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 7.8 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 well suited for any management company in the multifamily or commercial space and is a worthwhile competitor to other options in the space - MRI Software, Realpage, Resite, etc. For those med-large enterprises that value an intuitive and straightforward accounting and leasing system, and also work with other vendors that need to integrate with their ERP system, this is a great option. There is a large ramp-up time, requiring many company resources, and licensing is quite expensive, so this solution may not be for those companies with a small budget or personnel resources.
Yardi Property Management particularly excels at creating a system where it is easy to leave feedback for property managers because the data is available up front.
Yardi is also a useful tool at integrating property management across the entire platform. It can be used for asset management as well even for the most nitty gritty details.
It is also convenient to edit expenses inputted by the accounting department and managing those expenses forward for future budgeting.
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
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.
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.
Onesite was broken, a lot. Yardi Voyager has been a much more stable platform. We have been operational for 3 years now and I cannot say that we have had any software downtime in 3 Years. But with Onesite, it was common to be down at least once a month for something that was not working correctly.
