A Connected Solution for the Optimized CRE Revenue Lifecycle

The interconnected balance between budgeting, leasing and construction projects is essential to optimizing asset performance across a commercial real estate portfolio. Working with the right set of tools not only ensures transparency and data accuracy but also provides real-time and actionable insights into every phase of the process. When live data from the leasing pipeline and construction projects are available within your budgeting solution, it becomes possible to manage the forecast on a rolling basis without the noise of updating a litany of spreadsheets.

From lead-to-lease pipeline management to streamlining the budgeting process and optimizing the construction lifecycle, here’s a closer look at how Deal Manager, Forecast Manager and Construction Manager — part of the Yardi commercial solution suite — unlock operational efficiency through an integrated workflow and single stack-solution.

• Deal Manager, part of the CommercialEdge end-to-end revenue suite, accelerates and simplifies the entire leasing process with automated workflows, sophisticated deal metrics and full pipeline visibility enabled by real-time portfolio information.
• Forecast Manager streamlines the budgeting process and optimizes accuracy by eliminating error-prone spreadsheets and enabling informed decision-making by connecting leasing, property management and asset management teams.
• Construction Manager, a full lifecycle project management solution, streamlines all aspects of CRE construction and ensures project visibility, risk mitigation and collaboration on capital and tenant improvement projects.

Seamless Communication Between Deal Management and Expense Forecasting

Deal Manager, at its core, helps leasing teams get better deals done faster. By leveraging Yardi Voyager data to populate stacking and floor plans and view side-by-side proposal analysis, the platform provides leasing teams with a better way to manage their deal pipeline.

This advantage is leveled up when Forecast Manager is in use. The leasing agents can automatically compare deal economics to approved budgets, market leasing assumptions and prior leases. This insightful view is powered by a bidirectional relationship and data synchronization between Deal Manager and Forecast Manager. The forecasting tool provides the ability to create comprehensive annual budgets for clients with multiple properties and tenants, allowing companies to outline a data-driven and well-organized plan for the upcoming period.

Within Deal Manager, the ability to see market leases and budgeted leases from Forecast Manager helps inform Deal Manger end-users about deal approvals. This bilateral connection facilitates data flow between the two systems and enables clients to quickly understand deal terms and generate proposals confidently.

By displaying the proposal, the market leasing assumption and the budget in one place, Yardi Deal Manager helps us make decisions and move forward quickly.

Adeel Khan, Chief Financial Officer, Rexford Industrial

Drawing on the budgeted lease set up for a specific space in Forecast Manager, the integration allows for automatic triggered approval, rejection or escalation in Deal Manager. In addition, Deal Manager provides the capability to set up multiple approval requirements in accordance with the budget data in Forecast Manager, making the approval process more efficient and reliable.

Clients can configure two separate budget versions when making comparisons. As an example, a current deal can be compared to both the approved annual budget as well as the most recent forecast. This level of visibility helps leasing teams close the best deal possible.

Side-by-Side Budget Comparisons and Real-Time Performance Tracking

Forecast Manager enables clients to monitor annual budget performance relative to their approved budget. Clients can promote deals from Deal Manager to Forecast Manager and use re-forecasting to accurately analyze their budget based on all deals in the pipeline.

A built-in hover-over feature in the forecasting tool shows where a particular data set originated and clients can make necessary adjustments along the way. Correspondingly, Deal Manager incorporates settings that ensure the appropriate information is pushed to Forecast Manager.

When it comes to assessing risk, clients have access to a comprehensive view of their portfolios in both Deal Manager and Forecast Manager and they can filter and view a wide range of information about each space — even across properties — including tenant risk and lease expiration date.

As an additional benefit, Forecast Manager enables clients to easily identify deals from Deal Manager at a particular stage and promote them into the forecast. A deal can be included in the budget by simply clicking the “promote” button next to the deal. Promoting the deal means that it will be included in the worksheet the next time the client runs the forecast or revenue projection.

For instance, if a deal is at least at the negotiation stage, configurable settings can allow for it to be promoted in the forecast automatically, eliminating the need to manually promote deals. At the same time, Forecast Manager ensures that double occupancy or duplicate revenue streams won’t be projected for the same unit, providing a correction notification in case promoting a deal causes a conflict.

This combination of features and integration of deal pipeline data helps asset management and operation teams budget more accurately and eliminates the need for manually compiling various spreadsheets.

Our forecasting is correct the first time and easy to see on a dashboard. I can add acquisitions and quickly get a snapshot of what the acquisition will do many quarters out. All this used to take days, and now it takes 15 minutes.

Alex DeHaven, VP of Corporate Finance, Rexford Industrial

Accelerated Construction Timelines Powered by Portfolio-Wide Insights

The integration of Construction Manager with the deal and forecast management tools further streamlines the revenue lifecycle by enabling clients to accurately assess and track project costs and timelines.

Construction Manager houses monthly/quarterly/yearly job forecasts based on real-time projected final costs and capital expense projections for future years. Project managers quickly and easily create or update job forecasts spreading cost to complete over linear, front-loaded, back-loaded or normal curves. Forecast Manager can pull data on job forecasts and capital planning to account for any cost projection changes, ensuring data coordination and forecast accuracy while eliminating the need to rekey any data manually.

Construction Manager is providing more visibility and easier trackability across the entire portfolio.

Brandon Van Orden, Senior VP & Chief Information Officer, Cousins

Deal Manager provides a range of tenant improvement options that allow clients to effortlessly create jobs that are automatically communicated to Construction Manager. Jobs auto-created in Deal Manager are synched for approval in Construction Manager and construction teams receive automated notifications that accelerate the process by bringing everyone up to speed right away. At the same time, all jobs occurring on a space or property are visible and trackable in Deal Manager as well.

In terms of operating expenses, Forecast Manager provides a detailed, configurable dashboard that enables users to filter through properties by account and drill into specific expenses such as landscaping, insurance, electric, maintenance costs and so on, with Forecast Manager automatically calculating expenses based on custom requirements.

Forecast Manager cut our monthly forecasting time by 40%.

Alex DeHaven, VP of Corporate Finance, Rexford Industrial

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Deal Manager, Forecast Manager and Construction Manager communicate in a way that ensures visibility into each phase of the CRE process by leveraging a single-stack solution to manage leasing, forecasting and construction teams, as well as boost efficiency and drive ROI. This single-stack solution brings together and helps teams ranging from IT, asset management and accounting to project management, project accounting, property managers and leasing teams.

In addition to these platforms, the Yardi Commercial Suite encompasses a wide range of solutions focused on shortening leasing lifecycles, maximizing revenue, improving insight and enhancing customer service. CommercialEdge is an integral part of this solution stack.