SANTA BARBARA, CALIF., Oct. 29, 2013 – The Buzz Oates Group of Companies (BOGC) sought to reduce business process cycle times and drive workforce efficiency in various business operations, and establish a technology framework to enhance customer service. BOGC will fulfill these initiatives by adding Yardi COMMERCIALCafé™ and products from the Yardi Investment Suite™ and the Yardi Commercial Suite™ to its Yardi Voyager® property management and accounting platform.
BOGC is a fully integrated commercial real estate development company that invests in real estate through complex ownership structures. It will track its involvement in more than 100 ventures and partnerships easily and quickly with Yardi Investment Management™, which automates investment accounting, performance measurement and investor reporting.
“Our entities have multiple layers and different partners. Yardi Investment Management will help us track these complex hierarchies and deal structures and consolidate reporting automatically,” said Kimberly Chambers, senior vice president of accounting and tax services for BOGC. “It’s the only solution that gives us full oversight of these activities and lets us manage them at every stage, from the investor to the individual asset.” BOGC will also adopt Yardi Advanced Budgeting & Forecasting™ so that budgeting and revenue forecasting for BOGC will require fewer steps and less manual input. Yardi Advanced Budgeting & Forecasting will eliminate imports and exports among spreadsheets and draw future income and expense projections from company tenant lease data.
Seeking to increase tenant satisfaction with convenient online services, BOGC adopted Yardi COMMERCIALCafé, which provides a portal through which tenants can submit maintenance requests, and perform other tasks online or from a mobile device. “With COMMERCIALCafé, our clients will have an easier time submitting and tracking issues than they would by doing those things by phone or email,” Chambers said. “This means better tenant services, which gives us a competitive edge when leasing our space.”
Chambers added that Yardi Maintenance Management™, BOGC’s new tool for keeping tabs on daily maintenance activities, “will make a huge difference in tracking our operating systems in one core system that provides reporting and analytics, rather than having to transfer data back and forth between spreadsheets. We have reports on how many calls our maintenance vendors responded to and what they did instantly available, giving us a much better picture of the condition of physical assets at our properties.”
To give its leasing agents a clear snapshot of their deal pipeline and status, BOGC also adopted Yardi Commercial CRM™, a fully mobile solution that makes lease and lead tracking records, property management data, contacts, correspondence and other information available from a desktop or mobile device. They can respond quickly and accurately to prospects with information such as space availability, restrictive lease clauses, budgets and market rent data.
BOGC will gain further benefits from automation and single-platform integration by adopting Yardi PAYscan™, which scans invoices into electronic transactions and automates workflow across the approval process, and Yardi CHECKscan™, which scans paper rent checks into electronic Yardi Voyager transactions. “Having invoice images in Voyager lets anyone with an Internet connection look at them and drill down as deeply into the transaction as necessary. Electronic routing is also better,” Chambers said. “With CHECKscan, we don’t have to spend time manually going through checks from our tenants, then code, scan, deposit and apply them to the account, and flag it if something isn’t correct. It’s all done automatically in one system.”
“The Yardi platform will allow BOGC to manage their entire real estate lifecycle with a vertically integrated suite of applications that leverages the best in technology and rich application functionality,” said Alan James, Yardi’s industry principal for Investment Management and Commercial.
About The Buzz Oates Group of Companies
The Buzz Oates Group of Companies, based in Sacramento, Calif., creates and manages facilities for commercial real estate users by designing and building retail centers, office/warehouse/distribution centers and state-of-the-art Class A office space. Buzz Oates Construction Inc. has built more than 60 million square feet of office and warehouse space. The company leases approximately two to three million square feet and brokers approximately $100 million of commercial property each year. It manages a portfolio of 17 million square feet for more than 100 ventures and has built relationships with 400 tenants. Buzz Oates’ reputation has been built on more than 60 years of experience, integrity and leadership. For more information, visit www.buzzoates.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 Commercial Suite™, Yardi Multifamily Suite™, Yardi Investment Suite™ and Yardi Orion™ 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.
Trade Media Contact: Joel Nelson 805.699-2040, ext. 1255