"We're currently being wowed by DoorLoop!"

Tell us about yourself:

My name is Alan Oviatt. I am the Financial Director at Access Foundation and we operate about 120 units of affordable housing for the disabled, for those in recovery. My partner was involved in a residential treatment and one of the things we noticed was people were not actually getting better. They needed something more. So we kind of experimented, got a house, rented a home, and put a few residents in there and one of the first thing we noticed was that they needed a safe space of their own.

We required them to have employment, we required them to follow a few rules, but our outcomes began to improve even better than treatment.

How many units do you currently manage?

So we currently manage about 120 units, we just recently purchased another 28 units. So we will be creeping up on 150. Something that we did was we jumped into Microsoft Teams, and we started creating and using teams. It's a great application. We love it for many reasons. But we were keeping track of rent in a note field in teams. And that began to be unmanageable for us.

How did you find out about DoorLoop?

We looked closely at our competitors. And one of the competitors route was really kind of bashing DoorLoop. That's what got my interest in DoorLoop. That's what actually, that's where I actually found out about DoorLoop. And I thought, well, why are these guys they must they must be afraid to DoorLoop or something. So I went to DoorLoop looked at it. And and that's where we got interested in DoorLoop. 

What made you want to try DoorLoop?

Yeah, there are applications that are specific to our industry, but the cost is very prohibitive. It's expensive, and so we decided to look outside of that and go and test about five or six applications, I think six applications, that were apartment rental oriented or more commercial oriented. We looked at a lot of products. While we looked at those six products, we actually did some testing on all six of them and we decided on DoorLoop because DoorLoop provided us, well, an interface that we liked. We really liked the graphic tools on the dashboard. We really enjoyed, we saw how easy it is to input rent, how easy it is to manage that ledger. That was very important to us. That was the primary impetus for us moving forward with DoorLoop.

Well, our industry's a tough one. We're highly regulated by the state, by the city, by the Department of Health and Human Services, so we do a lot with compliance and DoorLoop helps us manage so many pieces of the puzzle. Our workload has benefited.

How has DoorLoop helped automate your business?

In reality, we thought we were just going to use it for a rental ledger. That's that's where we began, our residents have never used a vacuum cleaner never used the dishwasher before. So we have a lot of maintenance issues. And sometimes a little bit of construction issues. And so we we started using tasks and we started pumping those out to our maintenance guy, man that became useful.

Next thing happened is we realized at first, we looked at the rent agreement, we wanted to try to make it our own, right, and so we wanted modify it. Well, it's tough to modify or it looked like it was, but what we found was it isn't that tough to modify. We found out that we can turn on and turn off things that don't apply to us, like pets, other types of rental history we weren't too interested in or didn't need for our purposes.

What advice would you give?

Actually, we've had calls from others who are starting out with DoorLoop and asking that very question and the answer is simply get in there. Start fiddling around with the with the features and before you know it you'll be sold