Dotloop is presented by the vendor as an all-in-one real estate transaction management solution that gives brokers and teams full visibility into their business and empowers agents to close deals. It is now a property of Zillow (acquired 2015).
$29
per month
Yardi Voyager
Score 8.7 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.
In Real Estate sales and property management, Dotloop will be your best friend. When you need clients or tenants to sign a lease or a contract, sending through dotloop is extremely easygoing and keeps everything organized pertaining to what you name the loop. I think I speak for my whole office when I say that without dotloop, our lives would be a disorderly mess, and we would find ourselves losing papers and becoming confused. Dotloop really helps our office like no other and has great support along the way!
Yardi Voyager is best suited for users in the multifamily and commercial real estate space, and can be used across a wide range of employee roles, including management, leasing, maintenance, operations, asset management, ownership, and more. On the leasing side, Yardi Voyager is best paired with either Yardi CRM or Yardi CRM IQ (Yardi's newest feature program), as they bring a more robust CRM product that helps with managing prospects and residents. Yardi Voyager houses operations for the majority of integrations across a wide range of industries and vendors, and it comes highly recommended by those industries and vendors when it comes to use of APIs and cross functionality
Dotloop has a great user interface. The features that seem small but are a huge help such as automatically scrolling to where the person needs to review and sign is very creative.
It has been great to be able to pull documents from the app on a mobile device to a web browser on a desktop.
It is very easy to organize documents (add, remove, arrange, edit, etc.)
The out-of-box reports are comprehensive and dynamic, in that you can drill down into specific data columns to see more detail.
The setup of properties is simple and intuitive, and not that different from other multifamily software competitors, which helped with the transition.
The residential Manager dashboard hosts a great snapshot of the property management performance of a property in real-time. It is easy to locate current occupancy, leasing activity, and maintenance request data.
In my experience there's a fairly steep learning curve for a new user to be able to navigate the system
While there's diverse functionality, many items seem buried in menus or obscure places, particularly the first time you're trying to find them
Getting used to the refresh functionality in some parts of the system can be challenging if you're used to a system that automatically updates when new filters are applied
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
The Brokers I've connected with that used Dotloop in the past have also had the same issue I had. Their relationship with "thousands" of MLS listing services is not true. No one took responsibility for not communicating this early on. Everyone just pointed the finger at other departments and did absolutely nothing to alleviate the situation.
To add insult to injury, the system crashes during peak usage, making it near impossible to submit offers promptly. If requested I am more than open to provide the video showing both when the system crashes and the aforementioned issue
Overall it is a reliable and relatively easy product to utilize. No Property Management Software is simple to implement, so a return on investment is delayed and care should be made to ensure that this platform does everything you need for it to do. Experience and knowledge in SQL programming language is helpful, as there are many SQL reports and scripts available to be able to better utilize the software. It takes time to find the ones useful and the ones that resolve hiccups.
Good support but onboard training could probably be a bit better as well as documentation. But we rarely need support as the software works flawlessly once you know how to use it. Very happy with support so far and I recommend the product.
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.
I personally feel that Dotloop is much more organized and easier to use. It feels more efficient to use and I have noticed the majority of the people I work with are more aware of Dotloop and trust it more
Citrix and Argus are property management tools that each fill a function. Citrix is used to track real time payments, while Argus is used for modeling and cash flow analysis. Yardi combines many of the features between the two. Though it is more difficult to use, fully integrating Yardi into a company could save time and money and standardize many of the finance operations of Real Estate asset management firms.
Plugin in updates are a pain point. I think when Yardi has updates that they should have vetted it and that us the client shouldn't have to test thousands of plugins to see what is different. Just leaving the information on client central for the end user to look at, at their leisure is in my opinion not the best way to handle, you should send out updated white papers to the SPOCS to let them know what changes are coming.
