Transcript
I am Jessica Stevens. I am the director of business systems and technology for BRG Realty Group. I oversee the whole entire Yardi platform, our business systems, including interface vendors and all of our technology throughout the company. We're in multifamily, all conventional, and we are growing quite rapidly. So we're at 8600 currently, units. When I get back, I have to put three more communities in. So, that we're acquiring or building. And so it will be just about 9400 at that point. We had a person who oversaw utilities, a full time employee who is getting close to retirement. What are we going to do with this role? Utilities is a lot to manage. And frankly, it would probably have been two jobs. In order to manage the growth of our company. That's when we made the strategic decision to hand it all over to YES Energy. Very nerve wracking for AP team initially, but now they never want to go back. We know we can say 1500 hours annually have been saved by eliminating that role. I mean, the time spent on utilities processing, submitting payables, and our team manually input all that data before, YES. Then they had to go and improve and make sure their GLs were assigned correctly. You don't have to do that now. They still have the ability to go in and say: “Yes, we're approving these”, you know, is there anything that's, significant variance that we need to be concerned about? But outside of that, I mean, the time spent is so easy. They can deal with the exceptions and go do the other big accounting work that we need them to do outside of the utility. The time that, YES, handles resident complaints. They're there for internal support as well. And we have questions on rubs, and how do we make, our systems more efficient and get the most recovery that we can. And then on top of that, you know, they're taking care of the payables. They're handling all those things for us. So I don't think you can truly put a dollar on the benefits that we get as a, you know, small, medium sized company from having that Yardi, experience and knowledge. We were recovering about 70% when we started in 2021 and then 2023, where we recovered a little over 81%. And in 2024, we're projected to recover 86%. So right now, from 21 to 23, it's a little over $650,000. And that's true, like, net recovery. So I factored in the expenses, the increase of expenses, which was 7%. Our revenue grew by 16.5. It's real dollars that we can take and put back into the properties.