Multi Housing News August 2012 : Page 13

TECH TALK Q A Lori Burger Senior Vice President Eugene Burger Management Corporation Have you successfully met the challenge of improving your screening process? Yes, doing screening within Voyager saves us time, helps us work more efficiently, and gives us full control over the process. We can enforce corporate policies uniformly across our portfolio. At times, site managers want to allow prospects who don’t meet all of our criteria to move in, but they can’t override corporate screening criteria; they have to consult with corporate and abide by its decision. In addition, Resident Screening gives us analytics that provide insight into our traffic and screening criteria. The reports help us understand, for example, why decline rates at communities in proximity to each other are different and what adjustments we might need to make. Resident Screening helps us make better business decisions and gives us higher quality residents and higher occupancy rates. You mentioned the importance of an integrated technology solution. Could you elaborate? About a decade ago, we had nine different software programs to manage our portfolio at the property sites and in district offices. This was clearly inefficient and unwieldy. Integration means performing multiple functions in a core platform, and in that sense Voyager gives us everything we need to run our business. There’s so much there, and we haven’t reached the limit—and probably never will—of what it offers. As one example, we’ve enjoyed ™ which we use to schedule success with Yardi Inspection, and manage our property inspections. Inspection’s mobile application lets our managers post their findings to Voyager from their mobile phones. Voyager is built to meet our needs, and we are a better company because of Yardi. Q A Q A Please describe Eugene Burger Management Corporation. EBMC is based in Rohnert Park, California, and maintains 12 offices in California and Nevada. We manage about 6,000 apartment units at more than 100 communities. We also have 22,000 condominium units along with about 2 million square feet of commercial space. Tell us about one of your major business initiatives. We found recently that we needed greater control of the screening process and more uniformity of criteria among our properties, and improve our chances of attracting and retaining high-quality residents. Previously, we had to do applicant screening at another site, then run the screening report from there. It wasn’t very efficient or user-friendly. Furthermore, our properties were using different screening companies and criteria. We just weren’t getting the quality of residents we wanted or uniform corporate screening policy enforcement. What was most important to you in seeking a new resident screening solution? Performing ancillary functions within our core Yardi Voyager ™ system is very important to us from an efficiency standpoint and it’s our number one factor when we evaluate new technology. Yardi Resident Screening obviously made sense from a Voyager integration standpoint, and this put it ahead of the five or six other options we evaluated. Q A Q A Resident screening SMART SMARTER Credit, employment and criminal screening fully integrated with Yardi Voyager YARDI Resident Screening ™ powered by RentGrow, Inc. »  Customizable scoring engine for consistent decisions and improved compliance »  Real-time results and visibility into your Voyager leasing workﬂows »  Business intelligence with analytics that leverage resident history data in Voyager To learn more, call 800.866.1144 or visit www.yardi.com/sm ar t2 5

Multi Housing News August 2012 : Page 13

Yardi Investment