CRE Tech Trends

Teel Talks at Realcomm

By Joel Nelson on Jun 22, 2017 in News

Rob Teel, senior vice president of global solutions for Yardi, offered perspective on new tools that help commercial real estate companies gather, analyze and use data in new ways in an interview at the Realcomm conference in San Diego.

Guided by collaboration with clients and industry trends, Yardi is directing its product development beyond traditional accounting and back office systems.  “Most transactions, such as purchase orders by employees and work orders by tenants, start in the field and usually on a mobile platform. We want to continue pushing ERP upstream to the source of transactions, and capture data that goes to the general ledger from the first transaction,” Teel explained.

He cited COMMERCIALCafé Tenant, a downloadable app that extends online services to mobile devices, as an example of this effort.

VENDORCafé, which automates manual processing involved in validating and onboarding vendors, also offers secure, mobile access to the ERP.

Teel also mentioned the investments Yardi has made, through acquisitions and development, to develop a comprehensive energy offering that includes intelligent HVAC optimization, submeter-level usage analysis and fault detection.  With these capabilities in hand, Yardi now focuses on putting them together as “a holistic offering that helps clients reduce their energy spend and promote sustainability,” he said.

He also discussed Yardi Matrix in terms of the artificial intelligence and guided analytics trends that were popular topics of discussion at Realcomm.  For years Yardi Matrix has been gathering information on commercial, multifamily and self storage facilities across the U.S.

The challenge now, Teel said, is to “use that repository of information about leases, rental rates and other characteristics to help clients make smart decisions about pricing properties, forecasting budgets and reporting to analysts and stakeholders,” Teel said.  Extending Yardi Matrix beyond data capture and leveraging the “pot of gold we’re sitting on” will “inject business intelligence into the daily cycle and make clients smarter.”

Teel’s interview was broadcast live on Realcomm’s YouTube channel on June 15. Watch it below: