Managing Growth

Bentall Kennedy, Canada

By Leah Etling on Jan 19, 2015 in People

Many North American property managers have grown their portfolios during the recent period of economic resurgence, but few can compare their experience to that of Bentall Kennedy’s multifamily portfolio. In just over two years, the well-known Canadian company – which has a century of experience in the commercial/industrial sectors – began and then quadrupled the size of its managed multi family residential rental portfolio.

We recently sat down with Chrystal Skead, Bentall Kennedy’s Senior Director of Residential Property Management to learn about how Bentall Kennedy’s use of Yardi products helped make such a rapid expansion possible.

Skead shared that Bentall Kennedy began its foray into the multifamily market with just three properties, amounting to 700 units, at the beginning of 2012. From inception, the intent was to acquire assets across Canada. The portfolio, now with 3,800 units, includes assets in Toronto, Regina, Calgary, Vancouver and Victoria. If you’re familiar with Canadian geography, that’s far from a centralized group of properties.

The acquisition of the additional 2,800 units came in January 2014. But less than one year later, Skead said that use of Yardi Voyager helped the transition from three different management groups to one had been relatively easy.

“When we grew by five-fold, it was relatively easy to do from a technology point of view. First, we needed to populate Yardi with the data provided by the previous property management company. Our accounting department dealt with most of that. Then it was only a matter of training the onboarding staff on the new systems and expectations,” Skead said.

One of her favorite features of the Yardi multifamily platform is that it enables her to have transparency into a property’s performance and ease of remote management.

“We had a situation where our portfolio in Toronto needed to be managed directly due to a sudden staffing change. I’m based out of Calgary – it’s a four hour flight between Calgary and Toronto. It was a great use of the Yardi technology to have the site staff be able to upload the application forms, leases and credit checks into the prospect files, so when the application came to me through Yardi I simply had to click, could see all the documents, and instantly approve or deny the application. It made it very seamless even though there were 3,000 miles between us,” Skead said.

Moving forward, Bentall Kennedy will be moving to Yardi’s RentCafe product to provide marketing and resident services portals for each community managed. Residents will be able to take advantage of accessing their tenant information online, completing lease renewals and communicating with the management office. All of the transactions and information will be simultaneously recorded in Yardi Voyager – creating further transparency and efficiency.