Company Name
Property Management By Design
Door Count
1,350+ doors (80+ rentals, 25 associations, 2 mobile home parks)
Portfolio Type
Associations Mixed Portfolio
Buildium Customer Since
2022
Company Name
Property Management By Design
Door Count
1,350+ doors (80+ rentals, 25 associations, 2 mobile home parks)
Portfolio Type
Associations Mixed Portfolio
Buildium Customer Since
2022
When Jeff Horner adopted Buildium’s AI-powered bank reconciliation, he expected to save a little time on paperwork. He didn’t expect it to free up multiple full days of staff time each quarter.
Property Management by Design manages a central Iowa portfolio of 80-plus rental doors, 25 associations, and two mobile home parks. As that portfolio grew, Horner moved the business’s accounting onto Buildium, and eventually onto Buildium’s AI-powered reconciliation tools specifically.
Quarterly HOA reconciliation used to take two-and-a-half to three days of manual, line-by-line work (Spoiler alert: it now takes about half a day). That AI-driven time savings is what’s given Horner the room to grow his portfolio to 1,350-plus doors without adding significant staff.
Before switching to Buildium, Property Management by Design ran its growing HOA portfolio on Propertyware with manual bank reconciliations. Horner insisted on reconciling every account himself as a check on the business, which meant hours of tedious, line-by-line work every month and quarter.
Propertyware was a solid choice at first, but as Property Management by Design added associations, it became clear that the level of customization was more than the company needed. Horner compares it to enterprise tools that are powerful, but may end up slowing down teams that want more out-of-the-box automation.
The real cost showed up every month and quarter at reconciliation time. Horner printed each bank statement, matched every line by hand, and manually entered interest earned, unexpected fees, and reserve transfers that never showed up on an invoice.
“I would say it took me roughly two-and-a-half to three days to do them manually on the quarterly,” Horner says. “That got to be cumbersome.”
That workload piled on top of all the other pressures of running a busy property management business. Horner was reconciling accounts in the middle of the day while still taking phone calls, managing a fast-growing associations list, and running day-to-day operations, with no accounting partner to hand the task to.
Horner tried Buildium’s AI-powered bank reconciliation on a handful of monthly statements first, then rolled it out across his full quarterly HOA portfolio.
The process now starts with a single drag-and-drop. Horner uploads a bank statement into Buildium’s property accounting tools, and the built-in AI reads it, matches transactions, and lists everything ready for review in seconds. Larger HOA statements can take a couple of minutes (which is still far faster than the hours it used to take by hand).
Tasks that used to eat the most time, like manually keying in dates and matching entries line by line, are mostly gone. Horner makes a few minor adjustments, saves the reconciliation, and prints the summary. The board packet still comes together the same way. The bank statement, invoices, and summary are scanned and sent together.
“You just drag over the bank statement to Buildium,” Horner explains. “It literally takes a few seconds. It reads it. It finds everything.”
The system isn’t flawless yet. Out of 25 associations reconciled last month, only one statement didn’t read automatically through AI and had to be entered by hand, a minor hiccup Horner expects to shrink as adoption matures.
Since adopting Buildium’s AI-powered reconciliation, Horner has reclaimed roughly two full days every quarter—time he’s reinvested in growing the business to 25 associations and more than 1,350 doors, all without adding significant staff.
Property managers he talks to often run similarly sized portfolios with a large staff. Horner runs his with a small core team split between ownership, accounting, and field operations.
“A lot of [that growth] is attributed to efficiencies and AI,” Horner says. “I have done zero marketing….“Everything that I have earned is through word of mouth and through using [Buildium’s] software, and using my general knowledge of running a business.”
For Horner, all of this has made it possible to build the kind of company he set out to build at the start: one that keeps growing without losing the personal touch that got it there.
“I want to build something that I feel is going to be a good legacy, so people can look back and say, ‘Man, this guy knocked it out of the park,’” Horner says. “‘He built a company.’”
If you’re ready to cut hours off your reconciliation process and get the oversight to grow with confidence, try out Buildium for yourself with a 14-day free trial or guided demo.
