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.
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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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
