The Yardi Advanced Solutions Conference (YASC) is an opportunity for property owners, managers, investors, and others in the real estate space to come together and learn, share best practices, and take a deep dive into the latest industry insights and software innovations. 

Our local REdirect teams were pleased to attend both the Sydney event in October and the London event in November in 2023. Both events were well attended, exceeding last year’s attendance figures.

We were proud to sponsor both events and took full advantage of the opportunity to build new relationships with the prospects who came to visit our booth. We also enjoyed networking with friends, colleagues, and new acquaintances at the evening social events. It was great to reunite with colleagues in the industry and catch up on Yardi's newly announced product features.

The announcement of Yardi Voyager 8 was prominent at both events. The events’ theme, “Infinite Possibilities,” and their marketing—featuring a number 8 turned on its side to make the infinity symbol—also tied in with this launch. 

In today’s blog, we share some highlights of the announcements made at the events.

Yardi Elevate Observations

There were few mentions of, or demonstrations involving, Yardi Voyager 7S at the conferences, despite the fact that the vast majority of Yardi’s clients are still operating on this platform. Demonstrations focused predominantly on the Yardi Elevate product suite and the upcoming Yardi Voyager 8.

Yardi Elevate offers an increasing number of products to help manage real estate operations. The mature product offerings remain the same: Yardi Commercial Suite, Yardi Residential Suite, and Yardi Investment Suite. However, Yardi also now has several new solutions emerging, including:

• Yardi Pulse (utility invoice processing, ESG reporting)
• Yardi Kube (flexible co-working space and occupancy) 
• Yardi Data Connect (business intelligence, PowerBI integration, sales, and revenue analysis); this solution is scheduled for a 2024 release
• Yardi BluePoint (visitor management, reception, and calendar booking management)
• Yardi Floorplan Manager (manage AutoCAD drawings)

As a large number of Yardi products were released in a short timeframe, overall knowledge of these new Elevate products amongst clients and consultants is not yet strong. Most clients still use Yardi Voyager 7S, and robust knowledge of Elevate products appears to be largely confined to Yardi consultants. We expect that this will change as these new solutions are rolled out more widely.

There is one key limitation of many Yardi Elevate products: they cannot perform the full functionality that Yardi Voyager 7S offers. Elevate products look more visually appealing but seem to offer only around 80% of the functionality of Voyager 7S.

Advanced Yardi users, therefore, are likely to stick with Voyager 7S rather than switching back and forth between the two applications. Elevate products may appeal to more front-end users but are not a direct replacement for Voyager 7S. The Yardi Voyager 8 platform addresses this challenge. 

Customisation options on many Yardi Elevate products also appear to be more limited. Yardi Elevate products are more “out of the box solutions” than the highly customisable Voyager.

Some Yardi presenters at the conferences mentioned that implementing Yardi Elevate products can take as little as a few weeks rather than the months required for a typical Voyager implementation. Yardi also mentioned that clients can upgrade from Yardi Voyager 7S to Voyager 8 in a matter of days or weeks, implying that clients’ timeline expectations for typical system implementations may be shortening across the board. 

Yardi Voyager 8

We attended some product demos for the Yardi Voyager 8 platform at the YASC events. This platform looks more similar to the Yardi Elevate product suite than to Voyager 7S and offers some impressive functionality updates and enhancements, including:

• Reporting and visual enhancements in Financial Analytics reporting
• The ability to save preset filters and share filter sets among users
• The ability to drag, drop, and hide columns to sort and group data directly in the system when running reports
• Built-in Yardi Aspire e-learning platform, with a “Related Training” banner displayed on certain pages that directly refers the user to relevant training videos
• No separate tabs in the lease setup area; charge schedules, clauses, and deposits all appear on the same screen. 

Upgrades from 7S to 8 are not only far quicker to implement than previous upgrades, but can also take place without Yardi PSG (Professional Services Group) involvement. Companies can also operate in both Voyager 7S and 8 while they are in the process of fully migrating to the new platform. This may limit project opportunities for system upgrade work.

Custom functionalities developed in Yardi Voyager 7S will not transfer over to Yardi Voyager 8, which may be a downside for clients who have a highly customised 7S solution. 

Yardi Voyager 8 will roll out to early adopters in the first half of 2024, with a full general release in Europe scheduled for September 2024. Subsequent Yardi Voyager 8 upgrades (e.g., 8.1) will upgrade automatically in the future. 

There are currently no plans to decommission Yardi Voyager 7S. Some functionalities—such as system administration, security, and system configuration—will remain on Yardi Voyager 7S in at least the medium-term. Some of the configurations for Voyager 8, such as security permissions, will therefore be completed in Voyager 7S for the time being.

Learn More

If you would like to learn more about anything we have discussed in this post, or about anything related to your Yardi real estate software solutions, please contact the REdirect team. Our consultants have many years of combined experience in supporting clients with choosing, implementing, updating, and effectively utilising Yardi solutions, whether you are embracing Yardi for the first time or considering switching to Voyager 8.