Flooring replacement is often the most expensive part of a multifamily unit turn or renovation and can have a major impact on monthly property budgets.

BH, an apartment management firm based in Des Moines, Iowa, and Real Floors, Inc., a multifamily flooring specialist based in Marietta, Georgia, teamed up to implement specialized software to mitigate issues surrounding flooring replacement purchases. 

Challenge 

Prior to 2017, BH service supervisors and property managers scheduled flooring installations by logging directly into Real Floors’ website. Since Real Floors’ system and BH’s procurement platform were independent of each other, BH’s purchase order approval workflow could be unknowingly circumvented. The lack of adequate checks and balances prohibited BH from proactively setting monthly budgets that could be enforced at the site level since Real Floors’ system was unaware of purchase order approval validity. 

Approach 

BH met this challenge head on by leading a collaboration between Real Floors and Yardi Systems, a software company based in Santa Barbara, California, to integrate the two disparate systems through a process called “punchout.” BH on-site teams could create flooring order requests directly with Real Floors from their Yardi Marketplace procurement interface allowing the purchase order to be approved, adjusted, or denied prior to Real Floors receiving the order. 

Punchout provides multiple benefits to both the property management company and its vendor: supervisors and property managers are never required to leave the property management software they are comfortable using, the systems share authentication of users, the vendor only receives orders that are pre-approved by management, and monthly budget expectations can be realistically enforced.  

Now, when an order is placed through punchout for a property that is over its monthly budget, an additional level of approval is required, versus the property automatically exceeding its budget with no oversight. This approach provides BH with continuous visibility and accountability for all flooring spend. 

Result  

As of September 2022, over 85% of BH’s flooring orders in Real Floors punchout-enabled markets were placed using this new and improved process. For example, Aventerra at Dobson Ranch, a BH multifamily property in Mesa, Arizona, placed 482 orders with Real Floors from January 2021 to August 2022 with 412 of those using punchout. 

“BH is leading the way in business-to-business procurement for multifamily,” said Joe Savarino, vice president of technology, Real Floors. “To our knowledge, there are few management companies taking a proactive approach to control spending in this way.”