- Hi, I'm Jennifer Van Arcken. I'm the SVP for information technologies for Envolve Communities. - I'm Maggie Murtaugh, SVP of compliance with Evolved Communities, - We've got 40,000 units and all of them are multifamily and I say about 90% are affordable, 10% market. (lively music) (logo whooshes) - We just recently have moved into SharePoint document management with Yardi. That has been fundamentally important for us. We save many different things under each resident attachment and having that organized and in a place where everybody can access it has been really important to us. We utilize Yardi for all of our practices, whether it be operations, accounting, compliance. - We do the verification services during, during the compliance process, the resident goes through, they connect to their bank, the information comes back. We do the screening with Yardi, so it's all within the workflow, so they get screened. - And that makes it easier for our employees because it's a one-stop shop. They don't have to log out of this system to go to a different system and run the credit and criminal and then go back into Yardi and you know, do something out. So it's very important to have it all under one umbrella. (lively music) I would say the biggest benefit is time, which is what we all need more of. Utilizing Compliance Manager and having everything on the dashboard for our managers and site folks has been really important for us. Any more time that we can give back to the sites to do what they're really there to do, which is to engage with the residents and help them out is money well spent. - I also think it improves the resident experience. People are doing things online now. If you have to go in the office and get a, you know, a bundle of paper and start filling things in with your pen, we don't want to have to do that. Let the people click on a link, walkthrough a process that asks 'em questions, additional questions based on their answers, gathering the information for certification, but it makes it easier for 'em and they can stop and come back to it and do it all in the comfort room of their home. (lively music) - It gives us the visibility to see at a moment's notice what's going on in each individual site as well as allowing us to pull that information as a company so we can see where we're spending the most money. Is it at certain properties, is it on certain products? Where could we use this for room for improvement? We've recently determined we have some issues with water. We're overpaying substantially for water right now. And had we not had that global oversight, we wouldn't have known and been able to pinpoint that that's where some of our issues were coming from. (lively music) - The Compliance Manager's just in time, it's relatively new. We're one of the early adopters, mainly because we had everybody on the wait list, so we were already using RentCafe Affordable Housing. The transition to Compliance Manager has been easier for us and it's nice because the way it used to be, they'd be in Voyager and they'd have to log into RentCafe in order to do the whole process. Right now, they come to this nice dashboard, the stuff that came in through RentCafe or the online certifications are sitting there in a bucket. Just got all this information, equivalent of what was on the Affordable dashboard, but more. (lively music) We've been using budget and forecasting for a couple years now, and operations really likes it because it pulls in the data, you know, the T12 information from the past. Now when you first set it up, you gotta put your formulas in and the first year had some of that set up. But boy, the subsequent years, I mean the formulas are there short of maybe making some adjustments on personnel and it just speeds in, it really improves the process. Plus the fact having everybody go into the system immediately rather than the, "Oh, I gotta take the Excel template and import it." They have visibility when everybody's done immediately at the portfolio level to say, "Well, we're not quite where we need to be you need to go back and tweak this." Or, "This is a little high on CapEx so we need to tweak this but our budgets are done and reviewed much more timely than they have been in the past." So yeah, operations is really like that module. - Budgeting has always been like, oh, the- - Pain point, now we're getting it done in a month! And it's like. (chuckling) - Everybody's like, "It's budgeting time," and they do not wanna be involved. This has made it much more seamless. (gentle music) - And another product that we've been using as the Maintenance IQ and Inspection IQ and the Inspection IQ has been really a game changer for us. The integration into the system with the photos and the ability to create work orders and to customize our own templates and require photos, we wanna require photo of all fire stops and required photo of all the smoke detectors just so that we know they're checked. So if there's ever an incident where there's a fire, we check the fire stop when we're there, inspecting last time. And the other thing that we've seen recently that the team's really excited about is the NSPIRE inspection functionality that Yardi's giving us, where it's very, very focused on the NSPIRE scoring. It's not a full-blown inspection, it's more like efficiencies are just tracked. Then we get the score in the end and then we're able to figure out, based on this score, what do we need to fix immediately. That's worked well, operations have been happy about that too. - You brought up the utilizing Maintenance IQ and inspecting, that has been, you were asking about cost savings, that has, I think been a huge cost savings in our insurance because we can prove that we are- - Exactly! - Continuously monitoring, checking our fire stops, doing all sorts of things to make sure that we are regulatory compliant in maintenance areas. And I think it's helped us overall with lower costs for insurance and things like that. - Yeah, insurance premiums actually went down. - Yep, you never hear that. - Exactly, I haven't heard that in a while, but yes, yes. - We're very much detailed on documentation for that kind of stuff. - Right. (lively music) We are early adopters and beta testers for a lot of the products and I think that the relationship we have with Yardi, they like our feedback. We also have the ability then to give input early into the development process. Software development's also hard, it's hard to get it right, especially with the technology changing. So we give them feedback, we'll test it and then just like Maggie had said, you know the people you're working with, it's almost like just a team member like "Hey we gotta take a look at this," or "This is where we see it ought to change," or, "We can do better on," or whatever. They're very responsive, so we appreciate that. - I would add one other thing that the industry folks that work on your products know the industry. I think that's really important and it's something to point out that the compliance folks that you guys have on your team know compliance. They're not just software people or salespeople. They're compliance folks that have been in the industry and know the product, know the rules, know the regulations, and know how utilizing them in software is gonna affect the end user. - And the other thing I know over the years is that Yardi works directly with Hud on the forms. The fact that they're right there learning what the form changes are, or, and or developing them for 'em, we know that we're getting the newest and the greatest forms now straight off the press, so that's nice. (logo whooshes)