AMTdirect provides anytime access to an organization's full inventory of property, location and lease information, contracts, associated expenses and revenues, and all related documents. The solution includes integrated real estate accounting and financial compliance, along with project management, facility management and location mapping capabilities.
N/A
Yardi Voyager
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
Yardi Voyager provides residential and commercial property management software. Capabilities include integrated accounting, lease renewal workflow, and modules for multi-family, senior, and affordable housing, as well as retail, office and industrial units.
The company was founded in 1984 and has 4,000 employees and 35 offices around the world.
I think for medium to large companies AMTDirect would be invaluable to have the "whole" picture of all properties at your finger tips. For smaller companies with 10 or fewer properties maybe not as "necessary".
I think it really depends on what you're looking to get out of the system. In terms of managing, updating, creating, and following prospect records, Yardi Voyager is absolutely fantastic. There are a number of existing API integrations already on the market that can connect into the record, and I commissioned a custom one to be built to work with the website that seems on the whole to work fairly flawlessly, so long as your community codes aren't regularly changing. That said, you definitely need to do strong onboarding with anyone coming into the system, particularly if they have limited former CRM experience. There's a great opportunity to input (and aggregate reports) from multiple facets of the system, but if people are inputting poor data, or missing it entirely, or you haven't formalized an even plan for things like Source and Sub Source then even the best system is likely to end up disappointing you and your stockholders when it comes time to analyze data. But, when used properly I'm impressed with how robust it is.
AMTDirect allows for customization to your specific needs in a snapshot. One area I appreciate is that I am able to change most labels/field names to coincide with our specific naming conventions.
AMTDirect has wonderful support. They respond very quickly and I always feel that I am important and matter to them.
AMTDirect is always interested in what I would like to see added to be even more useful to my needs. They listen to me and strive to make those changes.
Initially when I started using AMTDirect it was a little overwhelming because it is a lot of detail. At times I would like to see it a little more simplified. However, I will say they have over the past 6 years done that exactly. It is becoming more simplified to use, but with the same important outcomes.
The software is much faster than it was when I initially started using it. Some of that might be resolved if there were some drag and drop type situations more I think.
Upon disposition the retrieval of all on line documents by unit instead of tcode.
Menus are all over the place and need to be standardized.
Ease of finding reports, seems like if you are looking for a recurring pmt report typing recurring payment would get you the result, but instead it is a payment manager analytics report.
We have invested 5 years of setup, implementation and training on Voyager. It's doing a very good job for us and I feel we've only scratched the surface of its capabilities. Yardi support has been very responsive with very little down time. The training materials are great from Client Central
From my experience, AMTDirect does have a bit of a learning curve, but once you pass that curve the system has details and information that are vital to the decision process of lease negotiations, lease & facilities management as well as project management. I've said it a thousand times, AMTDirect is the only reason I am able to manage 50+ retail spaces by myself with regards to all of the above decisions.
I'm coming from the perspective of a fairly tech-adept person, so I didn't find the system too hard to learn. That said, I do feel some of the buried menus and the system's own internal search feature could use some improvement, but I have that feeling about the vast majority of CRMs I've ever used. There may be a little bit of a struggle to onboard/train up someone who isn't used to this sort of system, but once up and going it should be smooth sailing.
The local office is very knowledgeable, however recently it seems that Yardi has begun to route calls offshore and the knowledge base there does not seem to be as strong as the USA based support centers. All customizations are done by offshore personnel, which presents issues in terms of the language barrier and time zone differences.
I have not listened to any of the on-line video or webinars, but I have used the "help" guides and they are very easy to understand and for the most part that is how I have taught myself to use features I have never utilized before.
If you are converting from another system, grouping your properties by subsidy type seemed to help us. We were able to focus on a half dozen properties at a time, rather than the entire portfolio.
Yardi is more user-friendly, dynamic, and comprehensive than other similar products in the real estate space. While there is some ramp-up time to learn the system, Yardi is pretty intuitive and literal, which removes much of the confusion that other systems offer. Voyager also allows us to integrate better with outside vendors, as it is one of the most common ERP systems on the market.
AMTDirect has positively impacted our company for the simple fact that 1 person is able to handle 54 properties with regards to lease management, maintenance/repair and projects for those locations. We were at the point of needing to hire additional help, but AMTDirect has made it possible to delay hiring additional employees until we grow a little more.
AMTDirect has made it possible to be able for me to work from any where and not in an office with a bunch of files, because the information is at my fingertips. I am able to travel to our stores and still be able to take care of issues and answer important and at times timely questions.
Yardi saves much time whenever my company is involved in consulting a property manager or an asset manager on their real estate asset. Because we can look at their Yardi financials, it's easy to tell where cash is being spent.
Yardi has a positive ROI by making us able to answer these questions quickly, and thus keep clients happy.
