YES Communities builds the data foundation for 83,000 homesites

A REIT built for growth, running on tools that could not keep up

YES Communities is one of the largest owners and operators of manufactured housing communities in the United States. Founded in 2008, the company manages roughly 300 communities, 83,000 homesites, and 1,300 employees across 23 states. Its mission is to provide affordable, well-managed housing communities that support residents across the country.

As a privately held REIT that continues to grow through acquisitions, YES Communities relies on fast, accurate financial and operational data to run its properties well. Community managers in the field need visibility into daily metrics. Finance and FP&A teams need reliable numbers for budgeting, forecasting, and investor reporting. And leadership needs to trust that everyone is working from the same data.

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Slow tools, fragmented data, and a planning process that could not scale

The team at YES Communities had been relying on an Excel-based planning tool for their budgeting and reporting workflows. As the company grew, the limitations of that approach became harder to ignore.

Reports took two to three minutes to load and would freeze users' computers in the process. Overnight data refreshes ran for eight hours each morning, meaning field staff in eastern time zones could not access current numbers until mid-afternoon. Community managers who needed to start their day with a quick check on key metrics had no good way to do that from a phone or tablet.

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"It would literally freeze their computer while it was loading. So while they're waiting, they're getting frustrated. It caused disruption, not just for those thirty seconds to a few minutes, but in between too, because they never knew how long they'd have to wait."

— Troy Murphy, Director of FP&A, YES Communities

The fragmentation ran deeper than slow load times. Different teams were building their own offline reports to work around system limitations, which led to inconsistent numbers circulating across the company. There was no single source of truth - budget updates meant starting the entire process over. And as YES Communities acquired new portfolios, adding more properties, employees, and data, the system's ceiling became a real constraint on how the business could operate.

Troy Murphy, Director of FP&A, identified six core requirements that would define what a new solution needed to deliver: speed, mobile access, dynamic forecasting and versioning, a single source of truth, scalability without practical limits, and transaction-level granularity so users could see the details behind any number.

YES Communities evaluated 15 different software solutions before arriving at a key insight: planning and analytics serve different purposes and require different tools.

"Planning and analytics have different jobs. If you have different analysts, you might have a financial analyst and data analyst. They do have different job functions that they're very good at."

The company implemented a dual-pronged approach:

• Workday Adaptive Planning for budgeting, forecasting, and version control
• Incorta for operational analytics, real-time reporting, and mobile access

Incorta became the data foundation that unified information from financials, operations, payroll, and CRM systems. The platform's Direct Data Mapping technology eliminated the need for complex data pipelines, while its mobile app gave field operators instant access to the same KPIs and metrics available at corporate headquarters.

Implementation Highlights:

• Full deployment completed in under 9 months - including during an active budget cycle
• 90% of the build-out was completed by YES Communities' internal team (2-3 people)
• Soft launch followed by company-wide rollout to all 300 communities

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Faster answers, more time for the work that matters

The full rollout across all 300-plus communities was complete within nine months, including a budget cycle that ran in parallel during implementation.

Report load times dropped from two to three minutes down to seconds. The eight-hour overnight data refresh was eliminated. Community managers who previously had to be at a desk and wait for a report to load can now pull up a dashboard on their phone while walking a property.
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"Before, they'd have to go load the report, print it off, and then start their calls. Now they can just view that list from their phone and go do whatever they need to do with their day."

— Troy Murphy, Director of FP&A, YES Communities

The time savings are tangible. Community managers are getting back more than 10 hours per month that was previously spent waiting on reports or tracking down numbers. For Troy's FP&A team, dashboards that used to take days to build and validate can now be built and reviewed in hours, with full transaction-level detail included.

"Even yesterday, I built two dashboards throughout the day while doing other things. We can vet and validate them in hours, not days, without losing any of the details that matter."

— Troy Murphy, Director of FP&A, YES Communities
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More importantly, the company now has a single source of truth. Everyone from field staff to the c-suite is looking at the same data, and users can drill from a top-line number all the way down to a single resident record when they need to. That kind of visibility has changed how community managers do their jobs, turning data from something they waited for into something they use in real time to make decisions.

The FP&A team has also shifted how it operates. With less time spent on report production and data reconciliation, the team has more capacity to act as a strategic partner to field operators, helping them understand what the numbers mean and what to do about it.

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WHAT'S NEXT

Continuing to evolve with the business

YES Communities is actively building on the foundation they created. The team is consolidating dashboards to reduce noise and make it easier for users to get to the information they need without being overwhelmed. They are also exploring machine learning integrations and natural language analytics so that a community manager can simply ask a question in the morning and get an answer, rather than navigating to a report.

"I don't think it should ever stop. You just keep getting better at this as time goes on. The goal is to make sure that everyone has the visibility they need to drive the business forward."

— Troy Murphy, Director of FP&A, YES Communities

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