Real Estate ERP Software | Best ERP for Property & Real Estate 2025

Real Estate ERP: The Definitive Buyer's Guide

Real estate is an industry built on long-lived assets, complex ownership structures, and financial arrangements that make most ERP systems buckle. You are not selling widgets. You are managing portfolios of properties worth tens of millions to billions of dollars, each with its own tenant mix, operating budget, capital improvement schedule, and financing structure. And every transaction ultimately flows through to investors, lenders, and tax authorities who demand precision.

The accounting standards shift of ASC 842 and IFRS 16 -- which brought operating leases onto the balance sheet -- was the catalyst that forced many real estate companies to modernize their financial systems. But lease accounting compliance is just the entry point. The real opportunity is a platform that gives you unified visibility across your entire portfolio: property performance, tenant health, capital deployment, and investment returns.

This guide covers what real estate companies genuinely need from an ERP, which vendors serve this market well, and how to navigate the unique complexities of real estate technology.

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Who This Guide Is For

Real estate is not a monolith. The ERP needs of a multifamily REIT look nothing like those of a commercial developer, and both differ from a vertically integrated real estate investment manager. This guide addresses:

• Property management companies operating residential, commercial, or mixed portfolios
• Real estate investment trusts (REITs) -- public and private, equity and mortgage
• Real estate developers building residential, commercial, or mixed-use projects
• Real estate private equity and fund managers managing capital on behalf of institutional investors
• Corporate real estate teams managing a company's owned and leased property portfolio
• Mixed-use operators combining hospitality, retail, residential, and office under one umbrella

Each of these segments has distinct priorities, and we call out those differences throughout the guide. A property manager cares most about lease management and work orders. A fund manager cares most about multi-entity consolidation and investor reporting. A developer cares most about CIP tracking and draw management. Your ERP selection should be driven by what you actually do, not by what the industry as a whole needs.

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Why Real Estate Companies Need Specialized ERP

The Multi-Entity Problem

Real estate may be the most structurally complex industry from an accounting perspective. A mid-sized real estate company might have dozens or even hundreds of legal entities -- one for each property, joint venture, or fund. Each entity has its own bank accounts, financial statements, investor allocations, and tax returns. Yet management needs consolidated views across the entire portfolio.

Generic ERP systems that support "multi-company" often mean 3-5 entities. Real estate companies need 50, 100, or 500 entities, with the ability to spin up new ones quickly when acquiring properties or launching new funds. The consolidation engine must handle minority interests, complex ownership waterfalls, and varying fiscal year-ends. This is a level of multi-entity complexity that eliminates most ERP platforms from consideration before you evaluate a single other feature.

The Dual System Trap

The real estate industry has historically operated with a fundamental technology split: property management software (Yardi, MRI, RealPage, AppFolio) handles the operational side -- leases, tenants, work orders, CAM reconciliation -- while a separate general ledger or ERP handles corporate financials, consolidation, and reporting.

This dual-system architecture creates pain everywhere:

• Duplicate data entry between property management and accounting systems
• Reconciliation nightmares at month-end when the systems do not agree
• Reporting gaps that require manual Excel work to bridge operational and financial data
• Audit complexity when auditors need to trace a transaction across two systems

The modern real estate ERP landscape offers two paths out of this trap: (1) property management platforms that have added robust financial capabilities (Yardi Voyager, MRI Software) or (2) financial ERP platforms that integrate deeply with property management systems (Sage Intacct, NetSuite). Both paths work, and the right choice depends on whether your primary pain is operational or financial.

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The Seven Pain Points That Drive Real Estate Companies to New ERP

1. ASC 842 / IFRS 16 Lease Accounting Compliance

The lease accounting standards that took effect for public companies in 2019 and private companies in 2022 represent the most significant change in real estate accounting in decades. Under ASC 842, virtually all leases (both as lessee and lessor) must be recognized on the balance sheet, with right-of-use assets and lease liabilities calculated using present value of future payments.

For real estate companies, this affects two sides of the business: your own office and ground leases (lessee accounting) and, more complexly, the classification and disclosure requirements for the thousands of tenant leases you manage (lessor accounting). Your ERP must calculate and maintain lease assets and liabilities, handle modifications and remeasurements, and produce the extensive disclosures required by the standards. Doing this in spreadsheets is not just impractical at scale -- it is an audit risk that will draw scrutiny.

2. Multi-Entity and Fund Accounting Complexity

As described above, real estate companies operate through webs of legal entities. But the complexity goes deeper than just having many entities. Real estate fund accounting involves:

• Waterfall distributions -- investor returns allocated according to preferred return thresholds, catch-up provisions, and promote splits that vary by fund
• Capital account tracking -- each investor's capital contributions, distributions, and allocated income/loss tracked over the life of the investment
• Fee calculations -- management fees, acquisition fees, disposition fees, and promote fees calculated according to fund agreements
• Multi-level consolidation -- fund rolls up to management company, which may roll up to a parent entity, with different ownership percentages at each level

Getting these calculations wrong does not just affect your financials -- it affects investor trust, which is the foundation of the real estate investment business.

3. Disconnected Property Management and Financial Systems

When a tenant signs a lease in your property management system, that information should flow automatically into your financial system as future revenue, lease obligations, and budgeted operating expenses. When a maintenance work order is completed, the cost should hit the correct property, building, and cost category without manual journal entries.

In practice, most real estate companies spend days each month reconciling property management data with their general ledger. The rent roll in Yardi does not match the revenue in the GL. The occupancy data in MRI does not align with the budget model in Excel. Every discrepancy requires investigation, and every investigation consumes time that could be spent on actual portfolio management.

4. Tenant and Lease Lifecycle Management

A commercial lease is not a simple contract. It involves base rent (often with annual escalations), percentage rent (tied to tenant sales), operating expense pass-throughs (CAM, insurance, real estate taxes), tenant improvement allowances, free rent periods, renewal options, expansion rights, and termination clauses. Each of these elements has accounting, cash flow, and operational implications.

Your financial system must model all of these elements, project future cash flows accurately, and alert you to critical dates: lease expirations, renewal option deadlines, rent escalation triggers, and tenant break dates. Missing a critical date -- like a renewal option deadline -- can have six- or seven-figure financial consequences.

5. Construction-in-Progress (CIP) Tracking

Real estate developers and companies that undertake significant capital improvements need robust CIP accounting. Costs must be accumulated by project, capitalized at the appropriate time, and allocated to the correct asset when the project is placed in service. Interest capitalization during construction adds another layer of complexity.

For a real estate developer building a $50M mixed-use project, CIP tracking involves thousands of invoices from hundreds of vendors, draw schedules aligned with construction milestones, retainage tracking, change order management, and budget-versus-actual monitoring at a granular level. Most generic ERP systems handle basic project accounting but lack the real-estate-specific CIP workflows that developers need.

6. Investor Reporting Requirements

Real estate investors -- whether institutional limited partners, individual high-net-worth investors, or public REIT shareholders -- demand detailed, accurate, and timely reporting. The specifics vary by investor type:

• Institutional investors expect quarterly financial statements, IRR calculations, and detailed property-level performance data formatted to their specifications
• REIT investors require SEC-compliant financial statements with specific real estate disclosures (FFO, AFFO, same-store NOI growth)
• Fund investors need capital account statements, distribution notices, and K-1 tax documents

Producing these reports from disconnected systems is a manual, error-prone process that consumes finance teams for weeks after each quarter-end.

7. Maintenance and Capital Expenditure Management

Maintaining a portfolio of physical assets requires systematic work order management, preventive maintenance scheduling, vendor management, and capital planning. The financial dimension is critical: distinguishing between operating expenses (immediately deductible) and capital expenditures (depreciated over time) has significant tax and reporting implications. Your ERP needs to enforce capitalization policies consistently across properties and provide clear audit trails for the classification decisions.

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Essential Capabilities for Real Estate ERP

Tier 1: Financial Foundation

| Capability | Why It Matters | |---|---| | Multi-entity and fund accounting | Support for hundreds of legal entities, complex ownership structures, waterfall distributions, and multi-level consolidation | | Lease accounting (ASC 842 / IFRS 16) | Automated calculation of right-of-use assets, lease liabilities, and required disclosures for both lessee and lessor accounting | | Property-level financial reporting | Chart of accounts and dimensional reporting that supports analysis by property, building, unit, tenant, and any other relevant dimension | | Accounts payable with property allocation | Invoice processing that allocates costs to the correct property, building, and expense category -- the highest-volume transaction in most real estate companies | | Cash management and bank reconciliation | Multi-entity bank account management, automated bank feeds, and reconciliation across potentially hundreds of accounts |

Tier 2: Operational Integration

| Capability | Why It Matters | |---|---| | Tenant and lease management | Full lease lifecycle: abstracting, rent rolls, escalations, percentage rent calculations, options tracking, and critical date alerts | | CAM reconciliation | Common Area Maintenance expense tracking, allocation, billing, and year-end reconciliation -- one of the most time-consuming processes in commercial real estate | | Construction-in-progress (CIP) | Cost accumulation by project, draw management, retainage tracking, interest capitalization, and asset placement workflows | | Budget vs. actual by property | Operating and capital budgets at the property level with variance analysis and reforecasting capabilities | | Maintenance work order management | Work order creation, assignment, tracking, and cost capture -- either native or integrated with a dedicated CMMS/facilities management system |

Tier 3: Strategic and Growth Capabilities

| Capability | Why It Matters | |---|---| | Investor reporting and distributions | Automated waterfall calculations, capital account management, distribution processing, and investor-facing reports and portals | | Cash flow forecasting by asset | Forward-looking cash flow projections incorporating lease expirations, renewal probabilities, capital plans, and financing terms | | Acquisition and disposition modeling | Financial modeling for potential acquisitions and dispositions, including pro forma NOI, cap rate analysis, and return projections | | Tax reporting and compliance | K-1 preparation, cost segregation tracking, 1031 exchange management, and REIT compliance testing | | Portfolio analytics and benchmarking | Cross-property performance comparison, same-store analysis, and benchmark reporting for investor and management use |

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Best Real Estate ERP for Small and Midsized Companies

These recommendations are for real estate companies managing portfolios up to approximately $2B in asset value, with finance teams of 3-30 people.

Sage Intacct

Best for: Multi-entity real estate companies, REITs, and property management firms that need best-in-class financials

Sage Intacct has become the financial platform of choice for a significant segment of the real estate industry, and the reasons are specific. Its multi-entity architecture was designed from the ground up to handle hundreds of entities without degrading performance. The dimensional general ledger eliminates the need for a bloated chart of accounts -- you can report by property, building, unit, fund, investor, and region without creating separate GL accounts for each combination.

Sage Intacct's real estate strength comes from its partner ecosystem. Integrations with Yardi, MRI, AppFolio, and other property management platforms are well-established, allowing operational data to flow into Sage Intacct for financial consolidation and reporting. The platform also integrates with specialized tools like Prophia for lease abstraction and Adaptive Planning for budgeting and forecasting.

For REITs specifically, Sage Intacct's multi-entity consolidation, automated intercompany elimination, and flexible reporting engine produce the financial statements and supplemental disclosures that investors and auditors expect. The limitation is that Sage Intacct is a financial system, not a property management system. You will still need a PM platform for tenant management, lease administration, and work orders.

Typical cost: $30K-$100K/year for licensing; $50K-$150K for implementation

Oracle NetSuite

Best for: Growing real estate companies that need a single platform for finance, CRM, and property operations

NetSuite's appeal for real estate companies lies in its breadth. Beyond the financial core, NetSuite provides CRM (useful for leasing and investor relations), project management (for development projects and capital improvements), and procurement -- all in a single platform. For real estate companies that are scaling quickly through acquisitions, NetSuite's ability to onboard new entities rapidly is valuable.

NetSuite's SuiteApps marketplace includes real estate-specific extensions for lease management, property accounting, and investor reporting. The NetSuite for Real Estate vertical solution provides property-level financial tracking, rent roll management, and lease expiration reporting. The Advanced Revenue Management module handles ASC 842 calculations.

The limitation is that NetSuite's real estate capabilities, while improving, do not match the depth of purpose-built property management platforms. Companies with large commercial portfolios and complex lease structures may find NetSuite's lease management insufficient and still need a companion PM system. NetSuite works best for real estate companies where the financial complexity (multi-entity, fund accounting, investor reporting) is the primary driver rather than operational property management.

Typical cost: $50K-$150K/year for licensing; $75K-$200K for implementation

Yardi Voyager

Best for: Property management companies and landlords that want a single platform for operations and accounting

Yardi is the elephant in the real estate technology room. Yardi Voyager is a fully integrated platform that combines property management, lease administration, maintenance management, and financial accounting in a single system. For companies whose primary business is managing and operating properties, Yardi eliminates the dual-system problem entirely.

Yardi's strength is the depth of its property management functionality: commercial and residential lease management, CAM reconciliation, tenant portals, work order management, utility billing, and affordable housing compliance. The financial accounting module supports multi-entity consolidation, fund accounting, and investor reporting. Yardi also offers specialized modules for specific property types: multifamily (RentCafe), commercial (CommercialCafe), senior living, and affordable housing.

The trade-off is that Yardi is purpose-built for real estate, which is both its strength and its limitation. If your business extends beyond property management -- into development, construction, hospitality, or other non-property activities -- Yardi's financial capabilities may feel constraining compared to a general-purpose ERP like Sage Intacct or NetSuite. The user interface, while functional, is less modern than newer cloud platforms.

Typical cost: $40K-$120K/year for licensing; $60K-$180K for implementation

SAP Business One

Best for: International real estate developers and investment companies that need robust financial management

SAP Business One is not the first platform that comes to mind for real estate, but it deserves consideration for real estate development and investment companies, particularly those with international operations. SAP Business One's localization coverage (170+ countries) is unmatched by real estate-specific platforms, making it the practical choice for global real estate investment firms that need compliant financial reporting across multiple jurisdictions.

SAP Business One's project management module handles CIP tracking for development projects, including budget management, cost accumulation, and progress billing. The multi-currency capabilities are robust, which matters for firms investing across borders. Partner solutions from the SAP ecosystem add real estate-specific functionality like property portfolio management and lease tracking.

The limitation is that SAP Business One's multi-entity capabilities require the Intercompany Integration add-on and become cumbersome beyond 10-15 entities. For real estate companies with simple entity structures but complex international requirements, it works well. For those with 50+ entities, Sage Intacct or NetSuite is a better fit.

Typical cost: $30K-$80K/year for licensing; $50K-$120K for implementation

Acumatica

Best for: Growing real estate companies that need flexible, user-friendly ERP without per-user cost constraints

Acumatica's consumption-based pricing model appeals to real estate companies that need broad system access. Property managers, maintenance staff, leasing agents, and accounting team members all benefit from system access, and Acumatica does not charge per user. For a real estate company with 100 employees where only 15 are power users but 80 need some form of access, the cost savings versus per-user platforms are significant.

Acumatica's multi-entity capabilities support the entity structures common in real estate, and its project accounting module handles CIP tracking and construction project management. The platform's open API makes integration with property management systems and specialized real estate tools straightforward. The Construction Edition specifically addresses the needs of real estate developers with subcontractor management, retainage, compliance tracking, and AIA-style billing.

The limitation is that Acumatica does not have a native real estate or property management vertical. You will rely on integrations with PM platforms for lease management, tenant operations, and property-specific workflows. For companies that are primarily financial and development-focused (rather than property management-focused), this is a workable approach.

Typical cost: $30K-$90K/year for licensing; $50K-$150K for implementation

MRI Software

Best for: Commercial real estate companies that need deep lease management and flexible financial reporting

MRI Software is the other major real estate technology platform alongside Yardi, with particular strength in commercial and corporate real estate. MRI's platform combines property management, lease administration, financial accounting, and investment management in a modular architecture that lets companies adopt the components they need.

MRI's lease management capabilities are exceptionally deep for commercial real estate: complex rent structures, CPI-based escalations, percentage rent with natural breakpoints, tenant improvement tracking, and ASC 842 compliance. The financial reporting engine supports multi-entity consolidation with flexible report design that real estate finance teams appreciate. MRI also provides an open and connected ecosystem (MRI Living) that integrates with hundreds of PropTech applications.

MRI works best for commercial real estate companies -- office, retail, industrial -- where lease complexity is high and portfolio analytics matter. For residential property managers, Yardi's multifamily capabilities are generally stronger. The implementation complexity and cost are comparable to Yardi but can vary significantly depending on which modules are deployed.

Typical cost: $40K-$130K/year for licensing; $60K-$200K for implementation

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Best Real Estate ERP for Enterprise

These recommendations are for large REITs, institutional real estate investment managers, and major developers with portfolios exceeding $2B in asset value.

SAP S/4HANA Real Estate Management

Best for: Global real estate companies and REITs that need enterprise-grade financial management with integrated real estate

SAP S/4HANA includes a dedicated Real Estate Management module (RE-FX) that provides property and lease management integrated directly with the financial and controlling modules. For large real estate companies that need a single enterprise platform handling everything from lease administration to tax reporting to investor relations, SAP's integrated approach is compelling.

RE-FX manages the full lifecycle of real estate objects: land, buildings, rental units, and parking spaces, each with their own financial attributes. Lease management handles both lessee and lessor accounting, with ASC 842 and IFRS 16 support integrated into the financial statements. The integration with SAP's Controlling module enables detailed profitability analysis by property, tenant, and segment.

SAP's strength at the enterprise level is its ability to handle the full complexity of a global real estate operation: hundreds of entities across dozens of countries, each with local tax and regulatory requirements, consolidated into a single reporting framework. The investment is substantial -- both in licensing and in the specialized SAP real estate consultants required for implementation -- but for companies at this scale, SAP provides capabilities that few other platforms can match.

Typical cost: $500K-$3M+/year for licensing; $1M-$5M+ for implementation

Oracle ERP Cloud

Best for: Large real estate investment companies with complex financial structures and analytics requirements

Oracle ERP Cloud provides enterprise-grade financial management with the multi-entity, multi-currency, and consolidation capabilities that large real estate companies require. Oracle's strength is in the financial depth: complex intercompany accounting, multi-GAAP reporting (US GAAP and IFRS simultaneously), and the analytical capabilities of Oracle Analytics Cloud.

For real estate investment firms that manage multiple funds with different structures, Oracle's Subledger Accounting (SLA) architecture provides flexibility in how transactions are recognized across different reporting purposes. A single operating transaction can be accounted for differently for investor reporting, tax reporting, and management reporting without maintaining separate books.

Oracle does not have a native property management module comparable to SAP's RE-FX. Enterprise real estate companies on Oracle typically run a property management platform (Yardi or MRI) alongside Oracle for financial management and consolidation. The integration between these systems is well-established, and Oracle's integration tools (Oracle Integration Cloud) make connecting to property management platforms manageable.

Typical cost: $300K-$1.5M+/year for licensing; $500K-$3M for implementation

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance

Best for: Large real estate companies that want enterprise ERP with strong ecosystem and ISV solutions

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance provides the financial management, multi-entity, and consolidation capabilities needed by large real estate companies, paired with the Microsoft ecosystem advantages (Power BI, Excel integration, Teams collaboration, Azure cloud). Where Dynamics 365 differentiates from SAP and Oracle in the real estate context is the breadth and quality of ISV (Independent Software Vendor) add-ons available through AppSource.

Real estate-specific ISVs have built substantial property management, lease accounting, and fund accounting solutions on top of Dynamics 365. These ISV solutions provide the industry-specific functionality while leveraging Dynamics 365's financial engine, reporting capabilities, and integration framework. The result is a platform that can rival Yardi or MRI in real estate functionality while providing the financial depth of an enterprise ERP.

The Power Platform integration deserves specific mention. Real estate companies use Power BI for portfolio dashboards, Power Automate for workflow automation (lease approval processes, invoice routing), and Power Apps for custom applications (property inspection apps, tenant request portals). This extensibility allows firms to build precisely the tools they need without expensive custom development.

Typical cost: $200K-$800K/year for licensing; $400K-$2M for implementation

Workday

Best for: Large REITs with significant workforce management needs alongside financial complexity

Workday enters the real estate conversation primarily through its financial planning and analysis capabilities. For large REITs with hundreds or thousands of employees across properties, Workday's unified HCM and financial management platform eliminates the gap between people costs and property financials. Understanding fully loaded labor costs by property -- a significant expense category in property management -- is native to Workday.

Workday Adaptive Planning is particularly valuable for real estate budgeting and forecasting, allowing finance teams to build detailed property-level operating budgets, model lease expiration scenarios, and forecast cash flows across the portfolio. The planning engine handles the complexity of percentage rent projections, CAM escalations, and capital expenditure timing.

The limitation is that Workday does not have native property management or lease administration capabilities. It works best as the financial backbone for large REITs that run a property management platform (typically Yardi or MRI) for operations and need an enterprise-class financial system for consolidation, reporting, planning, and workforce management.

Typical cost: $300K-$1.2M+/year for licensing; $500K-$2M for implementation

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Implementation Guidance for Real Estate Companies

Start with Your Entity Structure

Before selecting a platform, map your current and planned entity structure. Count your entities, document the ownership relationships, and identify where intercompany transactions occur. This exercise will immediately eliminate vendors whose multi-entity capabilities cannot handle your scale.

Also plan for growth. If you have 40 entities today and plan to acquire 15 properties per year, you will have 100+ entities within four years. Your ERP must handle that growth without performance degradation or prohibitive additional licensing costs.

Solve the PM-ERP Integration First

If you are keeping a separate property management system (Yardi, MRI, AppFolio) alongside your ERP, the integration between these systems is the single most important technical decision in your implementation. Define exactly what data flows between systems, in which direction, and at what frequency:

• Lease data: PM to ERP (rent schedules, tenant information, lease terms)
• Financial transactions: PM to ERP (rent charges, receipts, operating expenses)
• AP and payments: Typically ERP to PM or bidirectional
• GL balances: PM to ERP for consolidation
• Budget data: ERP to PM or bidirectional

The integration must handle exceptions gracefully -- rejected transactions, mapping mismatches, and timing differences. Budget more time for integration testing than you think you need.

Phase by Property Type or Region

Large real estate companies with diverse portfolios should phase their implementation by property type (office first, then retail, then industrial) or by region. Each property type has different lease structures, operating expense models, and reporting requirements. Attempting to configure all property types simultaneously leads to scope creep and delayed go-live.

Choose the property type that represents the largest portion of your portfolio or the highest pain point as your pilot. Get the configuration right, validate with your accounting team and auditors, and then extend to other property types.

Plan for Year-End Processes Early

Real estate accounting has specific year-end processes that must work correctly from day one: CAM reconciliation, tenant year-end billing, investor distributions and K-1 preparation, property tax payments, and audit support. If you go live mid-year, you must ensure these processes work for a partial year -- which sometimes means running both old and new systems through the first year-end.

Map out your year-end calendar during implementation planning. Ensure your go-live date gives the team enough time to run year-end processes in the new system before the actual deadlines arrive.

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Typical Costs

| Company Type | Annual Licensing | Implementation | Timeline | |---|---|---|---| | Small property manager (1-20 properties) | $15K-$50K | $30K-$80K | 3-5 months | | Mid-market owner/operator (20-100 properties) | $50K-$150K | $75K-$250K | 4-8 months | | Regional REIT or developer (100-500 units/properties) | $100K-$300K | $150K-$500K | 6-12 months | | Large REIT or investment manager | $300K-$1.5M+ | $500K-$5M+ | 9-18 months | | Global real estate enterprise | $500K-$3M+ | $1M-$8M+ | 12-24 months |

These ranges include the ERP/financial platform but may not include the property management system if run separately. Integration costs between PM and ERP platforms typically add $30K-$150K depending on complexity.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between real estate ERP and property management software?

Property management software (Yardi, MRI, AppFolio, Buildium, RentManager) focuses on the operational side of real estate: managing tenants, leases, work orders, inspections, and tenant communications. It typically includes basic accounting for property-level income and expenses. ERP software (Sage Intacct, Oracle NetSuite, SAP, Oracle Cloud) focuses on the financial backbone: multi-entity consolidation, fund accounting, financial reporting, budgeting, and investor-level reporting. Many real estate companies run both, with the PM system handling day-to-day operations and the ERP handling corporate financials and consolidation. Some platforms (Yardi Voyager, MRI) bridge both worlds by offering property management and financial management in a single platform, though their financial depth may not match a dedicated ERP for complex investment structures.

How does ASC 842 affect our ERP requirements?

ASC 842 requires lessees to recognize virtually all leases on the balance sheet as right-of-use assets and lease liabilities. For lessors, ASC 842 introduced new classification criteria and disclosure requirements. Real estate companies are affected on both sides: as lessees (office leases, ground leases, equipment leases) and as lessors (tenant leases). Your ERP must calculate present values of future lease payments, maintain lease asset and liability balances, handle modifications and remeasurements (which occur frequently -- lease amendments, early terminations, and renewals), and produce the required disclosures. Companies with hundreds of leases cannot manage this in spreadsheets. Purpose-built lease accounting solutions (LeaseQuery, CoStar Visual Lease, Nakisa) can be used alongside your ERP, or the ERP itself may include ASC 842 capabilities. Either approach works, but the data flow between lease calculations and the general ledger must be automated and auditable.

Should a REIT use Yardi or Sage Intacct?

This is one of the most common questions in real estate ERP selection, and the answer depends on your REIT's primary pain point. If your biggest challenge is property operations -- lease management, CAM reconciliation, tenant portals, and maintenance -- Yardi Voyager provides the deepest operational functionality in a single platform. If your biggest challenge is financial -- multi-entity consolidation across dozens of entities, fund accounting, investor reporting, and flexible financial analysis -- Sage Intacct provides the stronger financial platform. Many mid-to-large REITs run both: Yardi for property operations and Sage Intacct for corporate financials and consolidation. This dual-platform approach adds integration complexity and cost, but gives you best-in-class capabilities on both sides. The decision should be driven by where your team spends the most time wrestling with inadequate tools.

How do real estate companies handle multi-entity consolidation?

Real estate multi-entity consolidation is more complex than typical corporate consolidation because of variable ownership percentages, waterfall distribution structures, and the frequency of entity creation and dissolution. Your ERP must support: (1) automatic intercompany elimination across entities with different ownership percentages; (2) minority interest calculations that adjust as ownership changes; (3) rapid entity setup when acquiring new properties; (4) concurrent consolidation at multiple levels (property to fund, fund to management company, management company to parent); and (5) different consolidation rules for different reporting purposes (GAAP consolidation for financial statements, tax consolidation for returns, management consolidation for internal reporting). Sage Intacct, Oracle NetSuite, and SAP handle these requirements at different scale levels. The key evaluation criterion is how many entities the system can handle before performance degrades or licensing costs become prohibitive.

What ERP do real estate developers use for construction-in-progress?

Real estate developers need CIP functionality that tracks costs across long development timelines -- often 18-36 months -- and handles the specific requirements of real estate construction: draw schedules against construction loans, retainage holdbacks and releases, AIA-format billing, change order management, and interest capitalization during the construction period. The leading options are: Sage Intacct with a construction or project module, Acumatica Construction Edition (purpose-built for this use case), SAP Business ByDesign or S/4HANA with project accounting, and specialized construction ERP like Procore (for project management) integrated with a financial ERP. Companies that are primarily developers (rather than operators) often find that a construction-oriented ERP serves them better than a property management platform.

How important is lease abstraction in ERP selection?

Lease abstraction -- the process of extracting key terms and financial data from lease documents into structured data -- is a prerequisite for effective lease management and accounting. However, lease abstraction is increasingly handled by specialized tools using AI (Prophia, Leverton/MRI, LeaseQuery) rather than by the ERP itself. Your ERP needs to be a good receiver of abstracted lease data: it should have a comprehensive lease data model that captures all the terms needed for accounting and management purposes. During ERP evaluation, focus less on whether the ERP can abstract leases and more on whether its lease data model is complete enough to handle your lease complexity (escalation types, percentage rent structures, renewal options, tenant improvement amortization, and so on).

Can we run a real estate company on QuickBooks?

Many small property owners and managers start on QuickBooks, and it works for very simple operations: a few properties, straightforward leases, single entity. The ceiling arrives quickly in real estate, typically when you need multi-entity consolidation, property-level financial reporting, or any form of investor reporting beyond a basic P&L. QuickBooks does not support the multi-dimensional reporting that real estate requires (analyzing expenses by property AND category AND vendor simultaneously), and its multi-entity capabilities are rudimentary. Most real estate companies outgrow QuickBooks between 5-15 properties or when they take on outside investors who expect institutional-quality reporting. The migration path typically leads to Sage Intacct, Yardi, or NetSuite depending on the company's profile.

How do real estate companies handle CAM reconciliation?

Common Area Maintenance (CAM) reconciliation is one of the most operationally painful processes in commercial real estate. Landlords must track actual operating expenses, allocate them to tenants according to lease terms (which may use different allocation methods -- pro rata share, gross-up, base year stops, expense caps), compare allocations to estimated billings collected during the year, and bill or credit the difference. For a portfolio with hundreds of commercial tenants, each with slightly different CAM terms, this is a massive data exercise. Purpose-built property management systems like Yardi and MRI have the most mature CAM reconciliation capabilities. If your ERP does not handle CAM natively (and most general-purpose ERPs do not), this is a strong argument for running a PM system alongside your ERP.

What role does Power BI play in real estate ERP?

Power BI has become the dominant analytics tool for real estate companies, regardless of their underlying ERP. Its ability to combine data from multiple sources -- ERP, property management, market data, Excel models -- into unified dashboards makes it particularly valuable in an industry that typically runs multiple systems. Common real estate Power BI use cases include portfolio performance dashboards (NOI, occupancy, rent per square foot by property and over time), tenant credit monitoring, lease expiration exposure analysis, capital expenditure tracking versus budget, and investor reporting packages. When evaluating an ERP, consider how easily it exports data to Power BI. Platforms like Sage Intacct, Oracle NetSuite, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 have robust Power BI connectors that enable real-time or near-real-time dashboards without manual data extraction.

How long does a real estate ERP implementation take?

For a small property management company implementing Yardi or Sage Intacct, expect 3-5 months. For a mid-market REIT implementing a dual-platform solution (PM system plus financial ERP), 6-10 months is typical, with an additional 2-3 months for integration testing and parallel running. Enterprise implementations at large REITs or global real estate investment managers take 12-24 months. The biggest timeline drivers in real estate implementations are: entity structure setup (configuring and testing 50-500 entities), data migration of lease data (abstracting and loading active leases with their full history of escalations and modifications), integration development and testing between PM and ERP systems, and year-end process validation (ensuring CAM reconciliation, investor distributions, and tax reporting work correctly).

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Next Steps

Selecting the right ERP for your real estate company means understanding whether your primary challenge is operational (property management, lease administration, maintenance) or financial (multi-entity consolidation, fund accounting, investor reporting) -- or both. The answer shapes every downstream decision.

We built a comprehensive requirements tool that helps real estate companies document exactly what they need, covering both the financial and operational dimensions that matter in this industry. The tool generates a structured requirements document you can send to vendors for accurate, comparable proposals.

Build your Real Estate ERP requirements