added over 3,300 new customers, over 2 million units under management on our platform, and those 2025 numbers are through three quarters, so we look to build upon that.
Our RPU has grown from $66 to $103. Within our base, the units on premium tiers have gone from 10% to 25%, which speaks to our continued success in SMB, but really our growing success with customers up market. In Realm, our AI suite of products, our AI-powered solutions, are being utilized now by 96% of our customers compared to 40% just three years ago. Now, the market has responded as well. Customers of all sizes are switching to AppFolio and growing their business with us as their trusted partner. While continuing to be the market leader with SMB businesses, one of the biggest differences in our company compared to three years ago is the success we've experienced with up-market customers. Our ongoing commitment to delivering industry-leading innovation and exceptional service is driving our customers to adopt our products and services.
AppFolio has become the competitive advantage for ambitious property management businesses. Now, this momentum has resulted in AppFolio receiving a lot of external recognition for our innovation, our customer impact, and our culture. In 2025, we were named by Fortune to the Future 50, which highlights companies with the greatest long-term growth potential. We were also named the overall leader on the G2 grid for property management software and voted by Fortune as one of the best workplaces in technology, entirely received from the feedback of our employees. This recognition reinforces our values that great people make a great company, and innovation powers success. Now, speaking of our values, from our early days, our values have always been the foundation of who we are and how we approach opportunities and challenges.
Our actions are always grounded in the context of our values and have served as a catalyst to our transformation and our conviction in the significant opportunity ahead. Now, beyond our values, we do our best to model the behaviors we expect. We believe how we experience each other is how our customers in the industry will experience AppFolio. We call these leadership characteristics the AppFolian way. The AppFolian way encourages us to paddle as one, be customer-obsessed, raise the bar, set the pace, and deliver results. The AppFolian way guides us in how we show up for our teams, how we show up for our customers, and of course, how we show up for our shareholders. Now, AppFolio is led by an outstanding leadership team who exemplify our values and the AppFolian way.
They drive our focus on customers, our industry-leading innovation, and the discipline in how we operate and make decisions. I'm very excited for you to get to know some of these leaders throughout our time together today. Now, let's talk about our future and where we're headed. Just as there's been a transformation for AppFolio, the real estate industry is facing transformational change as well. Property managers are facing big challenges, battling external pressures, a growing list of technology providers and point solutions, and a surge of AI tools, creating an over-reliance on disjointed experiences and task-based outcomes. Where businesses are struggling to move beyond task efficiency and profitability is slipping. In many ways, the industry has equated efficiency with performance, centralizing back-office tasks, layering on tools, doing outsourcing.
When efficiency is the end game, teams get narrowly focused on completing tasks and processes faster and not thinking bigger about how they can create value. This task-based approach is creating a performance gap in our industry. Even with record investments in the prop tech ecosystem, nearly 60% of operators do not feel like they are fully utilizing the systems they have. Despite having more tools, the business impact remains very limited. Research says that 75% of property managers cite achieving operational efficiency as their number one top challenge. Their number two top challenge is translating that efficiency into maximizing revenue and margin performance. Yet in the same research, only 17% of property managers report winning consistently. Why is this? It is because platforms were built to manage tasks, not to deliver real performance outcomes. It is time to redefine what winning looks like in this industry.
Property managers serve an ecosystem of customers: investors, residents, vendors, owners. Success is centered on a holistic experience, driving real performance outcomes where everyone in their ecosystem thrives. Traditional legacy property management software has let the industry down. Now, with bolt-on AI and this growing list of point solutions and services, there is significant competition to independently own the system of record, the system of action, and the system of growth, creating challenges for property managers with their limited resources to stitch together these fragmented experiences. A performance platform is required to close this performance gap, a platform that seamlessly and fully integrates the system of record, the system of action, and the system of growth, because true performance can only be realized by adopting all preceding systems. This is the future we're building here at AppFolio. We call it real estate performance management.
This AI-native modern platform puts property managers at the forefront of what is possible, not focused on task efficiency, but focused on delivering real performance outcomes. In this new paradigm, we are empowering property managers to become performance managers. With the AppFolio Performance Platform, we seamlessly integrate our system of record, our system of action, and system of growth, where the sum of these interconnected systems delivers unparalleled performance, closing the performance gap our industry is facing. Now, three years ago, we declared a new vision for AppFolio. That vision is to power the future of real estate. We deeply, deeply believe in this vision. Our mission is to build a platform where real estate comes to be a business, and we achieve this mission and deliver on it by building the AppFolio Performance Platform. Our path from platform to performance goes through our core customer, the property manager.
If the property manager is our core customer, then the other industry segments are their customers. The property manager is the only industry segment that directly interacts with all other industry segments, creating our highest point of leverage to reach investors, residents, and vendors, making the property manager our fastest path to value. Property managers who deliver exceptional investor, resident, and vendor experiences will reinforce our most important metric: units under management, creating a virtuous cycle of business where industry segments independently grow revenue and margin while reinforcing customer acquisition and unit expansion. The AppFolio Platform is purpose-built to make the property manager the competitive advantage. At our scale, we're in a position to deliver that value at a magnitude unlike any other. Now, an important kernel of our vision is to own the control points through a unified experience.
This means property managers and their customers, investors, residents, vendors never have to leave AppFolio to get the value they need, whether we build it or deliver it through a partner. By going through the property manager, the systems are the control points. With our system of record, that's where we store the data. With our system of action, we do the work with them. These are our agentic capabilities with our performers that we just announced. Our system of growth is where we create the value and unify the experience in the moments that matter.
By creating that value, we can share that value, which means we can drive the economics, we can unlock performance, and create that virtuous cycle, reinforcing customer acquisition and unit expansion on our platform while independently defending against point solutions, trying to get in and penetrate those critical value streams in those moments that matter. Now, this is our vision of where we play and how we win. Our platform powers our core customer, the property manager, which powers industry segments, their customers, owning control points through a system of record, a system of action, and a system of growth, creating value by unifying the experiences in the moments that matter, driving the economics, turning property managers into performance managers, becoming the platform where real estate comes to do business, powering the future of real estate.
Simply put, we build the platform, we store the data, we do the work with them, we create the value, we unify the experience, we drive the economics, we power the future. Now, we have an enormous opportunity in front of us, and our path to capture that potential is within our reach. Today, we have over 21,000 customers and over 9 million units under management. The majority of those customers and units on our platform are coming from property managers and owner-operators.
With these customers and all future customers and all units on our platform, we extend our reach to 644,000 home service providers, 17 million investors with rentals, 110 million residents in rentals, and 5 million real estate transactions, resulting in significant opportunity for AppFolio to capture value, giving AppFolio a resilient and sustainable future for growth, creating an experience that profoundly improves the lives of our customers and the communities we serve for years and years to come.
Our goal is to unlock performance not just for our customers, but also for our employees and, of course, all of our shareholders through delivering differentiated industry-leading innovation and through the sum of our interconnected systems, the system of record where we store the data, the system of action where we do the work with them, and the system of growth by creating value and unifying the experience in the moments that matter. We drive the economics and deliver real performance outcomes, closing the gap and creating a future of winning for our customers. To deliver on this future, we organize our efforts around three strategic durable pillars. The first is differentiate to win. This defines a unique value we're creating for our customers and how we secure our competitive advantage. The second is to deliver performance efficiently.
This ensures we're scaling with discipline and rigor to make sure that we can deliver in service of our customers. The third, and probably the most important, is great people and culture. This ensures that we have the skills, capabilities, and people who can inspire this future. With that, I appreciate your time today, and I'm going to hand it over to Kyle Triplett, our Senior Vice President of Product, to walk us through our strategic pillar of differentiate to win. Kyle, come up.
Good morning, everybody. I get to have the pleasure of talking to you about the AppFolio Performance Platform. Grateful that I get to do that. We unveiled this just a few weeks back at our Future conference. Anybody attend Future by chance? A couple of you? We are very excited about this and so are our customers. As we think about the foundation for how our customers improve their performance, the AppFolio Performance Platform is what they are using to be able to record the system of record, to drive the system of action, and the system of growth. Each of these systems represents a distinct capability and a distinct revenue stream. We have built all of this on AI-native architecture. That means that every workflow, every data point, and every customer interaction operates on one unified platform, not just a collection of disconnected tools.
Today, I get to walk you through each of these different systems, and we'll get to see some software. Hopefully, everybody's excited to see that as well. We'll get to do some demos. Our system of record stores and maintains all of the critical operational data for our customers. It delivers consistency, accuracy, and accessibility across every AppFolio workflow so teams are able to operate from one reliable source of truth. This enables everything that follows: intelligent automation, unified experience, and performance visibility. Our strategy starts with the capabilities that earn us the right to win. We have to earn being the system of record for our customers. They may not differentiate us on their own, but they are essential to storing the data that powers everything else.
In accounting, we're extending our capabilities with flexible entity modeling and intelligent automation, aligning AI with how customers want to run their financial operations. With mixed portfolios, we're expanding our ability to support various portfolio types with our advancements in student and affordable housing. We want customers to be able to run their entire complex portfolio all within AppFolio. In permissions, we're introducing granular, flexible controls and smarter role management to ensure that we can add additional safety and security. In reporting, we're creating more customizable, visualization-ready reports that move from static compliance and reactive reporting into actionable insight. Each of these advancements reinforces our position as the system of record for our customers. Let's talk a little bit about unified data. The heart of every successful platform is data. For property managers, data is everything.
When it's scattered across systems, the results are conflicting answers, slower decisions, and greater risk. Our system of record holds every dimension of the customer's business: their properties, their stakeholders, residents, owners, accounting, leasing, maintenance, so that every action is grounded in reliable, consistent data. The unified data foundation enables smarter automation and more connected experiences across AppFolio's ecosystem. AppFolio Stack integrates directly into the system of record. I heard Shane mention we released this a few years back and became an open ecosystem. This allows customers to be able to connect their external data sources right into that same trusted environment. This is our customer space to connect their data to the outside world. Today, we have over 4 million units connected to Stack. We have 84 partners across app and solution partners and eight product categories.
Stack creates a powerful network effect that strengthens the platform with every new integration that we bring in. Stack is not just an add-on. It's how we scale connectivity and drive stickiness with our customers. As we look to expand the capabilities of Stack, we are bringing partners directly into the AppFolio experience. It's something I'm incredibly excited about. RealmX Flows can now trigger actions with Stack apps. So a partner can kick off a workflow in AppFolio, work alongside, and you're parallelizing the two technologies to work alongside each other with event streaming and everything pulling back into one experience, which extends our system of action further and supports deeper integrations with partners. Storing data is just the beginning. Once customers have reliable data, the next step is helping them to do the work. We've built the foundation, the trusted sources of truth.
Now, let's look at how we turn that into real, measurable work and performance outcomes. Onto the system of action. This is our execution layer. It's where AppFolio moves from storing the data to doing the work with our customers. Whether that work is done by a human user or by a RealmX Performer, which is our AI agents, this layer turns information into results. Our advantage lies in codifying daily operations so that customers depend on AppFolio to help them run their business. With AppFolio powering the work itself, we deepen our moat, we expand engagement, and we can directly drive customer performance. Anyone heard of AppFolio Realm before? Yes? Great. Realm is our suite of AI products that are embedded throughout the platform. 96% of customers already engage with our AI tools because they're built with the workflows that they already rely on.
Our AI architecture combines traditional ML, generative AI, and agentic capabilities, and it's backed by years of investment in data, context, and talent. This is not AI just for AI's sake. It's purpose-built to make every customer interaction faster, smarter, and more profitable. When we take a look at our RealmX suite of products, these are our generative AI capabilities. Customers are not just adopting new tools. They're changing the way that they run their business. The RealmX Assistant is a copilot experience. Think of this as riding with the customer along their journey in the application. They can send in text-to-data and text-to-action queries, which means they're using natural language to ask questions about their database, get back responses that clearly show where the answer came from, and text-to-action, which is asking the system to do something on their behalf.
We see customers who are using the assistant saving over 10 hours each week, which is an incredible time savings. RealmX Messages unifies communications across channels. Think of this as a unified inbox, emails, text messages, all coming into one spot where AppFolio has context and can help generate a response for the customer. Anyone a Grammarly user, similar tool? Couple nods. Customers can actually adjust the response to be short, long, friendly, professional, gives them the ability to really do their job quickly but still tailor it to their business. We see folks who are taking these messages and saving 26 seconds per message, which, again, really big when you are spending all day doing communication back and forth. RealmX Flows, our workflow engine, helps customers to codify and automate their business through triggers and actions. We have seen over 15 million actions automated in 2025.
You can think of an action as a task that a human would have otherwise had to do. A ton of adoption and really exciting to see the results of folks interacting with these products. These are real productivity gains. They help expand the margins of our customers, and they reinforce why AppFolio is the performance platform for the industry. At Future, we introduced RealmX Performers, and it is our move into true agentic AI. Performers handle routine tasks. They can adapt to change, and they can optimize for property managers' outcomes. We have launched the leasing and maintenance performers with our resident messenger performer currently being piloted with select customers. Now we get to have some fun with demos. Today, I get to show you how performers transition everyday operations into automated, measurable performance.
Our leasing performer is tightly coupled with RealmX Flows and built into our leasing CRM. A critical part of deploying successful agentic capabilities is the human-to-agent interaction. We're powering human users. What you'll see here is the performer interacting with prospects, demonstrating the user interface, and handing off seamlessly to human staff when needed. Going to kick it off. We navigated to the leasing CRM and went ahead and clicked on a prospect conversation with Jane texting about a two-bedroom and asking which utilities are covered. The performer uses the centralized knowledge hub to respond instantly and accurately. When Jane asks about rent and availability, the performer generates a combined response and includes a scheduling link that's tied to the leasing agent's calendar. Jane books a virtual tour, and the performer follows up automatically with tour details and qualification steps.
The prospect mentions they look good, but my credit score isn't great, and the performer has instruction to hand this back to the leasing staff for a personal follow-up. We navigate back into the CRM. What you're going to see is updated notes so that the human staff knows that help is now needed. In addition to this, we go ahead and queue it up in our CRM queue to also indicate help needed for the leasing agent when they get back into their computer to see what they need to be doing. That's the power of agentic AI in a human-centered workflow. It's automation that works with people. You just saw a text conversation. Now let's go ahead and look at voice because prospects and residents engage across many channels, and we have to make sure that we can support all of those for our customers.
For quality monitoring purposes, calls may be recorded. Welcome to Coronado Park. How may I assist you?
Hi. I'm looking for a two-bedroom apartment. Do you have anything available?
Yes. We have two-bedroom apartments available. When are you looking to move in?
As soon as possible.
Great. We have several two-bedroom options available now. May I have your first and last name?
Yeah. It's Teddy Ho.
Please wait while I'm noting down your interest. Thank you, Teddy. We have a two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment available now. Would you like to schedule a tour to see it?
Yeah, but before we do that, can you tell me a little bit about the building?
Coronado Park is at 1007 Fifth Avenue in San Diego. It has a pool, lounge, deck, barbecue, and is close to the beach, running trails, and nightlife.
Oh, that's really cool. I also have a 57 lb Chihuahua. Can I bring him to the building?
Yes. You can bring your Chihuahua to the building as long as he meets our breed and weight requirements. There is a non-refundable pet fee and monthly pet rent.
Oh, awesome.
Would you like to schedule a tour to see the two-bedroom apartment?
Sure. I'd love to. Do you have any available times tomorrow?
Hold on while I check our calendar. We have tours available tomorrow from 10:00 A.M. to 8:00 P.M. What time works best for you?
How about 4:00 P.M. tomorrow?
Please hold while I schedule this. Your tour is set for tomorrow at 4:00 P.M. Please bring a photo ID. Let us know if you have any questions before your visit.
Great. Thank you so much.
You are welcome, Teddy. We look forward to seeing you tomorrow at 4:00 P.M. for your tour.
How about that? Pretty awesome. After the call, the audio is transcribed, and it is stored directly into the CRM so that every interaction—voice, text, even image—feeds our system of record, giving property managers full context for every conversation. In this case, the team even learns that they can expect a 57 lb Chihuahua to be showing up to the move. Next up, we are going to move over to the RealmX maintenance performer. This AI agent interacts directly with residents to create work orders, to diagnose issues, and to dispatch maintenance technicians. What makes this especially powerful is that it is multimodal AI. It understands both language and images. The performer can interpret a resident's written message or analyze an uploaded photo to identify the issue automatically. It is a great example of how we blend intelligence and execution all in the performance platform. Let's take a look at our demo.
We're starting in the resident portal where a resident will be submitting a maintenance request. The performer asks for a short description or a photo of the problem, and the resident's going to go ahead and upload an image of a leaking faucet. Using image recognition, the performer identifies the faucet leak and begins to guide the resident through confirming the details. The performer gets the details from the resident and moves towards understanding how a technician would access the unit. Now the resident can actually type in natural language right here in the message box. In the meantime, the performer checks the maintenance team's schedule and begins to offer up appointment options for the resident to select from. The resident chooses a time, and the work order is then automatically created and scheduled.
Now, as we navigate back into AppFolio, the property manager sees the new work order with the image, the diagnostic details, and a confirmed appointment already logged. That's multimodal agentic AI taking what used to be a multi-step manual process and bringing it into a single, streamlined experience for both the resident and the property manager. We've talked about our system of record, talked about our system of action. Now it's time to move into the system of growth, which is how we turn performance into value across the ecosystem. It's the part of the performance platform that monetizes the experiences that we've unified, creating new revenue channels and outcomes for every stakeholder. This is where growth for both AppFolio and our customers is unlocked, and when we do this right, everyone has an opportunity to win.
Property managers grow efficiency and revenue, residents enjoy better experiences and results, and investors see increased renewal rates and returns. That's how we create a truly aligned, sustainable growth model. A core bet in our system of growth is resident. By unifying the experience between property managers and residents, we drive satisfaction, streamline operations, and open up new revenue opportunities. The resident relationship with the PM is the control point. If we deliver the resident journey end-to-end, property managers don't need an alternative. AppFolio becomes the definitive destination for resident management. Through Folio Space, our resident mobile application, we've built, partnered, and acquired to deliver one modern, seamless resident experience that connects every touchpoint from looking for a home and leasing to paying your rent and living. One of the highest impact moments in the resident life cycle is the move-in.
Three out of four residents report challenges with the process, and yet residents who are satisfied are 76% more likely to be satisfied with their property manager overall. We have millions of move-ins happening on AppFolio each year. It's a major opportunity to build loyalty and revenue. Two things are key here. First, we're capturing the resident relationship early, which allows us to be part of that top-of-funnel moment. Second, ensuring that the move-in completes on time optimizes for both service and revenue outcomes. This is where our partnerships and our acquisitions come into play. With Second Nature, we help property managers attract high-value services through resident benefits packages. Coming in 2026 with Live Easy, our resident concierge simplifies move-ins by setting up utilities and packaging key services like internet all in the AppFolio experience.
At our Future Conference, we launched Folio Space resident onboarding, and it's already changing how residents move in. What you'll see here is how we streamline the entire process while embedding opportunities for attached services. Going to start with the demo. We see four steps starting with sign your lease. They receive an invite to begin the onboarding process with a lease signing. The resident's guided through each step with move-in charges up next. They review their move-in charges, and they're directed into AppFolio Payments to go ahead and make that first payment. This could be their security deposit, their first month's rent. Next up, they're going to be confirming renter's insurance, and they can either upload an existing policy or select one of AppFolio's provided coverage options. Go ahead and navigate through. In this case, the resident's going to go ahead and select the popular plan, Guard Plus.
They're then again directed through to AppFolio Payments to go ahead and pay for the insurance. Finally, they're going to set up utilities. This is adding account details and confirming an activation date. Here, we're going to show just electric. Once that's done, the onboarding process completes with all the services confirmed and ready for move-in. Through resident benefits packages and Live Easy Concierge, we have an opportunity to attach additional value-added services during this process, creating new revenue opportunities that can be shared with our customers while still enhancing the resident experience. At Future, we also released Resident Onboarding Lift for property managers who want to extend the resident experience even further. Co-created with Second Nature, it delivers value-added services like credit building, rewards, identity protection, and this is what the idea of everyone wins looks like.
Residents get convenience, they get savings, and quality of life improvements for services that they want and need. Property managers boost retention, they earn ancillary revenue, and they can reduce maintenance costs. Investors benefit from improved NOI and longer-term asset performance. This is the system of growth in action, creating economic lift across the ecosystem. We also want to showcase our newest performer, the Resident Messenger Performer, now in pilot with select customers. It is the bridge between our system of action and our system of growth. This performer handles routine resident communications, automates decisions based on policies that are in AppFolio, and routes escalations intelligently to property managers. It also can proactively engage residents to offer assistance, drive renewals, or attach services.
Now that we've seen how value and engagement extend across the stakeholders in real estate, let's look at how we turn this growth for AppFolio and our customers. Value-added services are where our platform and customers come together to create scalable growth. These offerings extend AppFolio beyond core software, helping property managers grow, protect, and optimize their business. Through tightly integrated, high-value services, we unlock revenue across every part of the property manager's journey. You'll notice that performers now subsume some of our earlier AI solutions like Smart Maintenance and Lisa under one unified AI framework over here on Action the Work. In the near term, adoption comes from a la carte value-plus offerings, but in the long term, RealmX flows and performers will become the backbone of our platform. This is how we scale revenue and value together, performance that grows with every customer.
Everything we've shown here today connects back to one goal: delivering measurable performance for our customers. Customers adopting the AppFolio performance platform are already seeing tangible results. A great example of this comes from customers who are adopting RealmX Flows to codify and automate their business in AppFolio. These customers are reporting real gains: reduced vacancy time, higher renewal rates, and meaningful improvements to net operating income. That evidence reinforces the larger story. The unified AppFolio experience is driving measurable, repeatable performance across property managers, residents, and investors. We win when our customers win. To share more about our customers and how our go-to-market strategy helps us to efficiently deliver real performance, I'll hand it over to Lisa Horner, our Chief Marketing Officer.
Thank you, Kyle. Thank you. Am I live? Can you hear me? All right. Hello, everyone. Welcome to all of you to our campus and to those of you online. Thanks for being here today. I'm excited to represent our entire go-to-market teams from AppFolio. As you heard from Shane, the second pillar in our company strategy is to deliver performance efficiently. Today, I will review our go-to-market strategy and how we execute it to create efficient growth for AppFolio. A great and trusted brand is not just a nice-to-have. It creates operational leverage for our company. Our brand strategy is built on promises we can keep, relentless proof from customers, and zero daylight between the words we use and the experience our industry has with AppFolio.
Like our products and services, our brand is a differentiator for AppFolio, creating productivity across all audiences that we serve. There are five major stages of our funnel and our customer's journey with AppFolio: acquire, adopt, grow, retain, and advocate. From the first engagement with our brand to lifelong advocacy, our go-to-market teams have architected a flywheel of durable, efficient growth for AppFolio and our customers. In the first stage of our funnel, acquire, our marketing and sales teams are focused on new customer acquisition. Segmented go-to-market teams run common playbooks against aligned goals within a unified data and technology stack powering efficient, scalable customer acquisition for AppFolio. In alignment with our strategy to move up market, acquisition up-market sales capacity has grown 40% since 2023.
We are aligned on where we have the highest fit in the prospect universe as well, coupled with engagement and intent data that helps us predict propensity to buy. By prioritizing accounts by tier and automating investments and activity to our most ideal customer profiles, we create productivity for our sales teams. Our sales teams actually spend their time building relationships and converting new customers versus qualifying out low-fit pipeline. As we increase productivity, 2025 year to date, sales and marketing expenses as % of revenue is 13%. Additionally, we partner to engage all key stakeholders in target account buying groups. We have seen that cross-functional alignment within prospect accounts not only accelerates winning the deal, it also decreases time to value for all new users getting value from AppFolio as they onboard. The second stage in our funnel is adoption.
This is where go-to-market teams partner to ensure our customers are getting maximum value from our products and services. Early adoption on our platform is a very big priority for us. We have invested in product-led onboarding to decrease the time it takes customers from contract to realizing value from AppFolio. Our AI-native agentic platform reduces customer effort and accelerates their outcomes, driving faster onboarding, broader usage, and increased adoption, thereby delivering performance for both customers and AppFolio. Our Stack marketplace extends the value of AppFolio with deep integrations. Our customers use partner tools in platform, boosting adoption. The third stage of our funnel is growth. In this stage, go-to-market teams are focused on growing units under management, value-added services, and premium offering tiers within our customer base. Customer growth teams use revenue potential as a foundational element of our segmentation strategy.
Like our acquisition teams, marketing, sales, and services are commonly structured and goaled, working hand in hand to execute well-defined playbooks. Much of the same unified data and technology that powers efficient and scalable customer acquisition also powers growth. We get productivity and efficiency by applying common product, AI, and people-led motions to both acquisition and growth journey stages. As we increase the pace of innovation, we have also increased our growth sales capacity by 50% since 2023. Our goal is to ensure customers achieve measurable performance from our platform. Driving customer outcomes underpins our efficient growth as a company. The fourth stage in our funnel is to retain our customers, of course. AppFolio's predictable growth requires our marketing and services teams to create customer satisfaction and success, therefore retention. We believe that every service interaction is important to retaining our customers.
We consider high-quality service a means to both margin and growth. AppFolio customers access augmented assistance within our platform. In fact, in 2025 year to date, 59% of all support interactions are augmented and handled by AI. As AppFolio customers use more agentic and AI collaboration within our system of action, we see increases in performance that translate to long-term relationships with our customers. Like you heard from Kyle, the AppFolio performance platform enables measurable results. RealmX Flows users report 20% higher resident retention. When our customers actually retain more of their customers, they stay with AppFolio. The final stage of our journey is advocacy. Our brand is only as great as the promises we keep to our customers, which is why we focus on empowering our successful customers to become our biggest advocates.
In this time where markets like ours are filled with the promises of AI, real stories of AppFolio customers and their success cut through that noise and create credibility for our brand. We will continue to align AppFolio value with customer value, delivering efficient growth because of the trust that we have built in our market. Our go-to-market teams bring AppFolio's performance platform to an industry that really needs us. Through differentiated brand and customer experiences, we deliver predictable, efficient performance not only for AppFolio, but for all stakeholders in real estate. Thank you for your time today. We will now take a 10-minute break. For those of you in the room here, we will have refreshments right outside the door. We will resume at 10:10 in about 10 minutes for those of you online. We'll get back started at 10:10. Thank you.
I'm going to be able to hear you in the order that they're on the slide. Kai, can you mic up along the layer for Stacy?
We're getting ready to get started in one minute. One minute.
Are you hearing me?
Can they?
We're getting ready to get started in one minute. Can everybody please have a seat? Can everybody please have a seat? We're going to get started.
Thanks for coming, everybody.
Thank you.
Okay. Who's going to introduce?
I think Stacy was just going to get kicked off.
Oh, okay. Great. Okay. We'll give it about 30 seconds here. Okay.
Get these folks seated back here, and then we're ready to go.
I'm sorry.
Are you going to say something?
Yes.
Good.
We're good.
Thank you, Lori. Do I need to say anything?
How do I turn it?
We feel like they're back in college.
Can I see everyone's notebooks for the essay that will be taking place at the end of today? Welcome. I'm seeing you all for the first time. My name is Stacy Holden. I am Vice President Industry Principal here at AppFolio. I get the pleasure to make sure that everyone at AppFolio is customer-obsessed. We want to make sure that we're listening to our customers. It's been our DNA since day one, and it has gotten us to where we are today. With that, I could not be more honored in having these four lovely individuals here with us to be able to go through some questions. You'll be able to ask them some questions at the end and get to know a little bit about their experience with AppFolio today. Enough of me. Oh, look, I get a clicker too. Okay. Great.
There you go.
I'm going to let each of you introduce yourselves. I'm going to start over here with Rob. Tell the audience a little bit about you, your company, and as you're going into 2026, what's top of mind for you? Yeah.
Rob Gale. I'm President of DreamLive Prosper Communities. We're part of DLP Capital. We have $5.3 billion assets under management. We've been using AppFolio for investment management and obviously the operational software. We use it for both. We've been since like 2018. We got on a little steroids once I came over. I came over last November. I've managed before 35,000 units and took a company public in 2011. I've used every software there is out there. You'll hear why I really like AppFolio later.
Thank you, Rob. Tony.
I'm Tony Juliannell. I'm the CEO of Atlas Real Estate. We're a vertically integrated owner-operator of single-family and build-to-rent, as well as a third-party property manager. We operate in about 15 states, about $2.5 billion assets under management. I've been with AppFolio since 2015.
I think that's right. Yeah. Look, that's what the slide says.
Yeah.
That's some of the things on the slide, apparently.
What's Rob, I'm going to go back to you. What's top of mind for '26?
Oh, for 2026, our top of mind is really just diving into making sure that customer experience. What we focus on is we're building thriving communities that transform lives at DLP Capital and DreamLive Prosper Communities. Our focus is more of how can a software give our teams time back to give that experience. This is what we're excited about. We have a lot of Stack partners coming in and a lot of additional with the RealmXes we'll talk about later. It is good.
For you, sir?
Yeah. I think our emphasis or kind of rallying cry in 2026 is high-performing teams. I think one way we want to accomplish that is through simplification. One of the things we are very focused on is maybe different in that anything we are doing outside of AppFolio, we are trying to figure out how to do in AppFolio. They have been an amazing partner in helping make that happen.
Josh, introduce yourself, sir.
Yes. I'm Josh Winch, President of Focus Property Management. We're based out of Wisconsin. We manage over 6,000 units. We started in 2019. We started right away with AppFolio. It's been a great partner for us in our growth. We started with 250 units and only four employees. Now we have over 6,000 and over 100 employees. AppFolio has been a great partner in that rapid growth. It's allowed us to see where we're winning, where we're not, and how we continue to elevate our business.
Top of mind for you for 2026?
Very similar to what Rob said. I think it's about resident experience for us. How do we use the reports, the data to make our resident experience better every day? Through Performers, RealmX, things we'll get into here in a few minutes, that's allowed us to see where we're having success, where we could spend more time and allow our customers, our residents, to have a better experience.
Last but not least, not only a great name, but spelled correctly. We did not color coordinate. Really, we did not. Stacy.
Thank you. Stacy Winchip. I am the EVP of Operations at Fairgrove Property Management based here in Southern California. Prior life started out in large institutional multifamily, and then 2011, 2012, moved over into institutional single-family and was part of that space with Waypoint Homes. Later went on to be a founding employee at Mind Management. Took a little break into BTR for a little bit, and then a prior colleague from Waypoint gave me the call and had tapped me into running operations at Fairgrove about two years ago now. Trying to scale the business to about 30,000 units. We're currently in about 9,000 units over the next five years.
This is my first kind of plus two years in joining Fairgrove is the first time I've ever used AppFolio and have learned a ton over the last couple of years by being a part of their advisory board.
Thank you so much.
Top of mind?
Yes.
Honestly, Southern California has experienced such great market conditions for the last several years that my 2026 initiatives are fully baked around the entire churn process from notice to vacate through move-in. Not only just looking at processes during that piece, but looking at new technology that we can implement in order to improve those processes.
Awesome. Now, we've talked a little bit, both you and Josh. I'm going to stick with you on this next set of questions around growth and expansion and the usage of AppFolio in your unit. So Stacy, I want to talk about Fairgrove a little bit. You started with AppFolio at 900, and that was in 2018. And now you're at 9,000. Can you talk about that journey of growth and where did AppFolio as your tech partner help you along the way?
I can speak to the last two years, which has been about 25%-30% of that growth, and tell you stories that I've heard about before Stacy. Essentially, Marco Bartanian, who's our founder and CEO of Fairgrove, purchased a company in 2019 that was around 900 units. We have rebranded to Fairgrove over that period of time and grown about 50% through acquisition and 50% through organic onboarding. The drive there has truly just been Marco's passion. We did this together at Waypoint Homes. We both joined in 2011 and took that to about 17,000 scattered-site single-family homes before he transitioned to Invitation Homes and took that to where it's at today until 2019. I then left with the co-founders of that company and went and developed Mind and grew that for four years. I think our passion for growth has kind of led that.
Also just that knowledge, you know it can get done. What we learned during that time is scalability is based on not just people and process, but the real backbone of it is technology. That partnership with AppFolio, like I said, the first time I've used AppFolio in my career was at Fairgrove and learning that they are building that platform with this AI background because this is something that we were talking about in 2016 at prior companies, and particularly around the RealmX Flows. Being on the customer advisory board allowed me to see the vision early on and become a little bit more aware of the progress that was being made. I think the biggest thing is that they have built something that's a lot more flexible for customers because we all have different businesses, right? I'm 100% third-party property management.
We don't own any of our properties. You can imagine with 1,000 different clients, they want their properties managed differently from a single-family home to a 250-unit building. It's a different experience. What I found is AppFolio has been able to scale those product types with us, with both on-site usage as well as centralized service usage. It's been great.
Yeah. Third-party management's not easy. It's...
I was not going to do it again. Then this opportunity came and.
I used to tell the teams that it's like playing handball, racquetball, pickleball, and squash and tennis all in the same day. It's very similar, but really different depending on what you're doing. The scalability, I know, especially for third parties, is really important. Josh, your growth's been a little bit different, but also very rapid. You already mentioned to the crowd from 200 units in 2019 or 225 to 6,000 now. Tell us about how AppFolio has enabled that growth story for you.
Yeah. For us, we're the opposite. We are 100% owner, one owner, I should say. So no third-party management. For us, when we started the company in 2019, we started with three core principles. We wanted people to have jobs they loved. We wanted our residents to love where they lived, and we wanted to give back to the community in which we managed. Throughout that growth period, AppFolio has helped us a lot of ways. I think two things in particular. First is data. There's a lot of data within AppFolio that we can use and extrapolate to say, "Who's helping us? Who's helping our business perform better today? Who isn't?
What are our areas of opportunity? Along that growth, we could put better processes in play to allow us to reposition properties, add value, and ultimately, like I said, provide the residents a better experience, right? The second thing is workflows. Workflows has been huge for us. Since that's rolled out, we use it in various areas of our company. One in particular that I want to mention is our legal team. By using workflows, we were able to increase our profitability, decrease our overhead, and increase our results. That's kind of the triple threat of workflows. The cool part about it is it allows our teams to work on the process instead of in the process, freeing them up to take on higher-level responsibilities. AppFolio has allowed us to be able to scale, create more profitability, and grow our team's knowledge.
It has been great to watch Focus and how you guys have grown. I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about delivering performance. Tony, I want to start with you. Can you talk about your experience with Second Nature regarding that strategic partnership and how that has enabled you to get basically a win-win-win, speaking of triple threats, between the owners, operators, and resident experiences with something like Second Nature?
Yeah. We were, I think, an early adopter of Second Nature as a resident benefit package. And there were a few things that were really important to us. One, it had to actually be a benefit to the resident. Some of the packages that are out there are a great benefit to the property manager. They do not really add much value for the resident. What we found with Second Nature is they really are benefiting the resident through things like credit reporting. They are responsible for maintaining the systems in their home. The filter delivery, when you kind of combine everything that they get, they are getting about a 60% discount to what they would pay for all of that if they had to do it themselves. That is the win to the resident. The win to the property manager is that we see some revenue benefit from that.
That ancillary revenue is meaningful to us when revenue on just property management fees themselves is really compressing. The win to the property owner is the better maintenance of that home. We have now got data that really supports that on our single-family portfolio. More exciting is the integration with AppFolio. For a long time, they were kind of running separate, and we were having to kind of fix where things broke, and it was not fully integrated. We were doing our own auditing. Now that that partnership has been formed, it is just a simpler, more seamless process. Now we are layering in additional services like internet delivered to the home, pest control, and some other things that are really big. Really, the driver with Second Nature is that we see a greater than 15% increase in renewal rates when we are using Second Nature.
Think about what an impact that is, not just on the savings we get from not having to turn the unit, but think about average vacancy of whatever your number is, 30-33 days of vacancy that you're having to absorb, marketing costs, leasing costs. That renewal is kind of the, I think we would all say, renewals are king right now. We want to keep everybody in the unit. We want them to have an amazing resident experience. Everybody said resident experience already. Second Nature helps us accomplish that. We're really excited about it.
I'm just going to do a quick follow-up. What kind of feedback do you get from the residents about having this experience, kind of, for lack of a better phrase, all in one?
Yeah. I think the expectation now is zero effort, right? Has anybody ordered anything on Amazon while you've been here today? Be honest.
You don't have to raise your hand.
You do not have to raise your hand, but some of you have already done it, right? The expectation is zero effort. I am going to go in the app, I am going to click a button, and when I get home tonight, it is going to be waiting for me. This idea that my filters get delivered, my credit reporting just happens, these resources, or even think about the internet expansion that they have done. The fact that there is more than, I do not know what their count is, but a lot of doors in that system, they can drive pricing we cannot drive. That is driving part of that resident experience too. Just the ease, kind of the zero effort, the "I do not want to mess with it" mentality, and Second Nature makes that happen.
Zero effort's good. This has not been zero effort, Rob. Rob and I sat at the NMHC annual meeting last January, 10 months ago now. You said you wanted to go fast. I said, "Okay, let's go." You said you wanted everything within AppFolio, and you just mentioned that you were growing on steroids. Since you and I have gotten together, talk a little bit about that journey and what that has done for DLP and its business goals.
Now, we are an owner-manager, so we own all of our assets. The biggest thing for me as well is compliance, checks and borders. Again, I ran a publicly traded company for over 13 years. The one thing I was told, Stacy, I need it to work from the time it's a lead all the way to move out. I do not like move-outs, but you need to make sure it works all the way through. We sat in January, and I said, "Okay." We went through, and it is all about the workflow. What I always tell my AppFolio is it just has to work, and it does. Making sure that the ease of the workflows is one thing, but everything's connected into one system. Again, you have the system of record, which is key.
You have everything I can pull from, documents, things that I would need is all to the system. For me, I have to audit all the way down to the lease itself, and I have to audit down to the PO. Having it for the expense side is very important. We want to make sure everything flows, there are no breaks. We have a public part of ours on the investment side, but as well as it's important that our financials are true and everything like that. It really makes it great for my accounting team, which is amazing. As well as we do not have any fear of what we are reporting. Guess what? It is even better for our associates on site.
That's what's the unique thing about AppFolio is that our teams on site can bring that, have those same workflows where they're not diving into some other system to post something, to do something else. Everything's within the same system. Guess what? Everything's very workflow efficient for the employees on site. The other win is same with the residents. We'll get into the maintenance workflow. Stacy knows I think I did seven Stack partners and probably six RealmXes in less than, it was probably four or five months. Again, the ease of rolling those out is because it's all within the same system. Our teams on site, it was no disruption. I didn't lose leasing in the summer season, which is our busy season. We actually, it's one of our highest NOI growths this year. Everybody's like, "What?" Yes.
Our performance came down to the results as well. The residents, it's easy. Obviously, the associates on site, it's easy. My back office accounting in Pennsylvania, they love it as well.
That's important. Being a former controller, happy accounting people is a happy life. Is that the right way to put it?
There you go.
I think it's a good way to put it. All right. So you've done a lot. I'm going to stick with you for a while. The impact, I think, is really important not only on the staff, but the residents. Change management can be hard. I want to transition and talk about, in particular, the maintenance performer. You were part of the beta group, and this is a new technology to everyone. Can you talk about that experience? Especially with maintenance techs, which I'm going to make a generalization, are not normally the most tech-excited about having new things. How did that work?
It was amazing. I'll start off as that in the industry now, I consider our face of our communities is our maintenance. Because guess what?
So true.
Everyone's renting online. They're signing their lease online. They might come and pick up their keys. That's basically it. You got Second Nature hooking up all their utilities and everything that they would want. There is that connection to the office on some, but the majority of it is when they have a work order and they have an issue within their apartment. That customer experience, we consider our maintenance our face of our communities. When our maintenance have a maintenance ticket that comes in, having this workflow is very efficient, but we also have added layers to it for follow-up for the residents and things like that. All of our maintenance teams, they have a picture of themselves on, called a hi there card. Basically, they say, "Hey," they wrote in a little note, and they leave it there.
With this workflow, we're able to add where they take a picture of what they said, "Hey, I fixed your garbage disposal today," and they'll look for what we call it one other thing. I retopped your kitchen or did something else to go an extra degree. They leave this on this note, and it's a picture of themselves and saying, "Hey, this is who was in their apartment." Within the workflow, we added this, and Stacy's like, "What?" It flows back. It is in the documentation of what was left, what was done in their apartment. The communication back to the resident is great. I was kidding about when we were sitting in the room, that we had to call the residents and say, "How was your work order?" and follow up.
Now it's all done within this workflow with the maintenance. It's just, again, your residents are satisfied, but then your maintenance, the ease of the taking of the picture of what the issues were and when someone's putting in the ticket, how the residents are putting in the ticket, saying they saw where the leak was, where it was, and be able to document it very seamless. It makes our teams more efficient. My head of maintenance is like, "How fast can we roll this out?" We did beta, obviously, because we were in the beta. We had the entire portfolio by the end of December on this, which is exciting.
I'm curious, did you find any different feedback from your residents around that maintenance experience?
Yes. So again, you can have the surveys linked, and then we are able to, if you can look up DreamLive Prosper, average Google ratings are 4.8. We really, again, focus on that building thriving communities and transform lives and that of resident experience. Having that is huge, but we can have surveys attached where it goes directly to a Google review. There is some other, just so it is another arrow in our quiver, I like to call it, just making that resident experience even better. They can give us true feedback of what is going on. Again, the only time they are really interacting nowadays is when they have something go wrong in their apartment. How quickly you can respond and how quickly you can communicate back is key. There is not anything else like it out there.
Now, Stacy, I'm going to put you on the spot. This wasn't in the planned questions.
I can see you joining.
I know. No, but you were also part of the beta program for the maintenance performer. Was it a similar experience? Was there things that were different? I'm curious.
Yeah. With those 9,000 units, we decided to beta test this. As a growing company, one of the biggest things, obviously, is labor expense. We're a third-party manager, so profitability is based on a huge component is labor. We turned it on initially on about 500 units. Within, I want to say, two weeks, my VP of Maintenance was like, "What else can we turn it on?" Now we're at about 2,400-2,500 units that the beta has turned on. The feedback has been, I believe, from him. I asked him before I left yesterday. I believe that it's going to help us grow with the team that we have because it's adding about 50% more efficiency to the intake because of the instant responses back and forth.
The techs are not having to call before they go and be like, "Tell me more about your problems so that I come to the property prepared." We are a scattered site, so they're having to go to Home Depot before and during when they go. This gives them a lot more visibility because of the pictures that are included during intake, a lot more description, but also takes that communication off of our maintenance coordinators. They can work on scheduling because we are a scattered site. We are scheduling based on geography and timing. They work on the higher-level tasks. The performer is actually doing a lot of the communication and kind of intake of all of the items.
It's one of those things when I say next year we're looking at the entire process is also like, "How do we use this for churns and leasing?" And we are beta testing it on leasing right now too, so.
I think for the users too, a lot of it is trust. There's a stigma sometimes around anything that's AI-generated that, well, is it really doing what it's supposed to be doing? Is it a triage? And so my assumption is based on the triage and everything it's doing and what your maintenance leaders are talking about is that that trust is there, that it will do the job it should so they can do theirs better.
His comment was, "I think it's doing intake better than the maintenance coordinator.
Okay.
I'll take it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I want to stick with workflows, but I want to go to RealmX Flows in a little bit different of a spin. Tony, you were at Atlas, were one of the earlier companies that just started with RealmX Flows, and you had an amazing story around renewals. Can you share that with this group? Then what happened next as far as change management when it came to instigating the other flows you're using today?
Yeah. So I think, did we beta RealmX renewals?
You did.
I want to be in a beta too.
Yeah.
It's very fun.
Only if you're nice.
Beta is amazing.
Just say please.
Yeah. So no, it's been fantastic. When we rolled out the RealmX workflows around renewals, really it's this—we've been saying we've got to automate these processes. One thing to build a great process, and then you spend all your time on process adherence. When you automate the process, you don't have to worry about process adherence anymore. Getting in front of the resident earlier, getting in front of the resident very consistently with those reminders through automation has helped us raise, on our own and operated portfolio, we're above 70% renewal rate. Everybody measures that a little differently. We measure actual renewal rate based on the entire portfolio. We don't exempt anything. When you compare us to the publicly traded REITs, it looks a little bit different. They're a little trickier with their numbers than we are. Right?
I won't talk about that. That was in the past.
It's just everybody has a different.
All right. Calm.
Denominator, right? The fact that we've been able to push those renewal rates up above 70% across our portfolio is huge. The biggest differentiator is now when we look at the property manager, there is not this big difference between, okay, Renee in Las Vegas runs this renewal rate, and Jesse in Phoenix runs kind of down here. We have seen that even out because of the consistency that RealmX creates for us. Going back to renewals, if you just do the math on an increase in renewal, when we looked at a 4% increase in our renewal rate, it equals out to just under 100 basis points of NOI, which is very meaningful when you own and operate a portfolio.
Now, can you tell them this, was it Renee? Was she the one in Las Vegas? Can you tell the story of the contest?
Yeah. We ran a contest on renewals, and Renee always won the contest, right? We put RealmX workflows in place, and Renee was not very happy. That is the end of the story. Renee is like, "Wait a second, I'm always the winner." It is like, "No, actually, now you have some competition," right? What Renee was so good at was every morning she had her process, she set out her 90-day and her 60-day and her 30-day and her 15-day, and she was very disciplined around that. Now everyone had the same discipline because of the RealmX workflows.
She didn't win the contest that year.
She did not. Realm-X did.
That was not good. What have you implemented at Flow since then?
Yeah. I think the next most impactful was the collections workflows. We really do believe that your engagement with the resident makes a massive difference in all of your performance metrics. Again, you're relying on the variability of the individual human being that's trying to execute that task. We try to stay very engaged with our resident, form a relationship with the resident, and that should drive better outcomes. Automating collections, those quick reminders, "Hey, your rent's due in X days. Hey, your rent's due today. Hey, we see you haven't paid your rent. Hey, we'd really love for you to pay your rent," right? Those kind of interactions are now all automated. Our collection rate within 60 days of delinquency has shot up by about 30%. That's very, very meaningful. Once you're past the 60 days, it's much harder to collect.
We're doing it both on current residents and residents who've moved out. We're able to return more of that revenue back to the owner. We, as a management company, earn income off of that management income. It's very, very meaningful the way that we've been able to automate those things. We've been able to actually grow the portfolio sizes of our teams. There's kind of a, in property management, particularly third-party, there's kind of this myth that if you get above X number doors per person, the whole thing just falls apart. It hasn't been a myth. It's kind of been true. We've been able to push beyond that number because of these automations, which just makes us more efficient and more profitable.
That's a great segue to Josh. Your business model, you run it a little bit differently. Can you explain how RealmX Flows enables that business model and how it engages with the residents today?
Yeah, absolutely. We use RealmX in a lot of areas, just like Tony alluded to. There are so many mundane things that our team was having to spend time on, whether that's delinquency follow-up, leasing, just simple communication with residents you can automate that you're doing every single day. The cool part about that is it removes all that from the workload of that team member. You free up that team member to think creatively. We're a very experience-related company. I'm thinking, "Okay, what do we do with this time?" We've implemented community events where we have all of our communities come together, right? We'll do like a cookout or we're doing a big turkey giveaway. Getting our residents out of their homes, getting them connected in this world of AI technology, which is great.
We want to still figure out how do we bring everyone together, increasing our renewal rates, right? Making people want to live there because of their maintenance technician, making people want to live there because of their friend Bob who lives two doors down. By taking away workload, we increase the responsibility of our team, which makes them feel more challenged, which makes them develop, which makes them take on more responsibilities. Hopefully, like I said earlier, giving back more to that community so that the community feels valued, so that we drive up renewals because renewals are king, as Tony said. For us, it's just how do we do more of that? When we think about 2026, we want to continue to invest in our communities. We spend millions of dollars each year on making our communities look great.
It has freed up our leasing agents or our sales team to be able to spend more time on what the focus difference is instead of, "Is this up or lower? Does it have laundry? Does it have a garage? What's nearby?" That is slowing down the leasing agent so much, but it is also draining for that leasing agent because most people in sales are very eccentric, outgoing. What do they not want to do? Repetitive tasks.
It also allows them to be great at what they're naturally gifted at, which has helped drive up our occupancy rates, which has helped increase our team's dynamics in terms of knowing, "Hey, I don't have to do that stuff anymore." AppFolio has allowed me to focus on what I truly love to do, which is selling, which is telling people why they should rent from Focus, why it's different from renting from anyone else. I mean, we do things like we stripe our lawns, we edge our lawns, we have scents in our common areas, we have a barefoot to trash rule. Instead of telling them up or lower, they can focus on those things, which I think really engages the resident, gets them excited, and gets them in the door to allow us to prove ourselves.
It's not only that, but I don't think, tell me if I'm wrong, that you're not hiring staff based on their email response rate. You're hiring them because they're good with the community.
Absolutely.
Being able to lift that technology or lift that task away and give them the ability to focus on the, "I love the barefoot to the trash," by the way. Can that be done in a single-family home like mine? Because that would be great. I think that's amazing because that must increase employment engagement as well.
100%. Yeah. Our retention rates are below 30% for the last three years. In our industry, that's very strong.
That's actually really good.
I think it's just giving people business ownership. I talk a lot about this, right? You should show up to work every day knowing what success looks like in your job. If you can't answer that question without your boss telling you, then I don't think you're very aligned with our principles or our values of our company. A quick story. For example, we hire maintenance technicians that have zero skill in how to fix anything. People are like, "You're nuts. Why would you do that?" If they have the right values, we can teach them those skills, whether it's HVAC, plumbing, electrical, whatever the case may be. What I can't teach you is how to move with speed, how to provide an unparalleled experience, how to uphold our standards. AppFolio allows us to do that because we know where we're spending our money.
We can look at % in-house versus out-of-house in our GL accounts and say, "Hey, we're spending a lot on plumbing, so we need to spend more time skilling our team up in that category." By doing that, it allows us to then be able to develop that team member so they can do more and we have less vendor usage, which obviously helps drive up our profitability.
Change management is not always rainbows and lollipops. Stacy, you and I know we have been at companies where we have had teams that have three, four generations in the same team. Also, just what does change management even look like? Because as we will talk about accounting, a controller wants to know what their third Thursday at 11:00 A.M. is going to be like every single month, right? There is routine. Talk to me about the change management when RealmX Flows was implemented and how that sort of transformed the mindset of some of your employees at Fairgrove?
Yeah. So a little background. Upon joining the company, I had been with some pretty tech-forward companies in the past and went in like, "Okay, let's go." People, process, tech, I just was told, "Hey, it's going to be process and tech, right? Let's do it. Let's grow." First things first was I inherited a team that, one, in California, we have a rule where you have to have an on-site manager at anything that's 16 units and above. Our average building is about 20 units. I have a very large part-time staff in addition to a staff of our portfolio managers, regional managers that haven't been as exposed to technology as some. It was a little bit of there was a tech deficit for sure, but also they just didn't want to use any new tech. They were scared.
I went through this piece when we upgraded to Max maybe 18 months ago of how am I going to get them to adopt to RealmX Flows, which I knew was going to be game-changing. The conversations that I had with our technical account manager were where we have seen success is in the small little things rolling out first where you are taking something off their plate and they do not even know it. Then you get to market that to them of, "Hey, we have done this." We had rolled out OKRs for the first time that year. Delinquency was at top of mind. I picked that flow, the delinquency workflow. We just started doing the communications that Tony was talking about. Last night I went back to our OKR dashboards to find out the results because I do not remember from a year ago.
Even to myself, I'm surprised because I knew there was a huge win in this, but we started in November and by February we had decreased by 50%, a little over.
That's amazing.
We picked a couple of portfolio managers who were a little bit more tech-enabled and willing to test this. Because we were producing the monthly results at our all-hands meetings, it was being advertised that now they were doing nothing new, but all of a sudden winning. Instantly after the first month, I got half of the company being like, "Can you roll me into that?" Within four months, I actually started testing the lead nurturing flow. Because of that instant adoption and the win on delinquency, I had our most tech-averse, change-averse regional manager immediately say yes when I offered up to enroll him into the lead nurturing flow because his leasing team was having a challenge. He's like, "Yeah, just roll it. You can't do any other damage.
Just do it." To now, 12 months later, one of our change coalitions, she talked about change management. We have a policy on change management and we put together change coalitions. Later, as a regional leasing manager, she came to me and she's like, "I've been investigating this new flow." They are actually now coming to me with flows that we haven't talked about and wanting to implement them as part of their change management and their SOP processes. It is kind of night and day difference, but having the ability to be super flexible in those flows and only turn on certain pieces first really allowed us to get that adoption and that win from them.
Now it's like there's just instant buy-in where everybody's like, "Okay, yeah, just do it." Or they're finding it themselves, which is even better.
I love to see, because I've been in this industry forever, I love to see the change in that mindset because it changes the mindset in performance, performance of the asset, performance of the human, performance of the resident, and how embracing these things that have been harder in the past changes the business profile altogether. Thank you.
No, no problem. Just to say, AppFolio also has really great pieces of video content. At our regional manager offsite a few months ago, I knew Performers was coming out from conversations with the team. I just put out a couple of videos that were shared with me to the team of this is coming. Even before I have implemented it, they are like, "So when is that coming?" They are now seeing what is coming out and reaching out to me and being like, "So when are you going to put that Performer in on leasing? Or when is it going to do a little bit more?" It is just that partnership with you guys has been great because it has really been difficult for our team to adopt new technology in the past.
Over the past 12 months, I've seen a night and day shift.
That's awesome. Speaking of partners, I have one last question for each one of you. Why do you continue to have AppFolio as your long-term partner? I'll start with Rob and we'll go all the way down.
Yeah. So again, we measure and have data for everything. One of the biggest reasons is obviously I started in November and get the adoption and get everybody on the same purpose. It was unique because we do an eNPS score. It is not in your employees that if they are happy, it is if they are fully engaged into your purpose, your mission, your vision. All the things that we are able to do and roll out with AppFolio, it was all so they can be part of that. They understood that it was part of that mission and vision. For world-class organization for eNPS scores, I will give you some other scores first. Graystar is like at a 14. It goes to a negative 100 to a positive 100. You have, I think, Asset Living is at negative 10.
Those are large management companies that aren't very little different from others. Us, world-class is over a 70, we're a 72. Us measuring that in June after we've rolled this out, again, that's why AppFolio works. Our employees are engaged into our mission and vision of building thriving communities to transform lives. They have the time to do that. They're not sitting there doing the mundane tasks and they can focus on it. That's the huge, it's just a massive difference in what we're doing.
Our score was a 73.
Okay, there we go.
I was ready for that.
Keep swinging.
Good try.
It’s important.
Your score was 74.
Yeah, there you go. There you go.
That's how it's going to go.
That's a denominator.
Oh boy.
Yeah, yeah, there you go.
You know, I think for us, just knowing that, sorry if I'm glitching. Can you guys hear me all right?
Winking.
Can I just yell? I think just knowing how aligned we are. We deal with a lot of vendors in our business. This is a partnership for us. We have gotten to experience just tremendous leadership, tremendous engagement from AppFolio. When we run into a need, we manage institutional capital for large LPs. We have reporting requirements. We just have a lot of things we have to adhere to. When we call AppFolio and we say, "Hey, we need your help with this," they help. I think that is just a massive differentiator that we feel like we are being listened to or heard.
Even thoughtfulness around, we had an interaction the other day where we said, "Hey, we need this." The response from AppFolio was, "I can see why you need that, but have you thought about these other things underneath that are probably causing you to need that?" That level of engagement with our business and with our team is so meaningful for us. Just a belief that we share the right values, that they're engaged in our success makes it really easy. I think the other piece for us is knowing that AI is native to the process, it's native in the software, it's native to we're using AI across our organization, but knowing that it lives within AppFolio is very meaningful to us. We can see in the future what that's going to mean long-term.
John?
I think all of us can say this. It feels like we're a partner, not a customer. I would say that's probably the biggest win in working with AppFolio. We've had it since inception. Speaking with other property management companies, the support we receive in comparison to what they receive, it's almost laughable. Our CSAs are incredible. Anytime I need them, they're like, "This time, this time. What works for you?" They're always readily available to understand how it impacts our business because we operate much differently. "Hey, this might be a good product for you guys to try." "Yeah, it's not quite there, but I think it's going to be there.
This is what we see coming. They kind of give us the behind-the-scenes look so we understand, "Don't make a huge process change because this could improve the process six months from now." Okay, that's very helpful. I think the biggest thing is we feel valued, we feel heard. I always say, my CSMs hear me say this all the time. I understand everything can't change tomorrow, right? I just want to know what's coming so that I can understand how to best prepare my team and business for it. I think AppFolio does a really great job at that.
All right, Stacy, wrap us up because there's some questions.
I was surprised they asked me to be here, to be honest, because I haven't always been a promoter, right? I came in almost two years ago, never having used AppFolio and assuming that it wasn't going to work for a scaling company. They invited me into the customer advisory board to learn more. Not only that, to expose me to what was up and coming. One of the things that I hold them accountable for is the timeline because we want to grow fast. They delivered on a timeline that I was really excited about in the first year. We actually, within about four or five months, I actually signed another two-year contract with the goal of learning more in that two years.
During this past two years has been game-changing in that I went from maybe a detractor to a promoter of the business for three reasons. I went out in the field the first three months that I was at Fairgrove and all I got was positive feedback about the user interface from an on-site management team, our maintenance tech, super user-friendly for those entry-level folks. Second, I got to know the people and I have never experienced a partnership in software like this and I've been in the business for 30 years. Not just on the business side of things in the sense of these are the things that you can do to improve your business or wait for this.
During that kind of first year, we went through a lot of growth and change, and Shane made the time to sit with me for over an hour one day and talk about how he's handled change management with people in the past and really worked through business problems, not just technology problems. That is what you mean when you say partnership, that is what we're talking about, is that people partnership that makes them sticky. That is the piece. Technology is great. They've delivered on their product. I can see the future. You tied into your conference there. You see the future. I think that the other piece is just the people on our account are amazing. The relationships with the product team. They were in my office for eight or nine hours last week, right?
Telling us what's coming up next year based on what our initiatives are for next year. I think that there's a lot of great things, but most of all just this partnership is something I haven't experienced before with a software vendor.
Thank you so much. Do we have time for questions, Lori? Do we need to move on? Okay, so we're going to open up to questions. Lori's got the microphone. We're also taking questions online. Away we go.
Great. Will you say your name and affiliation before the question?
Great. Thank you. Jason Salino from KeyBank Capital Markets. I think it's Tony who's using Second Nature. Just curious how many of your residents, whatever the term is, are utilizing Second Nature today and how that's expanded. I imagine you only have an opportunity to sell Second Nature when the unit turns. Is that something that you can do interlease? For the other panelists, if Second Nature is something that you'd be interested in implementing in the next 12 months.
We'll start with the timing. We'll start with Tony really quick and then y'all can just raise your hands.
Our adoption rate.
Will you give him your microphone?
Thank you.
Thank you.
Our adoption rate across our own portfolio is 100%. We require Second Nature as part of the lease signing process. Our adoption rate on the third-party portfolio is in the mid-40% and grows. I think we started at zero. At renewal is when we're offering that up to residents. For the most part, they're taking advantage of it. Did that answer your question?
It does.
Okay.
Yeah, so we're rolling it out in first quarter. We're doubling in size by the end of the second quarter. It's just a process. We want to get it in before we double in size.
Hey, thanks. Stephen Sheldon from William Blair. Maybe as we think about you guys all kind of have large and growing portfolios. I guess, are you using AppFolio as the core property management system across your whole portfolio? Are you using competing vendors as the core system anywhere else? As you kind of grow and expand your portfolios, would the plan be to pull those units into AppFolio? Just maybe talk about how top-down your tech strategy is and how you might expand with AppFolio over time.
Do you want that one?
We're exclusive. Again, we're only going to use AppFolio. We don't use any. Again, we're owner-manager. We want everything to be consistent. We have scattered sites. We have multifamily 300 units. I have high rises. It's just, again, for trainings and things like that, but the use and you're doing your policy procedures, everything's the same.
We also exclusively in AppFolio as a system of record and increasingly as kind of system of action. The Stack partnerships are really meaningful to us. We utilize the Stack partnerships, but our intention is that we do everything within AppFolio that we can. That really goes to the property manager and the resident experience is simpler when we can use one system.
We got to go. As always, the customers, we take the most time. Can we give these guys a round of applause, please? Go ahead and go. You guys can head out that way. It is my job to introduce to you our CFO, Tim Eaton, who I think is going to go over what everybody's been waiting for this entire time. Thank you so much for listening to our customers today. We are customer-obsessed and the partnership with all of these companies are strong. Thank you so much. Have a great day.
All right. Oh, now I have two clickers.
You have two clickers.
Here, I'll give you yours back. All right, good morning, everyone. Please give it up for our customers again. We're so grateful that they came to see us here in Santa Barbara. We welcome all of you to Santa Barbara. For folks who are here in person and those who are joining us online, thank you for your interest in AppFolio. We're thrilled to have you here and to share a little bit more about what we're thinking about. You've heard a lot today. My goal is to translate the things that you've heard into our financials. After that, Shane, Kyle, and Lisa will join me up here for some Q&A. With that, let's jump in. To orient our discussion today, I'd like to start by sharing AppFolio's financial priorities and how we will deliver shareholder value in the years to come.
First, revenue growth, specifically by driving unit growth through new business and customer expansion with high customer retention, accelerating premium tier and value-added services adoption, and scaling our resident industry segment. Next, margin expansion. We will prioritize profitable revenue growth. We are not pursuing growth at all costs. As we grow, we are focused on unit types, value-added services, and industry segments that are profitable, drive both our top and bottom lines, and reinforce customer acquisition and unit expansion. We focus on continued operational discipline across our entire P&L, including sales and marketing, R&D, and G&A. We will continue to drive operational efficiencies and scale profitably. We will invest in high ROI opportunities. There may be circumstances that warrant increased investment to deliver strong ROI over time. We seek out these investments and are willing to invest when the ROI is attractive. Third is capital allocation.
We will prioritize organic growth while thoughtfully considering inorganic opportunities that are aligned to our mission of building the platform where real estate comes to do business. We will maintain financial flexibility with an appropriate level of liquidity in order to opportunistically invest. We will execute opportunistic share repurchases at attractive prices to drive long-term shareholder value and managed dilution. All of these priorities collectively drive an important financial outcome: growing operating cash flow per share. We believe operating cash flow per share reflects the underlying economic engine of our business, making it a clear indicator of long-term shareholder value creation. This outcome encompasses our focus on driving units, revenue, and margin into a single metric that measures the value we are creating for shareholders. First, let's talk about revenue growth.
Our midpoint guidance for revenue in 2025 is $948 million, double what it was in 2022, growing at an average rate of 26% since 2022. This revenue growth is driven by the strategy that Lisa discussed during the go-to-market section. First, acquire new customers. Make it easy for customers to adopt product features and workflows. Help our customers grow, retain our customers, and turn our customers into advocates. I hope you got a taste of that during the customer panel today. Now, let's double-click into the drivers of our unit and RPU growth. Units are the most important driver of revenue growth at AppFolio. Increasing units is our number one priority. A few things to note. We are focused on residential units.
In 2023, we deprioritized building for pure-play community associations to focus on residential units because residential units generally have a higher attach rate of value-added services and higher RPU than community associations. You can see the residential units are driving our overall unit growth, while CA has slowed. We still have a material number of community association units, and we'll continue to win CA through mixed portfolio customers who have both CA and residential units, but we are not focused on pure-play community associations. Our residential unit growth is balanced across market segments. We have historically focused on SMB, and we continue to perform well in this segment. We are also increasingly adding up market customers with larger unit portfolios. As we grow, we want to ensure we don't sacrifice the low end of the market in our pursuit of larger customers.
As Kyle discussed, we are focused on building features that can be utilized across market segments, but will allow us to increasingly win up market. Broader macroeconomic conditions may impact organic unit expansion, but we have a resilient business that can excel in a variety of environments. The past three years, organic customer unit expansion has been low compared to historical levels. We've seen some modest improvements in organic expansion from our existing customer base the past few quarters, but our units are growing primarily because we continue to land new customers. We are a resilient business, and we can win in a variety of macroeconomic conditions. Now let's turn to RPU. Since 2022, our average revenue per unit has grown from $66 to $103.
We continue to grow RPU faster than units, driven primarily by value-added services, which are growing at an average rate of 21% per year since 2022. We are also seeing property managers upgrade to Plus and Max, the premium tiers of our product. We expect our RPU to grow as we continue to add value-added services, scale our resident industry segment offerings, and customers upgrade to premium tiers. Speaking of premium tiers, customers continue to adopt our Plus and Max tiers. Today, approximately one in four units are on a premium tier compared to one in 10 in 2022. That is a 40% average growth rate since 2022 of our premium tier units. Our tiers allow us to group our product offerings based on size, scale, and complexity of customers. As our customers grow, we can grow with them.
Premium tiers are typically adopted by our larger and often more sophisticated customers that desire more flexibility in how they operate their businesses. Our premium tiers also provide flexibility in how we price and package new product offerings, giving us the ability to embed functionality within a product tier or sell it à la carte. We are seeing RPU growth across our entire customer base, with our average customer growing RPU at 11% year- over- year to $103. This average is the same as our lowest 20% of customers who are also growing RPU at 11% year over year to around $40. These are often customers with portfolios that are highly concentrated with community association units and have a lower attach rate of value-added services. We are seeing stronger growth across our top 20% of customers, whose RPU has increased 17% year over year to $160.
These are customers who are often early adopters of new value-added services and premium tiers. As we innovate and release new products, we will continue raising this range. We still have room to expand our RPU through our premium tiers, scaling our resident industry segment offerings, AI performers adoption, and increasing the attach rate of our existing value-added services. The AppFolio performance platform will provide us a variety of ways to increase RPU through various value-added services within the system of record, system of action, and system of growth. When analyzing the opportunities from our existing value-added services, AI performers, premium tiers, new resident initiatives, and other industry segment expansion, we believe the long-term RPU potential is significant. This will take time to realize, and it will not happen overnight, but we know the opportunity is large, and we are well positioned for continued RPU growth. Now, let's discuss margin expansion.
Let's take a moment to reflect on our progress since 2022. In 2022, we had a negative 1% operating margin. In 2023, our operating margin improved to 12%, and in 2024, we improved to 25%. In 2025, our projected midpoint is 24%. Our operating margin percentage has declined slightly year over year due to reasons we discussed during our last earnings call. This is primarily driven by the acquisition of LazyZ in Q4 2024, payments mix, and expected corporate incentive plan attainment. While the percentage has declined, our projected operating margin dollars are expected to increase to $227 million, or up 14% year over year. This progress is not the result of a single decision or initiative. It's a collection of disciplined decision-making over time. This improvement has made us healthier, given us financial flexibility, and allows us the ability to invest in high ROI initiatives.
Now, looking to our cost of revenue. As a percentage of revenue, our cost of revenue has improved from 40% of revenue in 2022 to 35.7% of revenue year to date in 2025. Our cost of revenue is driven by a variety of offsetting factors. Headwinds include product revenue mix, specifically around various payments types, corporate incentive plan attainment, and increased data center spend to support our customers' growing usage of our AI product capabilities. Tailwinds include cost of revenue operational efficiencies, such as embracing AI for customer support, business process outsourcing, and early scaling of new product revenue. We continue to balance these headwinds and tailwinds to identify and implement efficiencies to improve our cost of revenue, but these efficiencies often take time to realize. Now, looking at our operating expenses.
Our operating expenses as a percentage of revenue have improved from 60.5% of revenue in 2022 to 39.6% of revenue year to date in 2025. We've seen this efficiency across all areas of the business: sales and marketing, R&D, and G&A, and as the result of continued operational discipline. From right-sizing our workforce to driving efficiencies in how we work to utilizing AI and business process outsourcing, we are more nimble, agile, and productive in how we approach our work. We continue to invest, but we prioritize the highest ROI opportunities that drive both the top and bottom lines. You see the efficiency of our workforce when you look at our revenue per head count. In 2022, we ended the year with 1,785 employees and an average revenue per head count of $264,000.
In 2023, we right-sized our workforce and have been disciplined in our growth since then, focusing our hiring on key roles that drive innovation, revenue, and meaningful customer impact. At the end of Q3 2025, our head count was 1,703, lower than the end of 2022, and revenue per head count was $532,000, double what it was in 2022. As we look forward, we will continue investing in roles that drive innovation and revenue, but we expect head count growth to be modest. Now, let's talk about capital allocation. Here are our capital allocation priorities. Our first priority is organic revenue growth. This is investing in the product capabilities you heard about from Kyle and the go-to-market initiatives you heard from Lisa. Investments in organic revenue growth allow us to continue to grow units and monetize those units effectively.
Our capital structure allows us to fund ROI-generating initiatives while continuing to generate healthy operating cash flow. Our second priority is inorganic growth. This includes M&A, such as LazyZ, and minority investments, such as Second Nature. Our M&A strategy is centered on accelerating our product priorities, owning critical moments that matter for our customers, and entering new industry segments. We thoughtfully consider opportunities that are aligned to our mission of becoming the platform where real estate comes to business. Our third priority is returning capital to shareholders through share repurchases. In 2025, we repurchased approximately 689,000 shares year to date and have approximately $250 million remaining of our existing repurchase authorization. We will continue to opportunistically repurchase shares in order to manage dilution and drive long-term shareholder value. Revenue growth, margin expansion, and capital allocation all work together to drive an important financial outcome: growing operating cash flow per share.
We believe operating cash flow per share directly reflects the underlying economic engine of our business, and we have seen notable improvements since 2022. In 2022, we generated $25 million in operating cash flow, or approximately $0.72 per share. In 2024, we generated $188 million in operating cash flow, or $5.12 per share, more than seven times the cash flow generated in 2022. Through three quarters of 2025, we've generated $177 million of operating cash flow, or $4.87 per share, and we still have one quarter remaining to add to that total. Now, I've heard many of you ask about our long-term operating plan. We aren't ready to share numbers or timelines, but as we consider the future, operating cash flow per share is a metric that will help guide our priorities and decision-making. Now, to bring it all together, our strategy is simple.
We are focused on differentiating to win within the market. We do this by delivering the AppFolio performance platform, which includes the system of record, system of action, and system of growth. When we do this, we win more customers, grow units, and monetize those units by delivering exceptional customer value. Next, we deliver performance efficiently. By scaling our operations, focusing on margin expansion, and prioritizing our highest ROI opportunities, we will grow revenue faster than our expenses and improve our operating cash flow. Last, but certainly not least, our great people and culture are the foundation for our success. These strategic pillars drive us towards delivering our vision of powering the future of real estate. Thank you, everyone. I'll now pass the microphone back to Bill, and we will move on to Q&A with the executive team. Is this on? Yes. There we go. Thank you.
Yes, of course. Thanks, Jim. Take the microphone. Great job. Let me say a few words as we get settled on stage. Can everyone hear me? Great. It's really not you all that I'm worried about. It's folks on streaming. Thanks, Tim. We're now going to move on to what is secretly my favorite part of the program, which is Q&A. I talk to many of you quite a bit, so I'm happy to be joined up here with Lisa, Shane, Tim, and Kyle. Just really quickly, in terms of how this is going to work, we're going to take questions from the room. We're also going to take questions from those streaming. Lori is going to help facilitate in-room questions. Carolina is going to help with the streaming cue. Okay? The mic matters, so wait for the mic to speak. That's how folks streaming can hear you.
We ask one question at a time, just for the interest of time, so that folks have a chance to ask. We will make rounds again for any follow-up questions or additional questions that you might have. We will see how this goes. We will get it started. I'm going to be up here with the team. I will maybe ask clarifying questions based on your questions. I'm not going to repeat, just for efficiency's sake, so please speak into the mic. We will get things started. Lori?
First question. Hi. Sorry. I guess this is the trivials of sitting in the front. I guess keeping to my question earlier, Second Nature. It sounds like that's just one arrow in your quiver of growth, RPU growth opportunities. It does not sound like it's the sole focus.
I know it's small today, but how should we think that layers in or grows over the near term, call it one to three years?
Should I take this one? Take this one. Is my mic on? I guess I still have this one. Jason, thank you for the question. We do believe it's one of, call it multiple arrows within our quiver in terms of adding value to customers. As we think about the resident opportunity specifically, you heard the resident journey that Kyle outlined. If you think about the resident experience, they're looking for apartments. They find one. They want to schedule a showing. They might use a RealmX performer to schedule that showing. They go through. They want to apply. They put down a security deposit. They run a background check. They move in with resident onboarding.
They move in, and they live within the unit, and they talk to maintenance performers and have those other types of interactions. When we think about Second Nature and more holistically, the whole resident journey, there are opportunities to add value at every point in that journey. When we think about what the opportunity is, we want to help make sure that the entire journey lives within AppFolio. You heard that in the customer panel, how much customers value having that within one platform. We are not going to provide any specific numbers, but we know that the opportunity is large, and we are excited to add value at every point in that journey within the AppFolio platform. That is really what it means.
When we talk about creating value, unifying the experience in the moments that matter throughout the entire journey of the resident, that's one version of the value. Unifying that experience where we create that value means our customers never have to leave AppFolio to get value in those moments that matter, and that's where the opportunity is.
Thank you. Alexey from JPMorgan. Tim, I was wondering if you could talk about long-term guidance. In the past, you used to provide free cash flow outlook. Now that you've mentioned free cash flow per share is an important metric, are you going to return to free cash flow guidance going forward?
Yeah. We're evaluating our approach right now for 2026. We're not sharing any 2026 guidance recommendations for today. We will discuss that more in January. It is an important metric for us.
It's something that we're thinking about and something that we're analyzing decisions kind of through that lens. We'll have more to share in January, but it is an important thing that we're thinking about a lot.
Thank you. A quick follow-up on one of the slides that is missing from today's presentation about share of tenants. How much are they in total revenues, tenant fees, or tenant payments? I believe our last, the last, wait, can you clarify your question? Is it specifically around resident payments? We used to have a slide where you had split of revenues between tenant contributions versus property manager contributions. Can you update us on that?
Yeah. We do not have any specific updates to that specific metric, but as we go, it is in the early days of resident revenue, as we discussed, and we anticipate that that share will increase over time. We do not have any updates to that ratio to share today.
Hello. Thank you for the time. As some of you already know by now, I am from Brazil. And there we now have what we call PIX, which is a government-supported payment system that is very low-cost and very efficient and everyone uses. It has really changed the mindset in the country. People, the citizens, they do not expect to pay fees for any kind of payments anymore because it is really affordable, free, and works. My question is, if that comes to happen here in the U.S., and people, the renters, they start not accepting fees for payments anymore.
I cannot pay a fee to pay with card for ACH. That's a big part of your business model. How do you adapt to that? What's the risk that you see that happening, and how do you adapt your business model in case that happens over the next 5, 10 years?
Yeah. Thanks for the question, and thanks for visiting us from Brazil. Welcome to Santa Barbara. First and foremost, across our payment stream, there are a number of ways where residents won't be charged for payments. If you're a Max customer, ACH is included. That certainly is one way to do that. We have a number of property managers that have a buyout option to be able to do that, to offer that as well.
I think if you kind of step back and look at our vision, what we're really doing across the property manager and the various industry segments, whether it's investor, vendors, residents, someday potentially brokers, we're creating lots of different pools of value where we not only can grow, but we can also absorb changes in the model while we still continue to grow. That's the whole idea where we are no longer kind of dependent on any one revenue stream to continue to grow and have long-term sustainable success for AppFolio.
Great. Our next question will come from the virtual audience. The question comes from Ryan Tomasello at KBW. Upmarket unit growth looks like it has slowed a bit this year. How much of that do you attribute to the macro? How comfortable are you in the company's ability to unlock more unit growth upmarket going forward? How are upmarket win rates trending?
I can jump in on that one. This year has been an exceptional year for new business unit acquisition for AppFolio. We are very proud of the ability to land new customers and our results in that area. We do look at the macro. We discussed that kind of during the presentation, and we see that typically play out in terms of net expansion or organic expansion of our existing customer base. We are very pleased with our progress in terms of landing larger customers and increasingly moving upmarket. We do not share our specific win rates in terms of upmarket, but we are very pleased about our progress in that area. I can just add on. Disconnected. There we go.
I can just add on the product side that the investments that we are making are meant to serve our playground across both S&B and upmarket. We believe the performance platform is very well suited to drive return on investment for operators, and we see that as one of the biggest reasons why they're going to purchase software or purchase AppFolio in the future. That includes all of the different systems that we're aligning around: system of record, system of action, and system of growth to turn AppFolio not just into a cost center, but a revenue driver for large customers as well.
T hanks. Stephen Sheldon, William Blair. Thanks for doing this. I guess first off, I do not think I have said that yet, but wanted to ask about, we had a lot of customers up here talking about the utility they're getting, the efficiency gains.
I guess from your perspective, how do you think about being able to capture some of that as AppFolio? I don't think you guys have typically pushed pricing. You've got a lot of new solutions you can sell. I guess how do you think about pushing the monetization and the RPU within this? Is pricing something that you might start to push a little bit more than you have, at least historically?
Yeah. From a pricing perspective, I think in the past, and this is more than three years ago, we used to do kind of annual price increases. What we learned, one of our top values is listening to our customers is in our DNA. What we learned is that was really problematic for our customers.
We have really changed that, and we have aligned kind of an annual increase or a term increase aligned with their agreement so they have predictable expense going forward, and they can plan for that. I think for us, it is really about units on platform. We have highlighted how important that is for us. Ultimately, how do we create happy and growing customers with very high retention? We know, and we have kind of stated this, we are very focused on aligning the value we deliver with the value that we capture. We will always be very thoughtful about the different value pools that we are creating and customer value we are delivering. We know that we have opportunity to capture that. There will be times from a competitive perspective or to find more unit growth that we may make different decisions. We may include it in a premium tier.
We may look at that and say, "Hey, that's a value-added service. Let's take advantage of that." We will do that thoughtfully over time by really listening to our customers and making sure that we're driving the right outcomes, which is, "Hey, we want to be a customer for life with AppFolio. We want to expand our units on platform and ultimately bring our residents and investors and their whole ecosystem on to have a great experience."
Got it. That's helpful. Maybe just a quick follow-up for Tim on gross margins. There's a lot of competing factors there that I think you highlighted.
I get that you guys aren't giving long-term kind of margin targets, but just how are you thinking about the trajectory of gross margins as we think about the next few years with all of those puts and takes between payments mix, between higher AI data center costs? Just any context on how we should be thinking about gross margin trends.
Yeah. I think you said it. We have a lot of different factors that are kind of offsetting. You have some headwinds and you have some tailwinds. We're constantly looking at how we balance that. We don't have any specifics in terms of a specific target that we're trying to achieve within a certain number of years, but we're always looking to identify ways to improve that gross margin and really center it around that customer experience as well.
As we think about AI efficiencies or business process outsourcing and everything else, we want to be very thoughtful that the things we're doing do not compromise that customer experience, and we can still create advocates from our customers so they can help us continue that flywheel of new unit acquisition.
We have one more from the virtual space. This is from Jeffrey Nathan Rockefeller. Can you talk about how much you can drive penetration in Core, Plus, and Max? What are some ways of thinking about longer-term penetration opportunity for the Max tier?
Can I take thi s one? Yeah, you can take this one. We think a lot about product-led growth as opportunities to get people to begin adopting the tools that are available in the Max tier.
Some of the big drivers there are Leasing CRM, pricing tools, and we see a lot of data access tools as well. As customers get into Plus, we find opportunities to be able to really have them codify their business, use RealmX Flows. As we think about Max and the trajectory moving forward, we have opportunities to really level those tools up to be able to extend further, go beyond just flexibility into customization. We are thinking deeply about how do we work hand in hand with customers, not only on the tools that they need within our upper tier, but also the change management that is required for them to really be successful in adopting all of these different software functions that we are bringing to market. It is a combination of really guiding them within the product.
It's showcasing the return on investment, and it's working hand in hand with our customers on the change management to upgrade tiers.
I would also say when you think about the upmarket sales capacity increase that we talked about earlier, as we bring on new units onto the platform and increase upmarket unit acquisition, we'll see an increase in Max tier adoption as well.
I mean, to risk piling on here to answering that question, one of the exciting things we see within premium tiers as well is that customers who sign up for premium tiers often attach other value-added services too. It's not just about the tier adoption. It's about the total economic value of that deal and of that particular customer. This is to what Shane talked about earlier.
We think holistically about the deals in terms of what they would be signing up for, not just core revenue and value-added services separately, but holistically, what are the customers signing up for in context of their entire portfolio?
I think you heard Stacy Winchip from Fairgrove talk about this. When she came in two years ago, she had not had experience with AppFolio, and she had thought, "Hey, is AppFolio really a platform for a company our size and growing?" We have made a tremendous amount of effort to make sure that our platform scales with our customers so they never outgrow us. A part of that is creating these premium tiers so wherever you are in the journey, we can match the size, scale, and complexity of those customers. As they grow, we can grow with them. Fairgrove is a testament to that, and you heard Stacy say that.
JR Reddo, Piper Sandler. Thank you so much for putting this all together for us. I'd say you've done an impressive job on the RPU side over the years, and there's no shortage of ways for you to sustain that going forward. The unit growth is the tide that lifts all the boats, right? That's showing signs of acceleration while existing expansion remains largely muted. Maybe frame how much upside could come from a resurgence there on the existing expansion side. What could potentially spark that, and what are you doing from your perspective to drive a better 2026?
Yeah. I would say our guiding principle in this is we focus on the things that we can control. We can't control the macroeconomic environment, but we can control the value that we're delivering for customers, and we can control new business unit acquisition and going out and landing new customers and aligning our go-to-market initiatives and our product capabilities to do that. That's our focus. I mean, our dream scenario is to have new business unit acquisition fire on all cylinders and that expansion improve as well. We're going to focus on what we can control, which is new business unit acquisition. I'll add to that on the list of things we can control: seamless onboarding, making sure that when customers are ready to add to their portfolio, we're able to do that in a way that gets them value immediately. We think that that's a major way as we move forward and folks are looking to kind of expand their portfolios.
I'd also call out our bets in mixed portfolio to make sure that we can support all the different property types that investors may be wanting to go out and to purchase so that as customers continue to grow, they can do all of it all within AppFolio.
Hi. Sorry, me again. The 50% sales capacity increase over two years, I thought that was pretty interesting given headcount's been pretty flat and your sales and marketing expense has been only up 30% over that period as well. I guess where are you getting the extra capacity from? Capacity is heads in quota. Is it mainly coming from quota? How do you feel about sales capacity going forward? Is that something that you're focused on for future years?
I think it's both things, right? Both quota carrying headcount and capacity within the current headcount. We talked a lot about sales productivity. When you think about being in vertical SaaS as well as the differentiation and innovation that we are bringing to market, this high engagement of both the buyer's network and the buyer group, coupled with our insights from data around propensity to buy and this very high-fit customer, I think we are seeing increased capacity and productivity in our execution. Both.
Great. Our next question comes from the virtual audience. Zachary Olsen, and he says, "Thanks for the time today. When can we expect a medium to long-term growth and margin guide? What are you waiting for and looking to see in the business before committing to financial targets?"
We are working on setting our targets internally in our budget for 2026 right now. We will share our thinkings for 2026 when we meet in January for our earnings call in January. We are very much long-term thinkers, and we want to invest for the long term. We want to invest in durable revenue growth and sustainable operating margins. We are constantly thinking about that. The next time we will talk about guidance will be in January and our 2026 outlook.
Clark Wright with DA Davidson. I appreciate the commentary around the upmarket opportunity. One of the key themes I have kind of heard throughout the day is this term of differentiation. How do you prioritize your investment strategy to differentiate against the legacy solutions, and how do you win bigger from the start?
We talk a bit about our playground and how we think about driving value across all customers. We want to make sure that when we are going to go out and do something, we are solving a real customer problem.
One thing I'd point to is we have a history here of a mentality called market validation built in the DNA of AppFolio. We think very deeply and are customer-obsessed with what is the thing that we're investing in. Then after we identify that customer problem, we think about the solution. Whatever levers we're going to pull, buy, build, partner, these are all in our quiver to be able to make sure that we're solving real customer problems. At the end of the day, we pride ourselves on innovating at speed and making sure that we are driving ahead to be able to create value across the entire customer base.
Whether that's an S&B customer who may have slightly different needs than a large customer, we're thinking deeply about how the performance platform and the systems really drive outcomes for every part of our customer base.
Hey, thanks. I wanted to ask about the agentic AI solutions. I guess what does early demand there look like? How do you think, how applicable could these be across the unit base? And maybe, yeah, what are you thinking from a monetization opportunity with these? I mean, it seems like it's a huge opportunity. You've obviously seen with a lot of the AI advancements you guys have made, some very customers were talking very positively about the gains that they're seeing from it. Yeah, with agentic AI, how broadly do you think it could be applicable across the base?
We think it can be widely applicable and coming out of future. A few weeks ago, announced our RealmX Performers. Now, we've had RealmX experiences live in tiers for over a year now. From the Performers' perspective, we've seen interest from both S&B and upmarket. We are excited about the fact that customers across the spectrum are seeing the value. Ultimately, we think that there's opportunity for all customers to be able to drive automation in their business. From a packaging perspective, right now, we charge à la carte through V+ services as we went through in the slides. We can think about how we package that differently over the course of time. When you take a step back and you think about the P&L of the customer, you've had AppFolio really on a technology line item historically.
We're really opening the possibilities to getting more into the world of staffing. We think that's an exciting opportunity across the entire customer base. I'll also add, I mean, we have AI capabilities within different tiers and different levels of those AI capabilities depending on the tier that you're on. Based on our structure with the premium tier strategy and the ability to charge à la carte, we have a lot of flexibility about how we monetize that going forward. Right now, it's the combination of those two. It's within the tiers and then charging à la carte for the performers. We have some flexibility as we roll these out going forward in terms of how we think about that.
Great. We have time for just a couple more questions. Anybody else?
Hi, Chris Sopes. Thanks for taking the time. What is the hardest thing that you guys are working on at the company right now within each department or function that you work in? Hardest thing. Can you start with this one?
I will. I guess I'm on top of all the departments at some level. I think our hardest thing is it's not a matter of trying to find opportunities. It's a matter of we have more than enough opportunity. It's a matter of prioritizing what we're going to focus on. You get to our size and scale. That's certainly a blessing. It's also you run the risk of peanut butter spreading your focus a little too much, and then you start to deliver an underwhelming customer experience.
Our ability to continue to say, "These are the most important things," and we are going to resource those things to win so we can do that better than anybody else. There are a lot of things we have to say, "No, not now," or someday in the future, but we need to stay where we are. I think for us, the biggest thing is how do we continue to stay disciplined and focused so the things we are resourcing, we are actually better than everybody else to do that. I was going to say the same thing from the R&D perspective. It is about saying no, which is just as important, if not more important, than saying yes. I think there was one more over here.
I can add another one, actually. Sorry. I also think we are going to our customers and we're saying, "Hey, we need to deliver real performance, and we are going to store your data and do the work with you and unify the experience and create a ton of value in those moments that matter to really drive the economics and great outcomes." Every enterprise right now is going through this new world of AI and the impact that that might have and how do you grow capacity and drive productivity? We have lots of examples that we've shared today about how we're doing that. We're gaining capacity and productivity, but we really need to continue to model the behavior that we expect.
Because at the end of the day, whether you're a real estate company, a technology company, you're an investment bank, whatever it is, we all need to be adopting new ways of working so we can deliver better outcomes to whoever our customers are. That certainly is something that we always think a lot about. How do we do that, and how fast do we do it, and be really smart without breaking anything that we're delivering for our customers and their experience?
Sure. Mike is going in and out a little bit. Shane's this work. Okay. Can we click to the last slide? I don't have a clicker. This one right there. Thanks, Lisa. Can you click back one? You're a little ambitious with your click. Now the appendix. Now get to the appendix. We're going to review those in detail.
Now, what I'd like to do now is basically go with gratitude. It's been really amazing having everybody here in person as well as having those join us on the live stream. Thank you all for that, for your interest, investment, support in the AppFolio business. We will have the opportunity to—you can have the opportunity to interact with management a bit more over lunch. We'll have representation across the table. Another moment to potentially learn a little bit more about one of us or the AppFolio business. I also want to give a shout-out to the AppFolio team that has worked so hard to make this event possible. Our presenters, our customers, also a number of folks on the marketing and events team. Stephanie, Daniel, Susie, Ryan, Helene, Maddie, Lori, and Carolina from Blue Shirt, of course.
Also a special shout-out to our workplace experience and IT teams for getting this space set up for this meeting. This is our first meeting in this room, and it's impressive. Everything worked incredibly well. Thank you to all that were involved in making this meeting happen. For those online, this will kind of be our goodbye. This concludes our meeting for today. For those of you here in person, we're going to work our way outside for lunch. I'll see you there. Thanks, everybody. Thank you, everybody.
One more announcement. The slides will be up online shortly. Thank you. All right.
Thank you, Bill.