"Our goal is to use Yardi, comprehensively and exclusively, for all of our property management operations," said Yvonne Jones, managing director of asset and property management for McCaffery Interests, a Yardi client since 2011.

She added, "The single-vendor approach saves us a lot of time, it makes us more efficient, and, best of all, we get the Yardi technical support and sales professionals who understand our company, our properties and our processes."

Accordingly, McCaffery Interests has integrated several new products with its Yardi Voyager® property management and accounting system. One of them is RENTCafé TM, which McCaffery Interests uses to market its residential units online and to provide online resident services. "In today's world the consumer wants everything online, so our goal with is RENTCafé is to have a product that allows our residents to do that as much as possible," Jones said. "That means paying rent and submitting work orders, contacting site management, and seeing if they have deliveries to be picked up. There are a whole host of services that RENTCafé offers, and we're using as much of it as we possibly can."

McCaffery Interests also leverages the social media marketing features of RENTCafé. "When a resident is on their Facebook page, they can go directly to their account with us. This is part of our focus to use social media to increase awareness of our properties," Jones said.

Another product that McCaffery Interests built into Yardi Voyager is Yardi Energy Solutions TM, an automated utility billing and energy management solution. "What's really helpful to us, in addition to the vacant cost recovery, is having the means to benchmark our utility costs and compare how costs at one property compare to the utility costs of another property in the same area. Energy Solutions has been extremely helpful and beneficial in understanding costs across our residential portfolio," Jones said. "As Chicago and other cities become more interested in benchmarking, Yardi Energy Solutions will be the tools we'll use to understand our costs."

Revenues for the company have also been boosted by Yardi RENTmaximizer TM, which automates the process of calculating best rents. "RENTmaximizer has pushed our site teams to think more about pricing and occupancy. We're pricing on a daily basis, whereas before we might have looked at pricing only quarterly and not adjusted to increased traffic coming to the property," Jones said. "We expect that by the end of 2013 we will increase our revenues by at least 2% by having RENTmaximizer in place."

Addressing Yardi's electronic invoice processing solution, Jones said, "Yardi PAYscan TM has been fantastic and is one of the most important products we implemented because the process is digital and that makes us much more efficient. It's much easier to move invoices for approval between our offices in Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh and Chicago. And Yardi PAYscan Mobile TM allows me and other executives to continue processing invoices on the road using iPhones or iPads."

The commercial segment of McCaffery Interests' portfolio also benefits from Yardi solutions. One example is Yardi Advanced Budgeting & Forecasting TM, an automated solution that delivers accurate budget projections for revenue and expenses using tenant lease data drawn from Yardi Voyager. According to Jones, "It's a fantastic tool for the recovery setup, the recovery reconciliation and the running estimates that are due from the tenants in the upcoming year. That functionality alone has saved us so much time. We can handle expenses in the budgeting process in a more organized, strategic fashion.

"We're going to continuing exploring all the new platforms Yardi has to offer and integrate them as soon as possible. It save us a lot of time, makes us more efficient, and gives us access to support personnel who know what we're hoping to accomplish as a company."

About McCaffery Interests Inc.

Chicago-based McCaffery Interests Inc. targets investment in and the development or redevelopment of underperforming urban real estate. Since 1991, McCaffery Interests has successfully acquired, developed and/or redeveloped $1 billion of outstanding real estate assets. The company has won dozens of awards for excellence in property development from United States Green Building Council, American Institute of Architects, National Association of Homebuilders, and many others. For more information, visit www.mccafferyinterests.com.

About Yardi

Now in its fourth decade, Yardi® is committed to the design, development and support of software for real estate investment management and property management. With the Yardi Multifamily Suite TM, Yardi Commercial Suite TM, Yardi Investment Suite TM and Yardi Orion TM Business Intelligence, the Yardi Voyager® platform is a complete real estate management solution. It includes operations, accounting and ancillary processes and services with portfolio-wide business intelligence and platform-wide mobility. Yardi is based in Santa Barbara, Calif., and serves clients worldwide from offices in North America, Asia, Australia, Europe and the Middle East. For more information, visit www.yardi.com.

Yardi Systems Inc.
Joel Nelson
800-866-1144 x1255
Joel.Nelson@yardi.com