Peter Lohmann released a free API Report Card grading property management software like AppFolio and Buildium on API capabilities, cost, security, and functionality. As AI tools demand faster data access, strong APIs are becoming essential for automation. The report card pushes vendors to improve documentation and backend access.
Hey guys, Peter Lohmann here, and I just put together something brand new that I want to tell you about. What you're looking at right here is an API report card for the property management industry. It's essentially a way to grade and understand the API capabilities of all the platforms that we use in the property management industry, from Appfolio, Buildium, Rentvine, to all the point solutions and vendors that we partner with who provide some type of a software for property managers. And, you know, there's been a lot of discussion about API access and owning your data and who controls our data in the industry over the last few years, and with good reason. We operate our companies out of these softwares, myself included, and we put a ton of our data and our tenant and our property owners and our vendors' data into these systems And we trust that these systems are going to protect the data and allow us to be productive with it. And that's been great. That's been a pretty fair trade. However, in the last couple years, we've seen the rise of AI tools such as Claude and ChatGPT that are changing the game and frankly changing our expectations for what we should be able to do with our data. The next generation of AI-powered agents and tools mean that we can operate much faster and we can build tools and build software that complete a lot of the day-to-day work that we have to do as property managers for us, which is extremely exciting and very, very powerful. However, if we can't access our data, then it's useless or it's very slow and very expensive. And so I wanted to take a look at the landscape of software providers in our space and understand which of those providers are providing friendly interfaces For agents to use in the form of API access. It's one thing to say, oh, we have an API, but is the API free? Is it open? Is it built with modern standards? Is it secure? Can you have multiple API keys? Can you have different security level with those API keys? What can you actually do with API? Is it read-only? Can you actually complete work in the software using their API? So all those questions and more, you can find the answers to on this webpage. And the goal here is not necessarily to name and shame people. I know some of these scores are low, especially in preliminary version. The goal is transparency, and the goal is to drive competition and improvements in the software that we use as property managers. My hope is that over the next few months, these software providers will make steady improvements both to their documentation, to their access to the technical backend, so that I can come back through, regrade these, and everyone gets a much better score. And that's a win-win because the software providers now can brag about how awesome their API is, and we as operators can now go in and use that API much more effectively. I hope you like it. It's all free. Uh, take a look, browse around, see what you think, and let me know. Thanks.
