How do you measure your softwares ROI?

How do you measure your softwares return on investment? How does your software add value to your site staff and to your residents?

I think this would be a difficult question to answer, if you are not familiar with the different types of software, the different reports available, what your portfolio is consisted of, and what you might think is not needed could truly be an asset.

For example, Rent Manager is probable one of the most affordable programs for smaller assets with limited users, as the cost is a per user charge vs. per license. The program supplies pretty decent residential reports such as Rent Roll, Security Deposit, Deposit List, and Unit Availability, and their accounting are very similar to a quickbooks report. However, when it comes to affordable housing, their report has no controls in place to support any affordable housing programs, which means for LIHTC communities, all the reports will need to be done by hand, leaving more room for human error and qualification liability. Not to mentioned, if you have a project based community, you wouldn’t even be able to run the TRACS report, which means you would need a separate report just for that. So, while the program is affordable in cost, and can overall work well for conventional assets, it could be costly in compliance with affordable housing communities. This is where other programs like Yardi, Onesite, and AMSI come and start making sense.

Now, Yardi and Onesite might be one of the most growing and compatible systems in the industry. However, each of them has their strength and weakness. For example, Yardi was designed as true accounting software, so the reports it generates are amazing in the overall world of asset management and financial forecast. If you truly want to understand the financial operation of you r asset, Yardi’s reports would be ideal. However, if you are more interested on the day-by-day operation of the residential side, than Onesite is more than capable to do so, and their reporting are more in line in the resident aspect of the business.

So, to truly understand the cost of your software, you really have to understand what type of asset you have and what you are looking to track.

Hope this helps.

TIME. Determine the need. Pick a software that fills it and reduce time in data entry, reports and reporting. I also believe if you can standardize on one particular solution then you will have the flexibility to juggle employees between locations. Hourly loaded labor rate times hours saved divided by cost.

Every software has its own way of automating the leasing process and optimizing revenue. In what ways does your software program(s) do that and was it a deciding factor is what software you chose?

Great points from both folks. Magnum Multifamily Services has several tools for helping deliver a BIG ROI. The "I" part of ROI is important and varies widely, but we often find it justified by the "R" it can potentially produce.

Pedro, when measuring the Investment what have you considered for Total Cost of Ownership? Do you consider hardware cost, version management, integration, consulting/training, or vendor viability (like you are a BostonPost user and tomorrow you're a MRI customer)?

Brian, when it came to TIME as your leading metric for "Return", were you ever able to replace a full headcount? If not full replacement, did you adjust your hours to impact a hard cost in a real way? Does anyone measure things like average unit turn time, bad debt, renewal rate, same store rent growth in their system "Return"?