The Company
EastGroup Properties, Inc. (NYSE: EGP), a member of the S&P Mid-Cap 400 and Russell 2000 Indexes, is a self-administered equity real estate investment trust focused on the development, acquisition and operation of industrial properties in major Sunbelt markets throughout the United States with an emphasis in the states of Florida, Texas, Arizona, California and North Carolina. The company’s goal is to maximize shareholder value by being a leading provider in its markets of functional, flexible and quality business distribution space for location-sensitive customers (primarily in the 20,000 to 100,000 square foot range).
The Challenge
Manual budgeting processes
Before Forecast Manager, EastGroup’s budgeting process was a 100% accounting function. Asset managers would print rent rolls, mark them up and scan them to accounting for entry into the system. This process was very tedious, manual and time-consuming for both asset and accounting teams.
The Solution
Yardi Forecast Manager
Forecast Manager optimizes budgeting and forecasting for EastGroup by connecting asset management, finance and leasing teams on a single platform with centralized data and automated workflows. The solution eliminates manual processes and redundancy, improves accuracy with real-time leasing and expense information and increases visibility for impactful insights on portfolio health.
The Story
Spreading the budget process across multiple departments
Without software that provided centralized access to financial information and budgeting tools, EastGroup’s accounting team completely owned the budgeting process. As a result, the company experienced numerous challenges and inefficiencies across teams, such as manually submitting budget information to accounting. With Forecast Manager, EastGroup has expanded the budget process to include not only asset management entering leasing assumptions, but also property management teams entering expense items. Accounting then consolidates this information and reviews the individual budgets for accuracy and soundness. According to EastGroup’s CIO, Brian Laird, “The Forecast Manager implementation was a tremendous win for us by eliminating mundane processes previously undertaken for timely budget completion.” Forecast Manager ensures that only accurate current data is used for budgeting and forecasting and provides a single source of truth for the entire company.
Enjoying an easy-to-use system from a trusted partner
Forecast Manager is easy to use for EastGroup staff. Laird commented that the change management and the adoption aspect of implementing Forecast Manager couldn’t have been better. While he anticipated potential push back on adopting a new solution, staff readily accepted the change and were eager to start using the platform. EastGroup’s experience collaborating with Yardi has been excellent and has enabled the company to increase efficiencies and grow without adding staff. “With Yardi solutions, we have been able to automate, streamline and improve processes across our business verticals,” said Laird.
