GlobeSt.com asked Brad Setser, the firm's vice president of marketing, about the ways property owners and investors are using Yardi products in the current economic climate.

GlobeSt.com: What products does Yardi have to help investors or property owners assess risk and minimize exposure to specific firms or industry sectors?

Setser: Our Investment Management, RealDCF and Executive Dashboard products are part of our Voyager platform, a true full business solution for real estate management. It's a fully integrated system, which includes investment and fund management, portfolio transactions and financials, discounted cash flow modeling and valuation, and business intelligence along with property management and accounting. The unique benefit of our system is that it allows full analysis of the impact of market conditions and exposure without the use of data warehouses because it consolidates all of the properties and portfolios in real-time without the need to transfer data from one database to another.

Further, it is an international system. It can apply varying accounting and value added tax/tax rules, and it can consolidate from multiple currencies, making it an ideal system for managing multinational investment portfolios. Lastly, for those investment and fund managers who need to draw property and lease level data from other property management systems due to joint ventures or third party management, Yardi Voyager can act as the warehouse for those other systems and consolidate their data sets along with the property and portfolio data being managed in the Voyager system.

GlobeSt.com: You say your investment accounting and investment management products "give investment managers an edge" by automating all the accounting, analytic and modeling tasks that were previously done manually. Can you expand on the ways the software helps companies in terms of risk management?

Setser: Because all of the property and lease data is available in real-time, exposure analysis can be run instantly, with varying conditions and assumptions applied for immediate effect. The result is much faster assessment, so decisions can be made in a fraction of the time it takes to use spreadsheets. Furthermore, since all of the data is already present in real-time, asset managers are assured of its accuracy because the margin for error inherent in manual data transfer has been eliminated. This provides assurance to investors that investment decisions will be reliable and timely.

GlobeSt.com: Is there a case you can cite to illuminate the way the product is used?

Setser: We have so many clients using our investment management system: many of them use our product to manage their entire multi-national real estate portfolios, utilizing and consolidating the entire property management, investment and fund management, and analysis in a single system. Two notable companies do this with more than $40 billion in assets each.

GlobeSt.com: Can software like this make much of a difference in such a volatile investment climate or does it come down to the way each investment advisor evaluates the data?

Setser: Although good decision-making comes down to the ability of the advisor to understand the market conditions and analyze the intelligence provided, having technology as an enabler can provide that competitive edge versus those advisors that still use manual spreadsheets.