Accruent acquired Lucernex in 2017 to boost its IWMS or asset management portfolio. Lucernex Lease Administration & Accounting is a real estate lifecycle management platform emphasizing compliant financial contracts and accountancy.
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MRI Residential Management
Score 8.0 out of 10
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MRI Software offers residential management for the multifamily real estate marketing. Capabilities include leasing workflow, prospect management, resident management, billing, facility maintenance, and performance management.
The company was founded in 1971 and offers several residential and commercial property and investment management solutions.
I believe Accruent is well suited for companies with a large amount of leased assets that need to be accounted for under the new accounting standard. Companies with fewer leases would not need an intricate tool of this size. It is suited for both real estate and equipment leases, which makes up the entirety of our portfolio.
MRI Residential Management is so NOT user-friendly. I don't particularly care for using it and know that there are better programs out there. But this was a good choice for our company when we were much smaller. I believe we've outgrown it. We have started to implement Salesforce, and I believe that the plan is to integrate Saleforce's equivalent program module sometime in the near future.
The classroom and web-base training experience were very well-executed. Instructors and SME's in training were knowledgeable and helpful.
Upper management oversight of the projects provides the customer with confidence knowing that if escalations need to occur, issues will be handled.
Management was quick to make it right and switch our team when they recognized that there were some fundamental pieces missing from our initial SOW for our project.
We were misled that we would be utilizing Lucernex employees on our implementation. We have subcontractors from Sense Corp who do not seem that they are very familiar with the software. They often have to take questions away to ask (presumably Lucernex employees).
The implementation process is very inefficient. The upload templates are not straightforward, and there are "required" fields that are not designated as "required". Also, the sheer number of upload templates that need to be populated does not seem like the best way to get our information into the software. A guide to denote what each field on the template actually represents would be helpful.
You can tell that Lucernex is benefiting from the influx of business from ASC 842, and is trying to onboard as many clients as possible at the same time. This has caused a lack of attention to our implementation, and it shows with some frustration on our side with the implementation process.
Sometimes the data that is outputted is not consistent (back end of the database is constantly being updated), have to follow up with our client relationship manager
Sometimes very rigid
Incremental cost to add on information (if we want MRI to host certain documents in the cloud)
They have a terrible help center and the training tools and videos are useless and not helpful. They need to invest in better training tools and modules for people to refer to. Especially when there is no designated training person within a company to teach newcomers how to use it.
The trainers were knowledgeable and engaging in presenting the materials, and their emphasis on important concepts was helpful (I would rate the trainers themselves a 9!). However, I do not believe there's anything we learned in the in-person training that could not have been taught via live web-classroom. Traveling a significant distance (in our case) to Austin, TX for only approx. 12 hours in the classroom was (in my opinion) not necessary, since the same material could have been presented via live web-classroom and saved us the expense and travel-time. I would encourage Lucernex to consider moving to a live web-classroom format in the future; an online live format would still allow for participation and questions from the participants while saving clients' time and money
We chose Lucernex based on the commitment of building and maintaining the customer/vendor relationship to grow the product, the end user ability to configure the system and the systems functionality to complete all of our lease management needs.
We had a proprietary access database, but wanted to utilize MRI because of support (annual fee is in the tens of thousands versus a hundred thousand plus build out). The user interface is pretty straight forward, and there is available training as well. Updates are done online via the SAAS website so we don't have to worry about any coding issues here in house.
