For decades, real estate finance has lived in Excel. That era is ending.
What was once a reliable tool has become a liability in an age of fluctuating interest rates, complex swap components and rapid-fire portfolio growth. New tools have emerged to give managers the support they need to keep pace with today’s complex debt environment. TRD sat with Sheryl Yankovich, Director at Yardi, to learn how the leading asset management company is helping industry leaders move beyond manual tracking and achieve total transparency from investor to borrower.
End of the manual workflow
Excel was considered cutting edge for decades, but increased complexity paired with technological developments have put a target on the once-ubiquitous tool.
“Spreadsheets are still our largest competitor,” says Yankovich “People are attached to it, but they need a single source of truth. In a volatile market, the risk of not knowing the exact state of your debt can cause massive issues.”
The primary time-sink in debt management is the sheer volume of manual data entry and the constant monitoring of critical dates. Whether a firm has 50 loans or 2,000, the complexity of tracking accrual cycles, payment dates and fee amortizations is a monumental task.
“Loans have different schedules—some accrue interest monthly, others quarterly,” says Yankovich. “Debt Manager tracks all of this, ensuring notifications are sent so deadlines are never missed. It removes human error because everything is integrated and automated.”
Yardi’s solution, Yardi Debt Manager, was designed to centralize all debt data in one platform.
The system automates the billing of borrowers, collateral tracking and critical data management. This automation extends to the most granular details, including interest rate volatility. Debt Manager utilizes an API to update interest rates from variable tables on a nightly basis, a level of precision that ensures that calculations are always accurate.
Breaking down the silos
One of the most persistent challenges in debt management is the silo effect, where accounting, development and asset management teams operate on different sets of data.
When these departments aren’t aligned, the result is missed signals or delayed funding. Debt Manager was designed to simplify alignment across these silos, mitigating the risks caused by siloed data.
Richard Torcasio, a software engineer for New York-based Uniland Development Company, saw this firsthand before adopting Yardi.
“We were using a desktop application on an aging database and manually tracking across multiple spreadsheets,” says Torcasio. “Yardi Debt Manager dramatically streamlined our mortgage payment workflows by routing invoices directly to capital markets for verification and ensuring everyone works from the same real-time information instead of disconnected spreadsheets.”
Tocasio explains how, by eliminating siloed systems and manual duplication, Uniland “gained a single source of truth that improves accuracy, accelerates decision-making and enables more strategic, proactive management of our debt.”
Yankovich notes that this integration is key to informed decision-making.
“Teams can create ‘what-if’ scenarios, like refining refinancing strategies or holding a loan to term, informed by real-time data,” says Yankovich.
The ROI of visibility
For C-suite executives, the return on investment for modernizing debt management is found in risk mitigation and agility.
In a world where quick pivots are essential, having a dashboard that shows exactly where a portfolio stands twelve, twenty-four, or even one hundred and twenty months out is a major competitive advantage.
“Based on the debt a company has, and with variable terms, they can see exactly where they stand and what they may need to change or adjust,” says Yankovich.
The platform is also built for the unique idiosyncrasies of different firms. If a client needs to track a metric not included out-of-the-box, they can create custom fields and tables, ensuring the software fits the business rather than the other way around.
Yardi has been a staple of the real estate industry since 1984, and its debt solution has a seven-year track record of supporting owner-operators, REITs, and private lenders alike. Yardi is also leading the industry with an AI-driven strategy that brings intelligence features into products like Debt Manager to streamline client processes, along with integrations to tools like Claude that unlock deeper, more powerful insights. As the market continues to shift, the firms that thrive will be those that trade their spreadsheets for a unified system of record.
“Clients should realize they’re not just getting a debt solution,” says Yankovich. “They’re getting access to a larger portfolio potential and a better way of looking at managing their real estate in general.”
For more information on how to streamline your debt portfolio, visit Yardi.com.