Transcript
My name is Lori McGowan. I'm the deputy executive director of the Spokane Housing Authority. Software implementations. Are difficult to do. You have to go in with your eyes wide open. And if you're prepared, it's going to be a success. Look at you already as a partner. You guys have been there for us the entire implementation. We never thought we would be able to do it within 12 months. I think we finished in like ten, 9 or 10 months for our agency. Our size is unheard of in my experience. So, having you guys come alongside of us with the professional group, was just invaluable. I have never had that from another software company. I feel like Yardi knows housing better than any other software company that I have ever had interactions with. When we are at the table and talking about the new reports and talking about what HUD is coming out with, Yardi is there and they're like figuring it out and they're getting feedback at the same time. And that is really important. During Covid, I think you were the only company that came out with a solution to get those rental assistance payment out as quick as possible. No one else did. And that was really impressive. Make sure you have the resources available. Not only a consultant, bring in a consultant that in-house resources. Free up your stock time. Make sure that they can take the training. Make sure that they can think about the processes that they currently do and how that translates into a new software. But also the the right people to set it up according to their expertise. And that's what we did. We had a team of four people. That was our project management team. Those four people, they were the ones that were the point of contact with Yardi. Then we had at least two people in every single programmatic area that was assigned to help set up their specific areas. We decided to implement everything at one time with Yardi, that includes the applicant portals, the RTA portals, our landlord portals. Those enable us to get our vouchers out to the street quicker. Especially if we have someone that's in need and they need to be leased up right away. Just having the RTA portal and and implementing that and learning how to use it. We can lease up someone in a matter of ten days versus where we are on average, like 14 to 20 days. We just recently opened our waiting list, for Spokane, and at first time used the applicant portal to do so, and it was a breeze. It went better than we ever expected it. There was no hiccups, no hiccups with technology. We we helped people sign up for the portal, but it was easy for them. We had the waitlist open for seven days and we got over 5,500 applications, which equated to close to 14,000 people. That applied through the portal during that time. It was the easiest opening of our waitlist we ever had. I'm excited about that because right now, like the new look of Voyager 8 and those dashboards, we're still learning the reporting capabilities of Yardi, and I see that as streamlining it for us. The power BI is what we're looking into. We are excited to see what that can do. So we can combine our data and, and meaningful ways so we can make decisions from that. Spokane Housing Authority for several years has set a value of making sure that we are at the top of our game, meaning we are utilizing technology to do our jobs better. We know that they want to use the best technology. They want to do their jobs the best that they can and as efficient as they can, and they can get very frustrated when they cannot. We're looking at data. You can't make decisions going forward, strategic decisions without data. And we have not had that ability for a long time now. Technology is important because it and now it allows them to communicate differently. It allows decisions to be made quicker. That is this generation. If you if you are still pushing paper around and taking weeks, months to make decisions, you're not going to keep staff from the younger generation.