RentViewer Blog
How RentViewer Fits into the Real Estate AI Ecosystem
Introduction AI is rapidly changing the way companies operate — from automating routine tasks to generating predictive insights. But for real estate executives, the challenge often starts much earlier: your property management system (Yardi Voyager, AppFolio, Entrata,...
Reduce Maintenance Costs and Provide Better Service with a Property Maintenance Dashboard
Property Maintenance Dashboard: Reduce Costs & Improve Response Time Maintenance impacts both resident satisfaction and bottom-line performance. A property maintenance dashboard gives you data to manage costs, team efficiency, and vendor performance. What to Track...
Key Metrics to Include in Your Leasing & Occupancy Dashboard
Multifamily Occupancy Dashboard: Metrics You Should Be Tracking Occupancy is a leading indicator of revenue performance. A well-built multifamily occupancy dashboard lets you anticipate problems and manage leasing proactively. Metrics to Include in a Multifamily...
Real Estate Debt Tracking Dashboard: What to Include
Real Estate Debt Tracking Dashboard: What to Include Debt is one of the biggest risks in real estate investing. A real estate debt tracking dashboard provides visibility into your loan portfolio so you can proactively manage risk. There's no good place in property...
Property Management Budget Dashboard: How to Build a GL Variance Report
Property Management Budget Dashboard: How to Build a GL Variance Report A GL variance dashboard gives you the financial clarity needed to manage multifamily assets effectively. With it, owners and operators can quickly pinpoint where actual spending deviates from...
How to Track Rent Collections with a Real Estate Collections Dashboard
Real Estate Collections Dashboard: How to Track Rent Payments Collections are the heartbeat of your multifamily portfolio. Without timely rent, cash flow dries up, and forecasting becomes guesswork. A real estate collections dashboard gives owner/operators real-time...
Top 5 Real Estate Dashboards for Multifamily Owner/Operators
Top 5 Real Estate Dashboards for Multifamily Owner/Operators Managing a multifamily portfolio is tough without a clear view of your data. Whether you’re using Yardi, Entrata, AppFolio, or Rent Manager, the reality is the same: your team spends too much time building...
Real Estate Asset Manager Responsibilities
What are the Responsibilities of a Real Estate Asset Manager? Acquiring a property on great terms doesn’t mean that the investment will pay off handsomely! How that asset is managed over the next few years is what will determine whether the investment turned out to be...
How to Plan, Design and Build Your Yardi Dashboard
Introduction There are canned Yardi dashboard products out there. If you have already looked at them and concluded you need more flexibility and customization, this article will describe how to plan, design and build your own Yardi dashboard. We speak with many real...
What is Yardi Elevate and is it Right for Your Company?
How to Decide if Yardi Elevate is Right for Your CompanyMany companies that use Yardi Voyager are hungry for better visibility into their KPIs. They want dashboards to track their metrics, and to be able to drill down into the data to find opportunities for making...
How to Use Labor Efficiency Ratios in Property Management
As a property management company owner, understanding labor efficiency ratios can help you unlock ideas for making operational improvements. If you're inspired by the DLER (Direct Labor Efficiency Ratio) and MLER (Management Labor Efficiency Ratio) concepts after...
Yardi Data Warehouse With the Backup Database
How to Get Better Yardi Reporting with Dashboards, Analytics and a Data WarehouseYou are the head of IT in a midsize real estate company, and your CEO has asked you to help lay the groundwork for better Yardi reporting. Your CEO envisions a future with dashboards and...
10 Benefits of a Real Estate Data Warehouse
A data warehouse stores data such as all your rent rolls, snapshots of your A/R aging data, your general ledger, proformas and such. All the leads ever received, all the visits and all the leases. And a lot more. On this page we list ten benefits of a real estate data...
The Weekly Property Operations Meeting
WEEKLY PROPERTY OPERATIONS MEETING I learn a lot from my customers, and I ask a lot of questions. One question I always ask is “How do you run your operations?” or "Do you have a weekly property operations meeting?" Many companies have a weekly property...
How to Analyze Leasing Velocity
Leasing Velocity is an important metric to forecast supply, generate leads, and convert the leads to leases at the right rents. Lets take a look at an example scenario. Company Profile A multifamily developer and operator managing a portfolio of over...
Entrata and Domo Dashboards
Entrata and Domo Dashboards If you use Entrata and want to be able to visualize your data in charts, you can build your own home-grown solution, or purchase a third-party product. There are two third-party options: Use Domo with its own Domo Entrata Connector Use...
Multifamily Leasing Funnel Metrics
The leasing funnel describes how well your company converts leads into leases. This conversation between a client and I illustrates the usefulness of knowing your leasing funnel metrics. This concept is explained by Neil Bawa in this PDF available at Multifamily...
Property management dashboard design guidelines
HOW TO DESIGN A DASHBOARD THAT WILL ACTUALLY GET USEDSome property management companies spend months building a single dashboard. And after the dashboard is published, it does not get used. I have seen it many times. Want to avoid this outcome? Here are property...
You want me to replicate an Excel report in Power BI?
Dashboard Project Success Factors In this post I will describe one critical dashboard project success factor; how to frame the reason for building the dashboard. At the start of every dashboard project, I listen for a few signals that can predict if the project is...
How to Calculate Cash on Cash Return
Here's a simple illustration for how to calculate cash-on-cash return for a real estate investment. RentViewer clients who invest their own cash in real estate are interested in knowing their cash-on-cash return. The key is to separate cash inflows and outflows from...
Real Estate Data Visualization
Your Property Management System contains valuable data that can tell you how your business is performing and where opportunities lie for doing even better. Running standard reports is a common way to look at the data and make meaning out of it. Some companies export...
Is There an ROI in Analytics?
Is there an ROI in Analytics? Within five minutes of meeting a prospective RentViewer customer, I can tell if they are going to see an ROI in analytics or not. Many companies reach out to me because they are tired of compiling data in Excel, or want to view data...
Asset Management Maturity Model
Real Estate Asset Management Maturity: Assessing and Enhancing GP Performance The Asset Management Maturity Model is a framework for real estate investors to gauge how efficiently the General Partners are running their businesses, and if they are likely to deliver the...
Asset Management Goals
Real Estate Asset Management Goals and Analytics Go Together My customers don’t care about the technologies my company specializes in. They don’t care about data analytics. They have asset management goals. What they care about is increasing the value of the assets...
Dashboard cost estimate surprises
Dashboard Cost Estimate Dashboards and icebergs have something in common: they both have a part that is visible and a part, much larger, that is not visible. The invisible part of a dashboard is the data that gets pulled into the dashboard. The effort, and therefore...
Real Estate Asset Management with Excel
There comes a point when Excel expertise can become a liability. Excel is such a powerful tool that pretty much anything can be done in Excel. And some asset management teams don’t look beyond Excel to do their work. Here’s a conversation between an institutional...
How to estimate the cost of a dashboard
Before we can give you a quote for a custom dashboard, we need to gather some information. In this post I will explain how to estimate the cost of a dashboard, and what questions we need to ask in order to build the quote. How to Estimate the Cost of a...
How to specify custom property management metrics
Companies come to us because the reports from their property management system don't provide them the metrics they want. Customization is the driver. We have a process for specifying custom property management metrics. Here is how we do it. Custom Property...
What to do with those real estate deal proformas
Real Estate Deal Proformas When I review metrics with my clients, I also ask how the asset is performing relative to the original real estate deal proformas. Most of the time that question is hard to answer. We know that as a deal sponsor, if you can demonstrate that...
Four Types of Metrics in Real Estate
In this post I am going to introduce the four types of metrics in real estate management that I recommend our clients keep an eye on. Most of our clients ask to look at Actual vs Budget. Looking at the variance to budget helps them know how they are managing. I think...
The Dashboard Buyer’s Journey
Before our clients hire us to build them a custom dashboard, they go through what we call the "dashboard buyer’s journey". This is a “journey” because it involves many decision points, and there are lots of things to learn along the way. The Dashboard Buyer’s...
How to Forecast Occupancy
Take a minute to look at the occupancy dashboard image below. It is forecasting occupancy 30, 60 and 90 days from now. The rest of the article describes how to forecast occupancy for your portfolio. How to Forecast Occupancy Let’s say you have been given a monthly...
Building the Entrata KPI Scorecard
An Automated Entrata KPI Scorecard We built the RentViewer Entrata connector in collaboration with a client. Our client was looking to automate the process for updating their Excel-based KPI scorecard. The Business Challenge The client's executive team had...
Leasing Velocity
What is Leasing Velocity definition? The widely accepted definition of Leasing Velocity is “Length of time a unit is unoccupied between leases” or rental turnaround time. The quicker you lease the unit, the higher your leasing velocity. The longer a unit is vacant,...
Dynamic Pricing in Multifamily Portfolios
Dynamic Pricing in Multifamily Real Estate Dynamic pricing isn’t only limited to airlines and hotels! You, too, can decide what the rent for any specific unit should be on any given day. To achieve this capability, you will need to build an intelligent data...
Using metrics that predict future performance
When you are looking at P&Ls or balance sheets, you are looking at history you are looking at metrics that predict future performance.A P&L tells you what happened last month.It is not telling you what is likely to happen next month.And relying too much on...