Company needs 1/3 less time to complete ‘gargantuan’ cash flow projection project
SANTA BARBARA, CALIF., Dec. 01, 2011 – Commercial real estate owner Hartz Mountain Industries Inc. stands poised to complete a highly successful year that includes a record-setting quarterly performance. One key to this success is faster, easier preparation of portfolio-wide cash flow projections with a new technology asset: Yardi PortfolioVMF™, an automated forecasting and property valuation solution that the company adopted in early 2011.
Hartz leased more than 3.2 million square feet of industrial space from April through June 2011, a single-quarter record for the company. Leases in this period equaled 71% of the square footage that Hartz leased in all asset classes of its portfolio in 2010.
Hartz credits Yardi PortfolioVMF, which generates 10-year cash flow projections for more than 200 properties, for helping the company manage the upsurge in leasing volume. “With PortfolioVMF, which draws lease information directly from Yardi Voyager™, we get our projections much faster and with a higher level of accuracy than before,” said Lawrence Garb, executive vice president of administration for Hartz. “We can easily change assumptions, such as changes to vacancy and rents and assumed down time between leases. In our inaugural use of PortfolioVMF, we cut by one-third the time needed to create our gargantuan, 200-property projections ‘book,’ and we anticipate cutting the time by half in the future. We can generate all variety of analytics that let us compare properties on an apples-to-apples basis and see if our actual performance met our projections.”
Garb added, “In the past, we manually entered lease data to another projection tool and then pieced together a complex web of spreadsheets to obtain a consolidated cash flow projection. With all the times the data had to be manipulated, this approach was time-consuming, error-prone and not flexible for changes. Considering the volume of leasing this year, Yardi PortfolioVMF clearly provided a solution that enabled us to prepare faster, more accurate and flexible cash flow projections.”
“Yardi congratulates our longtime client Hartz on their recent success. We are pleased that PortfolioVMF has helped them accommodate their dramatic increase in leasing volume with seamless projections of future cash flow projections,” said Terri Dowen, senior vice president of sales for Yardi.
About Hartz Mountain Industries Inc.
Headquartered in Secaucus, N.J., Hartz Mountain Industries Inc. owns and manages one of the largest privately held commercial real estate portfolios in the U.S., comprising approximately 200 properties and more than 38 million square feet in the northern New Jersey/New York area. The company employs a comprehensive approach to real estate that is facilitated by its full-scale, in-house departments for leasing, management, finance, acquisition, architecture, construction, development, planning, marketing, design and property management. Hartz has been recognized by NJPA Real Estate Journal as the Best Developer of 2004 and by the Business News New Jersey Journal (NJBIZ) as one of the best places to work in New Jersey for 2004 and 2005. For more information, visit www.hartzmountain.com.
About Yardi
Yardi Systems has been committed to the design, development and support of real estate investment management and property management software for nearly 30 years. With its Yardi Multifamily Suite™, Yardi Commercial Suite™ and Yardi Investment Suite™, the Yardi Voyager™ system is the most comprehensive single real estate management platform on the market today. Yardi serves clients around the world from offices in Asia, Australia, Europe and North America. More information about Yardi products and services is available at www.yardi.com.
Trade Media Contact: Joel Nelson 805.699-2040, ext. 1255