In my recap of AppFolio Future, I wrote that AppFolio has a small handful of primary strategic partners it elevates in very public ways, while everyone else is left to wonder about their status. That was a gut read from the expo floor. I wanted numbers.
Public filings were no help. AppFolio has never put a partner count in a 10-K, and Buildium’s owner, RealPage, is private, so there’s no 10-K to check at all. So I did it the slow way: I counted every listing in the AppFolio Stack and the Buildium Marketplace, then combed through every archived version of each page back to 2022.
The short version: AppFolio and Buildium integrations have slowed way down. Both platforms are adding new software partners at a fraction of the pace they set a few years ago.
How many integration partners AppFolio and Buildium have today
As of November 5, 2026:
- AppFolio Stack: 93 listings. 72 are “App” partners (software). The other 21 are “Solution” partners: accounting firms and consultants.
- Buildium Marketplace: 52 listings. Buildium doesn’t split them out, but by my count 8 are service firms, leaving 44 software partners.
The software partners are the group I care about. Those are the point solution vendors whose products plug directly into the platform you run your company on. Accounting firms and consultants listing themselves in a directory is a different thing, so I set them aside.
New software partners added per year, 2022 to 2026
A snapshot only tells you so much. The archived pages let me see the year each software partner first showed up.
One caveat on the first pair of bars: AppFolio’s directory wasn’t archived until December 2023, so I combined 2022 and 2023 for both platforms.
The gross additions by year:
- 2022 and 2023 combined: AppFolio 38, Buildium 20
- 2024: AppFolio 12, Buildium 8
- 2025: AppFolio 15, Buildium 12
- 2026 (through November 5): AppFolio 9, Buildium 5
It isn’t a straight line down. Both platforms bounced back a bit in 2025, and 2026 still has a couple of months to go. But 2026 has the smallest bars on the chart for both, and neither platform has come anywhere close to its 2022-23 pace since. That’s a real slowdown, on both sides.
My speculation: the marketplace was the research lab
Everything in this section is speculation. To me, it looks like the drawbridge is slowly being raised on our point solution partners (the vendors).
I believe the major property management platforms used their app marketplaces to gauge demand for various solutions. They get tons of data from these first-party integrations. Then the vendors who did the best were copied, acquired, or invested in.
Copying is the obvious one. The other two cause a quieter problem: once a platform buys or invests in a vendor, that vendor gets alienated from the rest of the ecosystem.
One example. AppFolio invested $75M in Second Nature. Put yourself in Buildium’s or Rentvine’s shoes. How closely would you want to integrate Second Nature products like RBP and group-rate internet into your software, while wondering whether your largest competitor might have full access to all the data flowing through Second Nature?
[I have no idea if anything like that was included in the Second Nature/AppFolio deal. This is pure conjecture on my part.]
If you’re a property manager on one of those other platforms and you like a vendor that just took money from a competitor, that hesitation lands on you. You’re the one who wanted the integration to work well.
Buildium’s Resident Rewards: what Marketplace vendors are up against
Lest you think I’m picking on AppFolio: this week, Buildium emailed me to say that “Resident Rewards” will be turned on by default for all residents on November 17.
Look at all the first-party integrations in this settings screen that started on the Buildium Marketplace. Now imagine being a Marketplace vendor competing with one of these:
Renters insurance, rent reporting, and a security deposit alternative all sit under Resident services. The new rewards program, powered by Piñata, then gives residents points for using them: 25 points a month for an active renters insurance policy, 15 for an active rent reporting enrollment. Per the screen, you can’t turn individual triggers off separately yet.
Does it help property managers that these solutions are integrated into Buildium (way over and above what Marketplace partners get), and aggressively pushed onto our residents?
And do you think Buildium is going to add any new Marketplace partners that offer rent reporting or security deposit alternatives from here on out?
Doubtful.
What the slowdown means for property managers
That lack of competition is going to come back to bite us. When the platform owns the category, outside vendors stop showing up to compete for it, and you lose the option to pick a better product for your residents and owners.
Again, this isn’t a dig on Buildium or AppFolio specifically. I happen to know them better than the others. I believe all the platforms are walking down this same path right now, and picking up speed.
I don’t mean to sound cynical. My own property management company has benefited enormously from these integrations.
I guess I just miss the days when our platform partners competed on being the best possible software for property managers, rather than on extracting the most transactional revenue from residents at our expense.
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Adapted from Issue #216 of my newsletter. I write it twice a week for property managers, no fluff. Subscribe here.