Item 1. Business
ITEM 1. BUSINESS
Unless otherwise stated in this Annual Report, references to "AppFolio," "we," "us," and "our" refer to AppFolio, Inc. and its consolidated subsidiaries.
Overview
AppFolio is a leading provider of cloud business management solutions for the real estate industry. Our solutions enable our customers to digitally transform their businesses, automate and streamline critical business operations and deliver a better customer experience.
We were founded in 2006 with the vision to revolutionize vertical industry businesses by providing great software and services. Our mission is even more relevant today, as digital transformation is effectively a requirement for business success in the modern world, and the way we work and live today requires powerful software solutions.
AppFolio solutions are designed to meet that need in the real estate industry, and assist an increasingly interconnected and growing ecosystem of users, including property managers, property owners, real estate investment managers, rental prospects, residents, and service providers, with critical transactions across the real estate lifecycle, including screening potential tenants, sending and receiving payments and even providing insurance-related risk mitigation services. AppFolio’s intuitive interface, coupled with streamlined and automated workflows, make it easier for our customers to eliminate redundant and manual processes so they can deliver a great experience for their users while improving financial and operational performance.
Our platform and mobile-optimized solutions are designed for use across multiple devices and operating systems, and to be a system of record to centralize and automate these essential business processes, a system of engagement to enhance business interactions between our customers and their business ecosystems, and a system of intelligence to leverage data to predict and optimize business workflows in order to enable exceptional customer experiences and increase efficiency across our customers' businesses. Our solutions are offered as a service, and are hosted using a modern cloud-based architecture.
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We rely on strategic partners and third-party service providers to deliver certain aspects of our solutions, and we strive to provide a seamlessly integrated experience for our customers. We believe our customer-centric culture empowers a focus on customer satisfaction that leads to long-term retention and, ultimately, to our long-term success. Our commitment to building innovative products, delivering exceptional customer experiences, and nurturing our company culture has led AppFolio to be listed as a 2020 and 2021 Fortune 100 Fastest Growing Company.
Our Core Solutions
Our Platform
AppFolio’s platform addresses important aspects of workflows common to property management and is frequently updated in response to market trends and customer needs. Further, we believe that partnering and integrating with curated third party solutions to enable important functionality for our customers while maintaining an elevated customer experience will benefit our customer base over time. Core functionality of our services addresses key operational issues, including accounting, business analytics and management, marketing and leasing functionality, maintenance and operational efficiency, as well as communications with key stakeholders.
AppFolio Property Manager
AppFolio Property Manager provides the platform upon which property managers can run their business operations. Property management companies choose AppFolio Property Manager to leverage the benefits of process automation, an easy-to-use interface, and the optimization of common workflows. Customers include third-party property managers and owner-operators, who typically manage single- and multi-family residential properties, and others who manage community association, and commercial properties.
AppFolio Property Manager serves as our customers’ system of record with accounting functionality at the core. All critical transactions are completed and recorded in the system and give our customers access to the data they need to run their business. AppFolio Property Manager is also the system of engagement that customers use to interact with the residents living at their properties, the owners and investors owning those properties, and vendors providing products and services to the properties. Both aspects of the system are inherently interconnected so that the day-to-day interactions, such as residents paying rent through the AppFolio Property Manager mobile app, are instantly reflected in the system of record. For our customers, AppFolio Property Manager's mobile capabilities enable their teams to be productive regardless of their location, responding to leasing inquiries, addressing work orders, or completing inspections on the go. Due to their distributed nature, this is especially relevant for our property management customers with a significant portion of single-family or small multi-family properties.
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AppFolio Property Manager Plus
We continue to serve customers with larger and more complex portfolios with AppFolio Property Manager Plus, recognizing the evolving needs these customers have for deeper business insights, automation, and more advanced customer experiences. These customers typically have a more diverse mix of property types, a wider geographical dispersion of their properties, and the larger teams necessary to manage those types of portfolios. AppFolio Property Manager Plus is designed to solve these challenges in multiple ways: through customizable workflows that allow customers to digitize their existing processes; by providing performance insights; through intelligent revenue management; through integrations with a set of carefully selected partners; and through dedicated strategic account managers that help customers realize the full benefit of our solution.
Value Added Services
AppFolio Property Manager’s optional but often mission-critical Value Added Services are designed to enhance, automate and streamline business-critical processes and workflows. These services build on functionality and workflows in our solutions and generally fall into the categories of marketing and leasing, electronic payment services, business optimization, and risk mitigation (e.g., insurance-related services). Although many of our Value Added Services are enabled by third-party partners, we strive for a seamless experience for our customers that increases their efficiency while not sacrificing ease of use of AppFolio Property Manager and AppFolio Property Manager Plus. Utilization and adoption of our Value Added Services is typically higher for residential properties than community association or commercial properties because of the unique and complex needs of the residential rental lifecycle.
We empower our customers and users with a wide variety of Value Added Services, primarily:
• Electronic Payment Services. Our electronic payment services allow property managers to streamline their receivables and payables through a variety of online payment options. Customers can collect funds through our secure online portal, our mobile application and/or via electronic cash payments from various users, including applicants, residents and property owners. Types of funds that may be collected include rental application fees, security deposits, rent payments, and other tenant charges; contributions from property owners; and periodic dues from those living in community associations. Customers can also electronically send funds to various users, including distributions to property owners; payments to service providers; and payment to their own management company.
• Tenant Screening Services. Our tenant screening services include background screening, credit checks, income verification, and a streamlined rental history verification process for use in connection with the rental application process.
• Insurance. Through partnerships and wholly-owned subsidiaries, we make available certain risk mitigation services. Our liability to landlord insurance product allows our property management customers to enforce insurance coverage requirements within their leases by tracking coverage of their units and adding uncovered units to a qualifying liability to landlord insurance policy via a licensed insurance broker, while renters insurance protects the personal belongings of renters, as well as the property itself, from certain unexpected damages.
We experience some seasonality in our Value Added Services revenue. See Item 7, " Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations " for additional details regarding seasonality of revenue.
Our Growth Strategy
Our growth strategy in the near term is to provide increasingly valuable business management solutions to new and existing customers in the real estate industry. We are leveraging this growing footprint to expand both within the property management market as well as into adjacent markets. We define adjacent markets as markets that have both real estate and non-real estate characteristics. Key components of our near and extended term growth strategy include:
Maintain Product and Technology Leadership. We have made and will continue to make significant investments in research and new product development to expand our platform capabilities. We intend to continue using our market validation techniques and close relationships with our customers and users as a key source of feedback to inform and direct our product strategy. We may also choose to acquire rather than build certain technology capabilities, or to partner and integrate with curated third parties to deliver key functionality to serve the needs of our customers and their business ecosystems, all while maintaining a superior customer experience.
Keep Our Existing Customers and Users Happy. We believe customer success is essential to our long-term success, and we strive to have loyal and engaged long-term customer relationships. We place significant emphasis on customer experience to differentiate our solutions from competing products. This emphasis will continue to be a critical component of our growth strategy in the future. We believe that maintaining our focus on customer success will lead to new product innovation, the referral of new customers from existing satisfied customers, and greater adoption and utilization of our solutions.
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Acquire New Customers. We believe new customer acquisition is essential to our long-term success. We expect to continue to grow our base of customers, and thus the number of units managed on our platform, with continued investments in the development of increasingly valuable business management solutions across not only the existing property types we currently serve but new ones as well, innovative sales and marketing programs, including evolving real estate industry thought leadership and education, and the referral power of satisfied customers. To continue to attract larger customers, we may increase our utilization of partnerships and integrations with select third parties to deliver key functionality.
Expand Adoption and Use By Existing Customers. We have made, and will continue to make, significant investments in our solutions that expand functionality and enhance or add new capabilities to meet the current and evolving needs of our customers. We expect our satisfied customers will expand their adoption and usage of our Value Added Services to adapt our platform to their specific operational requirements. In addition, as our customers grow, we expect they will continue to use our solutions to manage their larger businesses. To facilitate the continued use of our solutions by larger customers, we may increase our utilization of partnerships and integrations with select third parties to deliver key functionality while maintaining an elevated customer experience.
Enter New Adjacent Markets. We expect to continue to evaluate and expand into adjacent markets (as defined above) based on our market validation strategy and targeted customer feedback in a manner consistent with our strategic plan. While we are continuously developing our real estate industry solutions within a given market, we believe we can apply certain relevant product features and key learnings from that market to find synergies and new opportunities as we extend our solutions into successive adjacent markets. An example of our adjacent market expansion effort is AppFolio Investment Management, which we released in April 2019 and is designed to enable real estate investment management organizations to better manage investor relationships by increasing transparency and streamlining certain business processes. By leveraging our knowledge and expertise in the real estate industry to grow AppFolio Investment Management, we may eventually develop investment management solutions for markets in other industries.
Our Customers
We define customers as those paying for a subscription to our core solutions. As of December 31, 2021, we had 17,215 property management customers. No individual customer represented 10% or more of our total revenue for fiscal 2021.
Customer Service
We believe our success is tied to long-term customer relationships, not a one-time sale. Our team is structured to deliver ongoing service; this includes ongoing live and on-demand training, a library of resources, and personalized account management. We regularly measure NPS and solicit customer feedback in a variety of ways in an effort to continue to better serve our customers. Our solutions are designed to be easy to use and manage, and we offer training and support at no extra charge.
Onboarding consists of a dedicated team that works to ensure that customers are prepared to run their businesses on our platform. As a result of our assistance with data migration matters, we are able to provide valuable insights into data integrity and work with our customers to help resolve any issues in their underlying business processes. We also assist our customers with the configuration of our products for particular property types, as appropriate. We share insights on best practices for the markets we serve and dedicate resources to guide our customers through the adoption and utilization of our Value Added Services.
Sales and Marketing
We leverage a modern and scalable marketing approach along with marketing automation technology to attract and engage prospects and build brand recognition as an industry leader. We participate in industry thought leadership and education, and we use a variety of inbound and outbound marketing techniques to promote AppFolio solutions.
Our business development team acts in partnership with our marketing and sales teams to reach potential customers, generate sales opportunities, and accelerate the time from evaluation to close. Our sales representatives assist prospective customers as they evaluate our products. Our interactive sales methodology allows our sales team to quickly build relationships, assess our customers’ business challenges, and demonstrate the benefits of our core functionality and, where applicable, Value Added Services.
Technology and Operations
Our products are powered by a highly scalable computing platform and are designed with a strong focus on data security and availability. We use Ruby-on-Rails as our primary web application framework, and we take great care to keep this application framework and the rest of our software stack current in order to mitigate known security vulnerabilities. Our computing platform and cloud infrastructure are primarily powered by Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform. In order to ensure that data is not lost and that customer requests can be satisfied, production assets are securely replicated and regularly backed up to multiple geographic regions.
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We monitor our production infrastructure to ensure high performance and availability, and our architecture allows our operators significant flexibility in achieving these goals. In particular, we have fine-grained control over the specific server and region on which each customer's data resides, and can move customer data between different geographic regions in order to avoid service disruption or to increase service performance.
Sensitive customer data, including passwords, Social Security, and tax identification numbers, is encrypted during transmission, and before being written to disk. We regularly evaluate our product and infrastructure security, including through third-party penetration testing. In addition, our products allow our customers to define roles that provide different levels of access to users, allowing them to view and modify specific items depending on their role. Supervisors can distribute work to on-site staff in a secure and controlled environment, while leadership retains visibility across the entire system. Some sensitive customer actions require secondary verification via two-factor authentication, and any customer can enable two-factor authentication for logging into their account.
Research and Product Development
We rely heavily on input from our customers and prospective customers in developing products that meet their needs and in anticipating developments in their businesses. We perform research and market validation efforts to guide our product roadmap. We believe that it is easier for our customers to adjust to continuous updates to our platform, which incrementally change and improve their user experience than to adapt to infrequent, but more drastic, upgrades.
Competition
The overall market for business management solutions in the real estate and other industries is global, highly competitive and continually evolving to respond to changes in technology, operational requirements, and ever-changing laws and regulations. We believe our competitors primarily fall into the following categories:
• On-premise or cloud-based real estate business management service providers that serve companies of all sizes in our markets; and
• On-premise or cloud-based horizontal business management service providers that offer broad solutions across multiple industries.
We also experience competition from numerous cloud-based solutions providers that focus almost exclusively on one or more point solutions in the real estate industry or in other industries. Continued consolidation among cloud-based solution providers could significantly increase competition.
Some of our competitors may have greater financial, technical and other resources, greater name recognition and larger sales and marketing budgets; therefore, we may not always compare favorably with respect to some or all of the foregoing factors. Further, the barrier to entry for competition in one or more areas we serve may be low, which could lead to competition from new entrants who solve similar problems in different ways.
Intellectual Property
We rely on a combination of patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, confidentiality procedures and contractual restrictions to establish and protect our proprietary rights in our core solutions and Value Added Services. We may pursue additional patent protection to the extent we believe it would be beneficial and cost-effective.
We control access to our proprietary technology by entering into confidentiality and invention assignment agreements with our employees and contractors, and confidentiality agreements with third parties. Despite our precautions, it may be possible for unauthorized third parties to copy our products and use information that we regard as proprietary to create products and services that compete with ours.
Human Capital
We believe our people are at the heart of our success. Our employees’ dedication to and passion for creating and delivering transformative solutions provides us with a competitive advantage and creates long-lasting relationships with our customers. We believe our efforts in creating and maintaining strong connections — with our customers, partners, and team members — differentiates AppFolio as a great place to work. This has led to recognition that demonstrates our valued company culture and workplace: Fortune recognized AppFolio as a Great Place to Work for Women in 2021, and the annual Glassdoor Employees’ Choice Awards listed AppFolio as one of the Best Places to Work in 2022.
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Our company culture, driven by the following six core values, fuels our dedication and passion:
• Simpler Is Better
• Great, Innovative Products Are Key To A Great Business
• Great People Make A Great Company
• Listening To Customers Is In Our DNA
• Small, Focused Teams Keep Us Agile
• We Do The Right Thing; It’s Good For Business
As of December 31, 2021, we had 1,600 employees. We routinely engage temporary employees and consultants. None of our employees are represented by a labor union or covered by a collective bargaining agreement. We consider our relationships with our employees and consultants to be strong. To maintain this strong relationship and attract new talent, our human capital management efforts focus on the following initiatives:
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Diversity is core to our values and, we believe, necessary to drive innovation and collective growth. Our commitment to these imperatives starts at the leadership level and cascades to our talented employees, who we look to lead and foster various initiatives. AppFolio’s employee-led resource groups create an environment where everyone is valued for their uniqueness, while also feeling part of the larger whole. We work hard to make sure our employees’ voices are heard, from our practice of small, focused teams to setting annual company initiatives together as an organization.
When we surveyed our workforce in 2021, of those who elected to share, 45.1% identified as women, 54.1% as men, and 0.8% as nonbinary.
Our recruiting practices focus on attracting and hiring employees with diverse backgrounds, experiences, and approaches at all levels of the company. We have key partnerships with universities and professional organizations and provide ongoing education to our hiring teams that are focused on closing the diversity gap and growing our team.
Employee Development. We invest significant resources to develop the talent needed to remain at the forefront of innovation and make us an employer of choice. Employees throughout our organization have access to training and learning programs which include programs for distinct audiences. Our annual engagement survey provides a platform for employees to provide anonymous feedback directly to their managers and our executives. Based on results from our 2021 engagement survey, the overall engagement of employees is greater than the technology industry average.
Societal Impact. Connecting and contributing to our communities is a long-standing tradition and important activity for our employees. Our team members are passionate about many causes and we encourage them to participate in these causes by providing eight hours of volunteer time off annually. In addition, throughout the year, we come together as a company to engage in community service through “AppFolio Gives Back,” where we donate time and funds to several charities that are selected by our employee-led Give Back Committee with AppFolio matching donations.
Compensation and Benefits. Our compensation and benefits programs support the wellness of our employees and their families so they feel they can live their best lives both at work and at home. Our competitive compensation packages may include base salary, commission or annual performance-based bonuses, and stock-based compensation. We also offer family-forming benefits, paid parental leave, paid sabbaticals, paid leave to care for family members, and access to fertility networks and discounts on fertility care. We review our programs periodically to ensure they remain competitive.
Health, Safety, and Wellness. We are committed to providing a safe workplace for our employees and assisting them in maintaining a healthy work-life balance. We regularly solicit feedback to assess the well-being and needs of our employees and offer resources focused on mental health and physical wellness. Specific to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have also taken measures to support the health and safety of our employees and their families. We continue to provide a monthly stipend to our employees in an effort to help ensure each team member has a comfortable and functional work-from-home environment and we have added training and toolkits focused on helping employees be successful in a remote work environment. We have enhanced internal lifestyle programs, such as virtual group fitness classes, and increased supplemental time off to create additional space for employees to reset and recharge.
In July 2021, we began transitioning our employees back to the workplace on a voluntary basis. When the environment allows us to safely do so, we expect to move forward with a hybrid work model, where a majority of our employees work out of one of our offices several days a week. We continue to evolve and upgrade our physical locations to ensure safe and healthy workspaces for our team members.
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Available Information
Copies of the reports, proxy statements and other information may also be obtained, free of charge, electronically through our corporate website, at www.appfolioinc.com, as soon as reasonably practical after we file such material with, or furnish it to, the SEC.