Enhancing Commercial Real Estate Budgeting with Yardi Forecast Manager

Budget season—A critical time for real estate professionals that combines necessity with complexity. Accurate budgeting and forecasting are the backbone of a successful real estate portfolio, ensuring financial stability, informed decision-making, and driving strategic growth. If you still rely on Excel to manage these processes, it’s time to upgrade.

While Yardi’s Advanced Budgeting & Forecasting (AB&F) offers robust capabilities, there is always room for improvement in efficiency and insight. Introducing Yardi Forecast Manager– a powerful tool crafted to optimize your workflow. With its user-friendly dashboards, advanced data visualization, and simplified budgeting for operating expenses, Forecast Manager enhances both the efficiency and strategic value of your forecasting process. In this blog, we’ll explore how Forecast Manager’s enhanced features provide a clearer, more strategic view of your portfolio while simplifying your budgeting process.

Key Enhancements in Yardi Forecast Manager

Yardi’s Forecast Manager builds upon the core functions of Yardi’s Advanced Budgeting & Forecasting (AB&F). However, unlike AB&F, Forecast Manager offers greater visibility into portfolio performance through dashboards, tiles, and enhanced filtering capabilities. Additionally, budgeting for operating expenses becomes significantly more manageable.

Revenue Projection and Lease Assumptions

Each year, real estate teams generate new model properties individually or in bulk by copying property details from Yardi. The model begins with existing tenant data as the foundation for the rent roll. Users then edit the rent roll and layer in general or specific leasing assumptions.

Forecast Manager enhances this process with a more intuitive and user-friendly interface, making it easier to enter market leasing assumptions and speculative leases.

• Market Profile Dashboard: Set profiles for specific assumptions based on industry, building class, or unit size. These profiles are automatically applied to relevant units.
• Revenue Dashboard: Gain a clear snapshot of revenue projections by property or portfolio. This tool highlights total space, units needing assumptions due to turnover or vacancy, and risk assessments. From the Dashboard, drill down into units requiring assumptions, apply market leasing assumptions, create speculative leases, and, if licensed with Deal Manager, seamlessly promote pipeline deals into the budget.

Operating Expenses Entry

The OPEX worksheet in Forecast Manager introduces multiple ways to enter budget details:

• Entry by Property: View all or a subset of accounts for one property at a time. Unlike AB&F, which requires drilling into individual GL accounts, Forecast Manager allows users to work on multiple filtered accounts simultaneously.
• Transfer from G/L: If your organization does not use zero-based reporting and prefers to start with last year’s budget, reforecast values, or prior period actuals, Forecast Manager streamlines what was previously a two-step process in AB&F into a single step.
• Entry by Account: Budget for a single account across multiple properties—ideal for portfolio managers overseeing multiple properties.
• Import Capability: Unlike AB&F, where users must copy/paste values account by account, Forecast Manager enables bulk importing of expense account amounts.
• Apply Values Feature: Select multiple properties and apply the same value, growth rate, and spread all at once.

Forecasting Capital Planning

To utilize CAPEX functions within Forecast Manager or AB&F, Construction Manager must be licensed. Forecast Manager enables synchronization of current jobs, projection of remaining costs, integration of capital projects from CM Capital Planning, and tracking of tenant improvements for speculative leases.

Portfolio Overview with the Property Dashboard

While the Revenue Dashboard and OPEX worksheet streamline budgeting tasks, the Property Dashboard provides an overarching view of the portfolio’s budget health:

• Displays total properties, unit count, total area, and average occupancy.
• Summarizes Net Operating Income (NOI) and gross revenue across all properties within the dashboard filter.

Elevate Your Budgeting Strategy

Yardi Forecast Manager enhances traditional budgeting and forecasting by providing better visibility, improved workflows, and time-saving automation. Whether it’s streamlining operating expense entries, managing lease assumptions, or gaining high-level insights through dashboards, this tool empowers commercial real estate professionals to make smarter financial decisions with greater efficiency.

If you're looking to optimize your budgeting process, it may be time to explore Yardi Forecast Manager and experience a more strategic approach to real estate financial planning.

Ready to get started? Contact us to discuss how we can work together to help achieve your business goals with robust budgeting and financial forecasting this year, next year, and beyond.