The Resident Who Was Still a Prospect

PropFlow marks an occupancy pending whenever the lease start date is in the future, and pending people are invisible to the phone identity lookup, the tenant list, and the resident experience. That's the whole rule — one date comparison. It never reads AppFolio's actual tenant status or move-in date.

• Early move-ins cannot exist in this model. SadieKate has lived in 405 for over a week; PropFlow says she starts Sep 1.
• Nothing flips pending→active on a schedule. The only escape is a later rent-roll sync noticing the person. If it misses, they're stranded indefinitely.
• Six people at Camellia are pending right now, all with Sep 1 leases: SadieKate & Jace (405), Carly Sprague (207), Hayley Bannochie (612), Jacob Warren (403), Salvador Guerra (112). All should self-heal Sep 1 — if the sync catches them. Hayley's record hasn't been re-synced in two weeks, which is exactly the kind of miss that strands someone.
• Her Aug 9 call therefore resolved as a prospect and the towing complaints got written into her leasing record's notes. (A fix shipped Aug 13 now tags such calls "incoming resident, Unit 405" — her Aug 15 calls got that — but routing and the UI still treat her as a prospect.)

Jace applied as primary; SadieKate is the co-applicant. When the application group synced from AppFolio, her application was folded into his card — and the approval was written only to his record. Her page reads "Under review / waiting on a decision" permanently. The move-in field on her page is blank because that page only shows what a prospect said they wanted ("desired move-in") and never looks at the actual lease or occupancy — it has no idea a signed-lease-pending, Sep-1 tenancy exists.

hmail.com passed the only check we have (a shape check: "looks like an email"). We already own a proper validator that does real DNS lookups and would have caught it on day one — it's wired to exactly one thing: the investor-deck login form. Nothing in leasing uses it.

When AppFolio corrected the address on Aug 15, the sync path her record takes (she's a "future arrival", not yet a rent-roll tenant) writes every email as non-primary, unconditionally — and our contact lookup reads primaries only. So the correction landed as a dead-letter secondary. Update Aug 16: shipped and verified in production — trusted AppFolio corrections now take over as primary automatically (the old address is kept as a working secondary, never deleted), and her record self-healed on the next sync pass. The full tenant sync has correct promote-and-retire logic; her record just never flows through it until Sep 1.

Mitigating fact: PropFlow provably never emailed her (zero sends across our logs, SendGrid, and the Camellia mailbox — she's routed by SMS as co-applicant). The lease email that went nowhere was AppFolio's, and we have no visibility into AppFolio's sends or bounces. But we did have the signal: the lease has sat unsigned since Aug 5 while comparable units signed within days. Nothing watches that — an alert that would have was deliberately removed on Aug 14 as noise.

Her texts went to JP's company-wide AppFolio texting number. What happens to an inbound text there, per AppFolio's own docs:

• The email notification goes to whichever single user last texted that number — or, if nobody ever has, to one catch-all address set in company settings. No team notification, no assignment, no escalation, ever.
• The shared inbox defaults to a "My Messages" view showing only threads you last replied to. A resident-initiated thread nobody has answered is invisible in every user's default view.

So Fede's hunch is very likely right: her texts are sitting unread in a view nobody has open. This is an AppFolio design property, not a JP mistake.

No API exists for these texts. Verified against AppFolio's docs and against the live catalog of all 68 reports available to JP's database — none covers texts/communications. No webhooks either. A third-party product (Skywalk) proves the data is scrapeable from a logged-in session. One open door: AppFolio's Max-tier "Database API" — its catalog is behind a login; worth one email to JP's CSM.

Other PMSs: same story almost everywhere. Rent Manager is the only major PMS with confirmed API read access to SMS threads. Buildium, Entrata, Yardi: built-in texting, no read API. RealPage/Knock: write-only. Industry-wide, texts are activity-log entries, not queryable conversations — worth knowing for the multi-PMS roadmap.