If Yardi’s intention is to provide slick, consumer-friendly, single-click property management from A to Z, then it comes as no surprise that it has recently unveiled new ILS solution RENTCafé, a consumer-facing website that, on the front end, advertises a “comprehensive list of nationally available apartments” and on the back end pairs apartment availability and pricing from opted-in Voyager users with leads from the ILS. What is unclear is whether the deployment of yet another industry ILS in and of itself doesn’t signify a step backward for multifamily technology.
The truth is, operators typically are looking for consolidation in the apartment Internet marketing space, not more fragmentation. “We would love to see some consolidation, particularly among the larger ILS players, but there’s too much opportunity: It’s still really the Wild West out there,” says Gary Redmond, vice president of e-commerce at Englewood Colo.–based Archstone, an owner of 436 communities representing 78,207 units that uses MRI and is not a Yardi client. Just three years ago, Redmond and his colleague, Archstone group vice president of strategic systems Donald Davidoff, began a broad e-commerce initiative at the firm aimed at integrating marketing and IT; deploying resident-friendly tech applications; and finding efficiencies for Archstone through the greater leveraging of technology. At the time, Redmond and Davidoff thought consolidation among third-party apartment Internet markets was a given. Now, there are more options than ever. “With the ease of entry and low barrier to get into that space, I think you’ll continue to see new entrants there,” Redmond says.
Indeed, while Yardi deployed RENTCafé to great fanfare, challenges remain, including how to generate a critical mass of resident prospects who actively use the system to search for apartments. Part of building that traffic will require the development of a listings engine that supports it, which also remains unclear: While RENTCafé is technically in full deployment, actual usage of the system is still being tested by key Yardi technology partners, and Yardi is unable to provide statistics on the number of users or the number of individual property listings or markets that currently encompass the RENTCafé platform.
