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.
Sage Estimating was initially created for the construction industry and many of its current users use it to estimate buildings, but it has adapted quite well for the oil and gas industry. If the user is willing to invest the time and energy to develop and maintain their database, I can see it working for any industry. It is very easy to adjust and adapt the database as estimating methods and project designs change. As an example, our accounting department sometimes changes the way projects are reporting in our accounting software. Because I can go through our 9000 line item database in a couple of days, I am always ahead of the curve and can report my estimates in the format they require.
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.
The program has a fairly antiquated user interface such that someone working in it may not feel like they are working with advanced software.
Sage Estimating has absolutely no remote access capability outside running it in a Citrix/RDP environment so users have to be using a fat/full client vs. any hopes of access on a mobile device.
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.
Sage's support of Estimating is adequate though frankly we rarely need it. Outside of more complex operations such as upgrades and installation problems the program itself is so straightforward that we do not usually have any "issues" and questions that are more about usability can easily be answered in online forums. We trust Sage's capability to answer these questions if needed but rarely 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.
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.
