Multifamily Companies Increasingly Turning to Outsourced Accounting

A recent webcast, “Staying Agile with Outsourced Accounting,” confirmed what most multifamily owners and managers already know: for an array of strong reasons, the industry is more and more relying on outsourced accounting for property-level financials rather than building out internal teams to handle it. These reasons tend to run along similar lines, and usually include the following: The cost and difficulty of finding the right accounting staff Inability to flexibly scale up and down as the portfolio changes Limited time for strategic work due to the burden of mundane tasks In the course of the webcast, participants elaborated on these and other factors that convinced them to go with RealPage’s SmartSource™ Accounting Services, a platform-agnostic, multifamily-specialized outsourced accounting service that can work with companies using MRI, ResMan and other software platforms in addition to RealPage’s. They’re using SmartSource for property-level accounting while keeping control of the more strategic corporate-level functions. Typical outsourced accounting tasks include such things as financial statement preparation, bank reconciliations, funding request support, and replacement reserves. The frustrating search for accounting talent Good accounting professionals, particularly those with multifamily experience, have become harder to find and more expensive to hire. Annette VanDuren of RealPage noted a 5.4% increase in accountant salaries in the multifamily sector over the past year, running far ahead of inflation and the highest increase in 15 years. And salaries aren’t the only cost. There are benefits, office space, training, and the other usual expenses of full-time staff to consider. “When you do find good people, you don’t want them spending most of their time on standard accounting activities that an outside company can do perfectly well,” VanDuren says. “You’re in the mu...