by Shane Henson — February 5, 2014—Chicago-based real estate developer McCaffery Interests Inc. recently chose Yardi Inc. to help the company boost its efficiency through a variety of software solutions for real estate investment management and property management.
According to Yvonne Jones, managing director of asset and property management for McCaffery Interests, the company has been a Yardi client since 2011, and now intends to use Yardi comprehensively and exclusively for all of its property management operations through Yardi’s single-vendor approach.
“The single-vendor approach saves us a lot of time, it makes us more efficient, and best of all, we get the Yardi technical support and sales professionals who understand our company, our properties and our processes,” said Jones.
Accordingly, McCaffery Interests has integrated several new products with its Yardi Voyager property management and accounting system. One of them is RENTCafé, which McCaffery Interests uses to market its residential units online and to provide online resident services.
“In today’s world, the consumer wants everything online, so our goal with is RENTCafé is to have a product that allows our residents to do that as much as possible,” Jones explained. “That means paying rent and submitting work orders, contacting site management, and seeing if they have deliveries to be picked up. There are a whole host of services that RENTCafé offers, and we’re using as much of it as we possibly can.”
Another product that McCaffery Interests built into Yardi Voyager is Yardi Energy Solutions, an automated utility billing and energy management solution. In addition, revenues for the company have been boosted by Yardi RENTmaximizer, which automates the process of calculating best rents.
“RENTmaximizer has pushed our site teams to think more about pricing and occupancy. We’re pricing on a daily basis, whereas before we might have looked at pricing only quarterly and not adjusted to increased traffic coming to the property,” Jones said. “We expect that by the end of 2013 we will increase our revenues by at least 2% by having RENTmaximizer in place.”
Other solutions the company has added into Yardi Voyager include Yardi PAYscan, an electronic invoice processing solution, and Yardi Advanced Budgeting and Forecasting, an automated solution that delivers accurate budget projections for revenue and expenses using tenant lease data drawn from Yardi Voyager.
“We’re going to continue exploring all the new platforms Yardi has to offer and integrate them as soon as possible. It save us a lot of time, makes us more efficient, and gives us access to support personnel who know what we’re hoping to accomplish as a company,” Jones concluded.
