AppFolio Property Manager is a web-based, SaaS solution serving small to mid-sized property management businesses. In addition to being a full-featured trust accounting solution, we have built in workflows that help our customers run their businesses more efficiently and promote a paperless office. Our “Leasing” workflow is just one of these, and piece by piece we’ve tested and iterated until all the essential components were tied together, which includes online rental applications, integrated resident screening and, most recently, online lease agreements. The cross-functional team assigned to the Lease Agreements project spent months researching customer needs and pain points, reviewing hundreds of different lease agreements, and reviewing competitive solutions. This work revealed three essential goals for the project: + ADOPTION/CONFIDENCE: Every lease is unique so the document would need to be fully customizable + EFFICIENCY: Information needs to auto-populate in the document seamlessly from data already entered into AppFolio + INNOVATION: Competitor solutions such as Docusign use a scanned PDF as their foundation, but we decided to cut the cord to paper documents completely and bring the signing experience into a fully-functional web flow

The Lease Agreements feature includes three components: (1) setting up the lease and addenda templates, (2) generating a lease for the prospective tenant(s), and (3) an online lease signing flow. Following our traditions of Agile and Lean UX, customer input drove the team from start to completion including prototype testing, an alpha group, usability testing, a beta group, and more usability testing. As a result, feedback continues to pour in from customers who are ecstatic about not having forms to upload or fields to fill out. Just set up the template and the leases are sent at the click of a button.