Yardi Systems -- Managing in Real Time

Brave New (Connected) World... Imagine that you're renting an apartment.You'd like to know if your landlord has received your monthly check. Are you being charged any extra fees above your rent? Did your maintenance person receive your service order request for a new lightbulb? Wouldn't it be easier if you could check online for answers to these questions?

Well, if your landlord is using Yardi's Voyager Enterprise application, you should be able to do all this and more. That's according to Bill Sugino of Yardi Systems, who demonstrated Yardi's "real time" property and portfolio management software to me last week. Simply put, Yardi has web-enabled its database and underlying application, and linked them both to a front-end web browser.

Sorry for the techno speak! But for years we've heard about how the web can facilitate communications between tenants, managers and owners. Now we're actually seeing the evolution of traditional property management software into truly interconnected information systems, integrated into a variety of other web-based services.

So from the moment a tenant applies to rent an apartment until he or she moves out and receives a deposit refund, anybody (obviously with security safeguards) can access all information on a tenant's occupancy instantly. And Sugino suggests that there's much more to come. "The key is collaboration. That's where the value is." For example, why not enable managers to publish Yardi's basic property data directly to the web? Why not automatically generate leases online? Why not track the preparation of leases online? Cool. Stay tuned.

--Peter Pike