“Grubb has a top-down philosophy of promoting long-term residents,” said Shawn Cardner, executive vice president of operations at Grubb Properties. “We always felt our long-term resident program that caps rent at five years was the right thing to do and was working, but we didn’t have a lot of data on it. We do now thanks to deep property and portfolio analytics, and that’s very exciting.” The analytics Cardner refers to come from Yardi Asset IQ, part of the Yardi Elevate Suite for multifamily. Asset IQ is taking Grubb beyond business intelligence by providing property, portfolio and market analytics for benchmarking, budgeting, analyzing collections and adjusting quickly to changing needs. Cardner and other execs get fast insights from dashboards that display real-time performance with drilldown to details. They not only have stats that show residents are staying longer but can also “get into the weeds” and see what’s behind the numbers to really understand what’s happening at their properties. Validating a long-term renter program At one of Grubb’s apartment communities, an impressive 42% increase in length of residency was only part of the story. “Using data from Asset IQ, we correlated the success of a long-term resident program to important financial metrics: $30 increase in rental income per unit and $32 lower expenses,” said Cardner. Grubb utilizes the benchmark KPIs on its Asset IQ dashboard for renewal rates, renewal percentages and new lease rates. The company also likes to keep a close eye on maintenance expenditures. Cardner added, “I see benchmark data as a tool that brings visibility into possible areas of improvement.” Benchmarking against peers and budget With Asset IQ, Grubb can compare its actual leasing, financial and operational data to a defined peer set and to its own budget. An easy-to-use dashboard...