BuildiumReviews of buildium.com

I have been with buildium for almost 10 months. I have experienced many times of waiting on hold to get someone to answer and then have to save my place by leaving my phone number with an expected call back in 25 mins?, etc. So a few hours go by and still not call back. So I repeat my steps, once again saving my place in line. If and when some one does call me back, the phone calls are limited to 20 minutes. If you then need addition help, you have to use the support tickets. I have several tickets open asking for help, I may get a response but when I reply back - it's several more days before anyone replies. As I read the reviews, it felt good to see that someone else also went into the NEGATIVE. (I used to have quick books and LOVED it. NEVER went negative, ALWAYS knew where WE were with the profit & loss. NEVER had a worry at all. That was a GREAT feeling. I DON'T have that with buildium. Wish I do though!) When I do get a hold of someone and ask for help, the information that i get is sometimes wrong, like in the beginning when they helped me set it up. Later, the first time I went negative, I was told not to use the profit and loss to figure out how much money I had left over in a month instead use the balance sheet and general ledgers. The second time it happend, I was instructed to use the rental owners statement because the other reports does not give correct numbers. I should only have to use one report each month. I am still waiting for a call back and responses from my tickets. I would like to see this work because I have spent SO MUCH TIME setting everything up and trying to understand how this works. Connie Mager

Horrible It is impossible to reach online help. The first time I did the Buildium Employee advised me to drop Buildium before the next billing cycle. This was AFTER I had endured the brutal (and incomplete) process of uploading my records. Nothing intuitive about it We changed from property-ware to Buildium because we couldn't afford all the bells and whistles for under 50 properties. I thought we would get "seamless" on line posting of available rentals. There is NO WAY to know what info they are using for the on line listings. So when your listing goes up and it looks like Hell there is no way to find the data they are using to fix it. Some categories are ridiculous and their "help" center does not offer definitions or applications of data entry points. Work orders must include a price before you know what the price will be. To include the appliances in the property records you must include a, "Name" but its the name of some random category of contacts that are buried in the data fields.

Dont wast your time with Buildium Their financial reporting is a joke. We manage HOA's and I highly advise against using this firm as they lack proper financials. For example they have a "so called" aging delinquency report. It doe not work. We have spoken to their tech support and they agree the system is flawed. However, they make no effort to fix it. Try getting an accounts receivable or accounts payable report , it does not exist. Ask their customer service for it and they will actually tell you to pull an income statement report. Somehow, they think that is the same thing. We have had two CPA's advise us that we should stop using this firm for HOA management. We are defiantly in the process of looking for another vendor. Other issues: They use Forte as their ACH vendor for EFT payments. Their in software application process is a disaster and confuses everyone from Forte to their own customer service people. There are tons of other "bug type" easy fixes through out their software. We bring it to their attention and nothing happens. Imagine managing hundred of properties and needing to pull a budget for a specific property. You click on the drop down to find the property and guess what? You have to search through all the properties to try and find the one you want. Yet on other drop down menus in their system you can type the first letter of the property name and the properties starting with that letter pop up. Why the inconsistency? More fun: Try using their system to generate 1099s, there are limited filer options. You have to uncheck manually every vendor you don't want to 1099. I am just scratching the surface on some of these issue but there are many more.... After posting this review yesterday our accounting reached out to Buildium. Below is his email to me. "Client" , I spoke with Buildium this morning. They said Buildium does have an A/R and A/P detailed report but that my individual “user roll access” settings do not allow me to see the reports. They said I should speak to you about increasing my reporting access. Buildium’s “Transaction Report” is what I am now looking for. While drafting this email, I just got another callback from Buildium and I asked about the Transnational Report. (Employee name redacted), admitted it is the same as the general ledger report….and that Buildium does not have these very basic accounting reports. (Employee name redacted) said he would submit a request to their software update area to see if they could update Buildium to include these reports….as he said other clients have requested them as well. (Employee name redacted), has been telling people who need this report to create it themselves in excel after using the Transactional Report via manually offsetting every debit and credit to see what is left. Unbelievable! It would take hours to manually eliminate all offsetting debits and credits in both the A/R and A/P accounts. I still would like to see what this Transnational Report looks like. Can my user access be increased? This is another reason to switch to ( redacted company name) for your HOAs ….at year end."

Love the software. Very easy to use. Pricing isn't bad. I do recommend the software to other property managers and landlords. Would like to see the mobile application expanded., especially a maintenance module where workers could view their jobs and update them. Wish inspections were not so expensive, I would use them if they were not.

Buildium used to be a lot more user-friendly. I will say that things have changed recently with their "New Features" and "Complex Billing". Units used to be $1/unit but now have lots of different factors to make the billing complex. Expect to pay $2+/unit down with their complex billing schemes. All the "New Features" have their own unique prices and for whatever reason, they justify everyone having to pay more despite the features also having charges. Today we were contacted by one of their competitors which somehow it appears they sold our information to. Their competitor had our phone number, email address, and other contact information. After a 20-minute phone conversation whereby they couldn't explain some of their program's benefits they sent information to our email on where to go to view the business's videos to make the switch. Their competitor swears up-and-down that we will save a ton of money if we switch. But after a couple of years of using Buildium, I am currently reluctant to make the move. Originally we choose Buildium because their prices were $1/unit and it was competitive with the market. Now they are charging more than most.

We have been using Buildium for a few years to manage single family homes, HOAs and vacation rentals and just came across a major issue. When paying bills I always rely on the built in safety feature which is supposed to prevent you from overdrawing funds from your bank accounts. When paying bills by check, I always choose the option that states: "Only include bills that can be paid with available rental owner cash balances". This is an option when paying bills for HOA and I always though that this was a safety feature for all bills until one of the HOA bank accounts was overdrawn by $4,000.00+. I was shocked and could not figure out how this could happen. When I called Buildium customer service, the representative seemed a shocked by this as well and had to double check with a supervisor. Why would this safety feature be an option when paying HOA bills, when it actually does not do anything? This is a major glitch and should be fixed or at least the safety option should not be there when paying bills for an HOA.

We've been with Buildium 4 years now. Coming from a computer based software it's been quite an upgrade. We chose Buildium because it's accounting platform was similar to our former system, and we felt it would make the transition easier. With 3 branch offices we need fluency. Regardless, as we've grown and taken on more out of state and international clients, we've received feedback on several issues which I believe are easy fixes. Buildium seems to pride itself on customer feedback, but has never given any official recognition to our ideas and feedback. Recently we were informed of a 25% price increase cleverly disguised as "bundling packages" based on "customer feedback". This is the 2nd in the past 2-3 years. While speaking to a Buildium representative, it was clear that he was not comfortable with the program. Often resorting to scripted "cliche" statements like "this isn't an easy conversation to have" and "we need this to keep improving our product based on our customer needs". This is the same rep who came to our office, and at least pretended to listen to our feedback and concerns (for the record that was 2 years ago and none were addressed). When I pressed harder for an explanation he changed his story, and basically said that Buildium feels that they deserve to make more, because their competitors are getting more. The lack of transparency, deception, and double talk (I'll stop short of calling them lies, but I'm being nice). I won't get into what the competitors offer as we bought into Buildium. But the past set of events have truly put a bad taste in our mouth. Every recent "improvement" seems to either come with a catch or it's too big of an ordeal to implement. For this, I recommend to shop around. I don't think Buildium has gotten better since we signed up. I equate their 'upgrades" to going from Windows 7 to Windows 8. Maybe back to Windows 10, but were in no better place than when it started. Just paying a lot more money.

As much as I want to say I like most things about Buildium there have been a few issues for my company with them. I operate a small property management company with approximately 50 properties give or take.. A few years back in 20011 I believe we came across Buildium software and it seem to fit what we were looking for and it was affordable. Until, we were audited by the BRE Bureau of Real Estate in 2013. That was a bitter sweet experience you never know that you don't know until they come. The BRE auditor was not happy with the lay out of the general ledger and suggested that we find something else. Well we contacted buildium and they seem to want to assist us in making some changes unfortunately, there did not seem to be any changes and we hired an accountant yet, we still additional software. Upon returning again they told us they didn't have record of the cancellation therefore, charged us $340.00 they spoke with a supervisor came back with and said they would credit the account.My concern was there is no contract and they had not provided any service you can't even look at a record in their system so no charge? After the reduction, I noticed they were charging me $60.00 no pro ration for the last two weeks of the month? No service no charge? I thought I would just wait until the beginning of the following month to begin and pay the full $60.00 for a full month. Well then the new month Came in and I went to start up and they insist I owe now $120.00. Now again, this is news to me that they now charge just for looking at their billing page only because you cannot access any part of their page unless you pay. Their reason for not removing the last month is because they gave me a prior credit but still no service. My frustration is make it known, if that's what your going to do now ,that's not what they use to do. I can make an informed decision if I know something I am a small business I have to budget. Also add a cancellation button to your billing page so that I can cancel because trying to get through the phone line is ridiculous these days but hey! I am all for growth just don't use me....Disappointed and frustrated