SkySlope, from the company of the same name in Sacramento, is a real estate software application designed to streamlines the transaction process, enabling brokers to focus on growing their business.
N/A
Yardi Voyager
Score 7.8 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.
SkySlope is most suited for real estate firm document management. I cannot think of another industry that it would be suited for; it is pretty specific. If you have less than 20-30 transactions a year, it wouldn't probably be worth the money versus just scanning. Our company does ~150 per year, and it saves me so much time. It is great for managing brokers of any sized firm with a fair number of transactions.
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.
Their task manager is not good at all. It is clunky and not very intuitive. In principle, I like the ability to assign tasks to new transactions, but overall this functionality lacks.
If a file is created, it canNOT be deleted. This is very annoying in the case of accidental file creation; it jumbles the archive. Seems like a very easy thing to implement, but support said there isn't currently a way.
The quick audit function is great when files are new, but it is not available for completed files to do the final review. Again an easy implement you would think, but not having this makes reviewing files in the final stages very clunky. It takes forever. Support gave me a workaround, so that helps.
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.
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.
SkySlope just has a lot more functionality over this software. All three have a comparable digital signature and templating capabilities. but SkySlope has many additional purposes. I have not found another software like it. Other software I demo-ed was not even close, so SkySlope seems to have the market cornered, but I haven't evaluated again for a couple of years.
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.
