The Client Who Asked to Pay Us More

A few weeks ago a client asked me for a meeting to discuss their pricing.

You can probably guess what went through my head.. Before AppWork, I was the SVP of operations for a nationwide property management company. I have sat on the other side of that table. I have called that meeting myself. It usually ends one way.

So I got on the call ready to walk through our value. I was ready to hear where we fell short, and ready to negotiate. But that's not what happened.

They told me they felt they were underpaying for AppWork.

Not by a little. They said the price no longer reflected the value their teams were getting from us, and they wanted to fix it. Their proposal was to more than double what they were paying. A 100% increase.

I have worked in multifamily for a long time. I have watched clients negotiate their price down. I have seen them ask for free months or ask for concessions at renewal. All of that is normal and fair. However, I have never once heard of a client asking to raise their own price..

At AppWork we have a running list of "only at AppWork" stories. This one made the list!

Why this happened

The easy answer is that the product is good. That is part of it, but it's not the whole story. Plenty of good products get squeezed on price every year.

The real answer is this: most vendors in our industry work one way, and we chose to work a different way.

In multifamily software, the sale is usually the finish line. The deal closes, the implementation team hands you off, and the relationship starts to fade. You hear from your account manager about ninety days before renewal. Your team is left to figure this out on their own., Adoption slips, and a year later someone in the corporate office is asking why they are paying for software nobody uses.

We built AppWork the opposite way. For us, closing the deal is where the obsession starts.

We release new features daily, and when a client asks for something on a call, they often see it in the product soon after, not buried in a nine-month roadmap. We train teams on site. We know their technicians by name. When something breaks on our end, we say so, we fix it, and we tell them when it is fixed. Our team came out of property management and maintenance, so when a regional says "my techs won't use another app," we know exactly what they mean and exactly what it takes to change it.

When a client sees that kind of follow-through for long enough, the pricing conversation changes. It stops being about squeezing the vendor. It becomes about what is fair. That is the conversation this client wanted to have. They did not think the deal reflected what they were getting, so they fixed it themselves.

What they saw

Nobody doubles a vendor's price because they like them. They do it because the results are impossible to ignore. Here is what this client's teams experienced in the time they have been on AppWork.

Work orders started getting closed faster. Every technician carries the Tech App in their pocket. Supervisors can see every open request in real time, and nothing sits in a paper bin or a forgotten sticky note. Completion times dropped across the portfolio, and the "nobody ever came" calls to the leasing office went quiet.

Technicians started staying. Technician turnover is an expensive problem in multifamily, and most operators have quietly accepted it as just the cost of doing business. This client's technicians stopped leaving. Part of that comes from a tool that makes the job less chaotic. A bigger part comes from recognition. Coins, leaderboards, and a platform that shows a tech's work to the people above them changed how their maintenance teams felt about showing up. Fewer open positions and less time spent recruiting, resulted in more experienced hands at every property.

Online ratings went up. Maintenance is the single biggest driver of resident reviews, good or bad. Faster completion and better communication with residents led to exactly what you would expect: online ratings increased across the portfolio. That is a marketing and leasing win that came out of the maintenance shop, which is the whole point.

Their teams also got free maintenance training in person. This part matters most, because it is not a software feature. Through our partnership with The Maintenance Academy, trainers came out and led in-person sessions for this client's maintenance teams. Not a webinar. Not a PDF. Real training, on their properties, for their people. When a client tells you their vendor invested in their technicians as people, that is what they mean.

In their words

I asked the client if I could share this story. They asked that we keep their name out of it, but they were happy to put the reason in their own words.

"We looked at what our teams were getting and what we were paying AppWork, and the two didn't match. Doubling it wasn't generosity. It was fair, and we wanted a partner like this around for a long time."

What this means if you are evaluating AppWork

I am not sharing this just to brag. I am sharing it because it is the clearest proof I have of how we operate.

Any vendor can show you a demo. Any vendor can send you a case study with a good-looking number on it or an ROI calculator built to impress. Here is a different test: ask any PropTech company in this industry whether a client has ever come to them, unprompted, mid-contract, and asked to pay more.

That is the standard we hold ourselves to. Not "good enough to renew." Good enough that the client feels like they are underpaying.

Only at AppWork.

I first shared this story on LinkedIn. You can read the original post and the conversation it started here.