Spend Management Helping Prometheus Get More for Their Money, From Reliable Vendors

As a procurement specialist, Kristina Loeza has a singular view of the spending taking place at Prometheus Real Estate Group’s west coast properties. Left to the discretion and whims of individual site managers, buying the products and services needed to run their multifamily properties can quickly become riddled with overspending, untrustworthy vendors, poor service, shoddy products, inefficient invoicing, and other problems. But in adopting RealPage’s Spend Management solutions, Prometheus has injected consistency, security, cost control and efficient invoicing into a function that can otherwise chip away at a property’s bottom line. “The RealPage Spend and Vendor Management platforms eliminate the sort of haphazard purchasing and invoicing that can really hurt your NOI,” Loeza says. Spend management starts with spending less At the core of managing spend, is the ability to leverage approved vendors with pre-negotiated volume discounts. By combining the purchasing power of member properties across the nation, RealPage has been able to gain competitive pricing for a host of products and services. This arrangement is often referred to as a Group Purchasing Organization (GPO), or RealPage eSupply GPO. “A property management company that manages, say, 20 properties have only so much negotiating power,” says (RealPage professional). “But if you combine the buying power of 1.4M+ units, vendors are incentivized to really get their prices down to capture part of that business. So even the smaller property managers can take advantage of very competitive pricing.” Property managers know that when they order from an eSupply GPO vendor, they’re benefiting from this negotiated pricing. And Kristina Loeza mentions a benefit Prometheus didn’t think about until COVID and broken supply lines created shortages in products important for running multifamily properties. “There were products such as chlorine...