The Entrata Platform, from the company of the same name headquartered in Lehi, is a property management platform designed for leasing management of multifamily properties and tenants. The Entrata platform features a general ledger and accounting management, invoice management, as well as lead management with in-built marketing suite.
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Yardi Voyager
Score 7.9 out of 10
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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.
As an all-in-one solution (website, email marketing, SMS, online inventory management, leasing data, renter management), Entrata is very effective and provides solid integration with ILS (internet leasing services like Apartments.com and Zillow) for pushing out data updates. However, Entrata's website solution is turnkey, and lacks customization features standard in any generic CMS, requiring a redesign and new site template to just add new content.
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.
I send customer communications almost exclusively through Entrata because everything ports into a customer activity log. It's simple and great for record keeping.
Invoices and payments can be handled from start to finish within Entrata. Expenses port directly into the property budget, allowing users to make informed buying decisions.
Within Entrata, a prospective customer can move from expressing initial interest to applying, signing a lease, and eventually renewing a lease. All documents and activity are housed within that customer's profile. It is the cleanest and most efficient method of leasing that I've encountered.
The user interface could be much more user-friendly and intuitive. Tools are disjointed, and some reports and integrations are several click-layers deep and not as accessible as they should be.
The integration with Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager for event tracking on-site is severely limited and lacking.
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
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.
I've used Entrata with three companies, all of whom have had an in-house liaison to the company. Consequently, I haven't had to work directly with Entrata support on very many occasions. However, I have personally seen feature requests added to the platform in a timely manner. That kind of service is rare in this industry.
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.
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.
The one competitor with whom I have significant experience is OneSite. Simply put, Entrata is better at every single thing. It has a cleaner, more aesthetically pleasing interface. It is more intuitive. It functions better in more browsers. It has more property management tools and more functions available to customers.
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.
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.
