Client Spotlight: ROCO Management

I used to stress over investor letters and spend weeks on them, including late nights, before we started using Investment Manager. Now, it only takes a few days. It’s made my life much better because I’m a one-woman show for investor reporting at ROCO.

– Christie Parker, CFO –

The Company

ROCO Management LLC (ROCO) is a privately owned and operated full-service real estate investment and management company. Headquartered in Bloomfield Hills, MI., the firm owns and manages approximately 7,000 apartment units at 42 properties across 5 states. ROCO has a long-term hold strategy for its assets and is committed to elevating the experience of rental living while maximizing investor satisfaction.

The Challenge

Paper-based manual processes

Before adopting Yardi Investment Manager, ROCO relied on time-consuming manual processes. While many of their investors agreed to go paperless and receive emails with PDF attachments to view investment information, ROCO was still burdened with making individual calculations and creating separate PDFs for each investor to show their specific investment details. Additionally, sending yearly K-1 statements to investors required a lot of manual work, including printing, stapling and mailing.

The Solution

Yardi Investment Manager

Yardi Investment Manager automates investment management on a single transparent platform and lets you track capital, manage new investment opportunities and provide a branded self-service portal for investors. Eliminate time-consuming manual processes and get timely access to the information you and your investors need to increase visibility and improve decision making. Easily track activities, tasks and correspondence to enhance communication with investors and grow relationships.

The Story

Integration that empowers a small staff

Using the end-to-end Yardi platform as its “one-stop shop” including Yardi Voyager, Yardi Investment Accounting and Investment Manager delivers a seamless operational experience for ROCO and greater convenience for its investors.

Before Investment Manager, putting investor statements together used to take weeks, once the financials were available from the accounting team. Now, it takes only a few days. “We would always try to get everything out by the 15th of the month following quarter-end, and we would be working on aspects of investor reporting for pretty much the entire two weeks at the beginning of the month. With Investment Manager automating processes for us, it takes about three or four days now,” Parker said.

By mid-2020 both financial analysts left ROCO, Parker said there was no need to hire replacements, thanks to Investment Manager and their end-to-end Yardi platform. “When the second financial analyst left, we were already in the process of transitioning to the Investment Manager portal. I then realized I didn’t need to hire anyone to help me out — I could literally do it all myself. So, we gained huge cost savings there in addition to greater efficiency. Before Investment Manager, it would’ve been impossible for me to do it all on my own,” Parker explained.

Transparency and access that pleases investors

With Investment Manager, ROCO provides its investors with a branded self-service portal that delivers around-the-clock convenience and secure access to important information. Investors can log in from any device to obtain key documents and reports, including approved, published summary and investment-specific metrics, as well as view new investment opportunities and manage their profiles. “With the investor portal, our investors can access the information they want when they need it, instead of me having to manually email or mail a hard copy of that information to them,” Parker said. She also noted that ROCO’s investors have given them positive feedback about the portal, even if they only use it to log in every quarter to access their information.

The investor portal is also “a huge time saver” for Parker when publishing K-1 statements at the end of the year instead of printing, stapling and mailing them out to investors or emailing PDFs. “It was a very manual process that I would dread. Now, I can just take electronic copies and publish them on the investor portal. I save myself about 80 hours of work every year, and that’s fantastic,” Parker enthused.