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 8.7 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.
Entrata is completely cloud-based and provides much more integrated functionality, but fewer custom features. Also, Entrata's UI could be greatly improved. Overall, Entrata's API is more open and allows for more third-party integrations and ILS connectivity over time than its …
Entrata isn't perfect, but it is heads and shoulders above its competitors. They consistently respond to customer needs and continually add to their suite of services. The platform is attractive and was built for Google Chrome from the get-go, unlike some competitors that were stuck on Internet Explorer for years and years. That might not mean much to some, but I think it exemplifies that Entrata puts user experience first. It has a robust array of functions and I'm happy to use it. For email marketing, Entrata is great. If you market by text message, Entrata is probably not your best bet. Customers are opted out of texts by default, so we've had to explore other avenues for mass text communications.
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
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.
Sometimes, some of our customers won't require a follow-up but there isn't an option to opt them out of follow-ups but the leads will still appear.
Access. Some of the things that should be accessible to all team members aren't (creating templates, saving signatures, or seeing credit screening details) and putting in a ticket or asking for permission can be time-consuming.
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
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.
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.
Entrata is completely cloud-based and provides much more integrated functionality, but fewer custom features. Also, Entrata's UI could be greatly improved. Overall, Entrata's API is more open and allows for more third-party integrations and ILS connectivity over time than its competitors. Combining the marketing portal (website, email marketing, SMS) with leasing management (renter invoices, rent collection, late fees, move in/move out checklists) provides for a unique, bundled service platform.
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.
