Editor’s note: the following article featuring Yardi’s Richard Gerritsen was originally published in the Dutch real estate publication Vastgoedmarkt. Reprinted here with permission. The coronavirus outbreak is a powerful reason to take the digitisation of many work processes to a new level. “There is both a need and a desire for online residential leasing in a socially distanced world,” states Richard Gerritsen, regional director of European sales at Yardi. The technical tools to do so are already available. According to Gerritsen, the property world rarely views technological transformation in strategic terms. “Clients want operational solutions. Vendors respond by making apps available for very specific purposes. The use of tools like these undoubtedly has added value, but it doesn’t change the way we work. Whether you are a property manager, asset manager or fund manager: I firmly believe the use of technology should form part of your business strategy. A more fundamental consideration of the potential of proptech is often lacking, but today we have an urgent incentive to change that.” Old habits die hard Gerritsen is referring to ways of doing business that have been in place for decades. They may be comfortable and familiar, but they’re not best practices. “Technology is changing the way we live in big ways. The coronavirus has resulted in us getting used to different ways of communicating with one another. But in the property world, things still go on much as they always have. We need to make strategic decisions now to be prepared for the future.” Yet, Gerritsen believes the technology to revolutionise the management of residential and other types of property is already available. He points to the United States, where it’s possible to arrange a property viewing at any time of the day without an...

Yardi recently partnered with the UKAA and Get Living to deliver a webinar which explored the effects that Covid-19 has had on the build to rent market. Yardi’s special guests from Get Living, Chris Armstrong, Brand, Technology and Experience Leader and Ian Gibbs, Director of Neighbourhoods, shared their experience on how brand, technology and operations have come together through the pandemic. Justin Harley, regional director at Yardi, kicked off the webinar by sharing some interesting technology trends that Yardi had collated throughout the pandemic. Harley highlighted that technology should be at the heart of any business as the need to be ‘digital-ready’ grows. The count of virtual tours, online applications and resident app downloads are at an all-time high, and data analysis from Yardi shows that resident app usage has doubled since lockdown. Underlying technology has become more essential than ever before. “Technology is a critical part of a business’s infrastructure, just like the physical foundations of any building” said Harley. He posed the question, “when we’re out of lockdown, will these tech tools stay crucial to businesses?” Are you Match Fit? The Get Living duo, Gibbs and Armstrong, scattered sporting analogies throughout the webinar as they compared their response to Covid-19 as becoming ‘match fit’. “We’ve been working on becoming ‘match fit’ for some time now. Gibbs compared Get Living as being ‘at times close to the top of the table’ before new opponent Covid-19 arrived, challenging the team in more ways than they were prepared for. Armstrong compared the Get Living team to being stood on the side lines, discussing the best tactics to take to win the match. He said their first step was to get the right people in the room and to talk it through about how to play...

Yardi’s vice president of international, Neal Gemassmer, recently spoke with the UK Proptech Association (UKPA) about the future of international proptech. Their conversation is reprinted below. Yardi started out as a small software start-up. Now, moving towards Yardi’s fourth decade, how have you seen technology evolve? Gemassmer: A lot has changed since 1984. Since then, Yardi’s technology road map has delivered consistent innovation as we remain focussed on meeting the evolving needs of the real estate industry, and helping our clients serve customers and improve business outcomes. As one of the earliest property management software start-ups, Yardi was founded on core property management and accounting.  Since then, we have greatly expanded our range of products and services. Being one of the first real estate technology companies to transition to the cloud, our SaaS model has proven to be hugely successful. With a focus on mobility, connectivity and efficiency for users, we now provide a unique role-based ecosystem of solutions and interfaces for key positions in real estate management. Whether you’re an asset manager, investment manager, property manager or marketer, Yardi offers a range of solutions that are intentionally designed to connect teams across the entire real estate lifecycle, while leveraging a single source of data. Yardi now employs over 7,000 people worldwide and are active in over 80 countries, serving clients that invest in and operate a wide variety of real estate asset classes, from fund and asset management, commercial including office, industrial and retail, coworking and flexible workspace to residential including build to rent, PRS and student. Can you share any insights into the latest innovations at Yardi? What are you most excited about in the product pipeline? Gemassmer: We have creatively consolidated Yardi’s technology solutions into four main principles: Fully connected real estate management...

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared in Property Australia and is reprinted here with permission. How is real estate technology responding to the industry’s needs during the COVID-19 lockdown? We check in with Yardi’s Bernie Devine, regional director of sales for APAC, to find out. “Real estate technology companies have been doing extremely well over the last five years. Massive amounts of investment have flowed into the sector as investors seek high returns, demand access to new technology and, for some for some, react to a fear of missing out,” Devine says. “COVID-19 has caused investors to refocus and technology companies to pivot to take advantage of adjacent or complementary market opportunities. Proptech companies not in a position to do so are facing a quick death.” Devine says Yardi has mobilised to respond to clients’ needs quickly, prioritising health, continuity, analytics and communication. As transactions and projects are paused, or in some cases cancelled altogether, the industry needs tools to eliminate paper from processes, enhance data rooms and streamline the valuation and underwriting process, Devine says. “A key challenge is in the due diligence process when it is currently not possible to travel to do site inspections.” Operational initiatives include mass rent abatement assessments and their impact on budgets requests and approvals, Devine explains. Expect to see artificial intelligence embraced to enforce social distancing and the rise of the robot cleaning and testing workforce, he adds. Technology is also helping property companies to stress test business continuity plans to see “how it holds up with a remote working scenario.” “The COVID-19 crisis has revealed how fragile spreadsheet-based processes really are. Some companies have rediscovered paper-based processes and must now figure out how to fix them in a remote working model. “In countries like China,...

Note: the following originally appeared in Gulf Property and is reprinted here with permission. Rapid advances in technology continue to reshape how the real estate industry operates, and how quickly one adapts to change is critical for success. Yardi continues to see growth in the adoption of its digital platforms by clients wishing to improve their business models and respond to challenges. Catering to nearly every real estate vertical, Yardi has also now expanded its support resources for clients with free webinars and other online resources. While digitisation has been a steady movement in real estate, its adoption has only really accelerated in these recent weeks with every segment of the industry having to cope with work-from-home regulations not just in the UAE, but around the world. Contactless property management enabled by RentCafe A tool that has become extremely valuable due to current events is Yardi’s RentCafe app for residential real estate. With more than six million residential units using the app, RentCafe benefits tenants at various levels: it helps to check the unit listings or available inventory in the market, facilitates online application and encourages tenant self-service. “A tenant can log on to the app and search for properties, shortlists the units they like and do a 360-degree viewing of the property, similar to a walk-through,” explains Aditya Shah, head of operations, Middle East at Yardi. “When they decides on a unit, they can submit an online application and then subsequently the property management firm can generate a lease contract. The entire process is contactless and this has helped our customers greatly during the stay-home period.” Available on Apple and Android mobile devices, the RentCafe app also has tenant self-service features whereby a tenant can use the apps for paying fees, service charges,...

China is home to some of the world’s largest tech unicorns and a host of smaller companies, which are producing technology with an impact on the real estate landscape through e-commerce, smart cities and building technology. And these themes have emerged in tandem with the well-known drivers of the Chinese real estate market. China will continue to experience rapid rates of urbanization and gentrification over the next decade, which will drive changes in demand and rates of consumption. There is pent-up demand for a better quality of life – cleaner, less congested streets and better housing – which also plays to wider concerns about sustainability and the environment. The poor air quality in large Chinese cities is driving developers to find innovative ways to improve the air quality in their buildings – technology can enable all of this. Smart city initiatives, such as those launched by Alibaba, should reduce congestion and pollution. China’s connected cities will be about providing a seamless handoff between a complex and comprehensive set of apps. No single company will do everything, hence a platform where task and role-based apps can work together to solve problems and deliver a user experience that is seamless is the most likely outcome. Companies that deliver operating systems, such as Microsoft, Apple, Google and Tencent, are working hard on that seamless data handover, but it is not easy. Data privacy, security and governance all overlap and often conflict. Data means insight China retail has been relatively resilient to the effects of e-commerce, not least because much retail development post-dates the emergence of online shopping. China’s tradition of transport node-centered mixed-use development, which follows its community culture, is more than just a place to shop, but a space to gather and eat. This intersection of...

Our previous article explored key portfolio risk mitigation challenges faced by real estate firms amid today’s uncertain market conditions and the likelihood that future income streams will fundamentally change. This time we’ll examine ways to help businesses that are currently forced to operate in a very different manner and environment for the foreseeable future. The ability of those now working from home to maintain productivity, collaboration, informed decision-making and productive action will be tested to the limit – not the least by kids running riot in many households! Mitigating risks associated with working from home requires: Adopting technology infrastructure that enables collaboration and process continuity. Addressing capital transactions and investor queries satisfactorily. Understanding the impact on reporting when data is drawn from multiple sources and collections systems and processed by multiple people. Successfully transitioning fund raising, normally handled in person by general partners, into a remote undertaking. Reliable and immediate access to key performance indicators from all business operations, from tenant transactions to the investor level. You might also want to consider how working from home now might reshape how you conduct business in the future (e.g., more videoconferencing, less travel, more remote viewing of properties, the potential to reduce carbon emissions). We don’t know how long the pandemic will run and thus delay the return to normal working patterns. Could demand for office space tail off permanently, for example? Real estate investment managers can gain the necessary data transparency, control and understanding of their investment data in a remote work environment just as they do in the office – with a single connected platform that allows collaboration between teams, while centralising all their key financial and operational real estate metrics, even if outsourced, for analysis, reporting and decision-making. Automating the real estate fund...

Editor’s note: The following article originally appeared in Vastgoedmarkt, a Netherlands-based real estate magazine. It is reprinted here with permission. Mapping the future of living, working and recreation, will require being responsive to the needs of millennials.  For this, proptech is essential, according to Richard Gerritsen of Yardi. Most of the technology is already available, but the drive to actually apply it to some sectors of the global real estate industry is still missing. Richard Gerritsen has been working for Yardi since 2005, and currently serves as regional director Europe. The American real estate automation supplier is doing well, the regional director says. ‘We started with offices in London and Amsterdam, but Yardi is now also in Germany and Romania, and will soon also be present in France. Our goal was to double our turnover every five years. We succeeded in that and recently, we have been even growing faster than that. Yardi saw its European turnover grow by 44 percent in the year 2019 alone. Now that Yardi is an established party in Europe and in the Netherlands, Gerritsen also sees it as his mission to stimulate more enthusiasm for proptech in the real estate industry. Unlimited possibilities ‘I want to make the industry aware of the great importance of proptech.  When I started at Yardi in 2005, I learned that I shouldn’t use the word software in my conversations with real estate professionals. The software department meant the lads at the end of the corridor where it was always dark. But now, technology and proptech play a much bigger role in (office) life.  Yet technology is still not a popular subject in the boardrooms. This is related to conservatism within the real estate industry, but it is also because those aged over...

Movers & Shakers hosted another impactful Build to Rent Forum on Thursday, Feb. 27, where eager build to rent professionals gathered to debate a range of topics impacting this ever-growing market. Movers & Shakers Chairman David Jennings opened the day with an inspiring video of Greystar’s 2,000-home Greenford Quay development, showcasing a great example of the high standard of homes the industry has to offer.  Adam Challis, Executive Director, EMEA Living Research & Strategy at JLL, reaffirmed the previously controversial notion that home ownership isn’t all that matters. As an industry, real estate should be focused on product quality and geographical diversity. Challis tapped into the importance of sustainability and thought provokingly asked which company in the market would be the first to achieve zero carbon emissions whilst being able to offer affordable rental prices. Later in the day, Rebecca Taylor of Long Harbour agreed with the sentiment and stated that as well as operating buildings more efficiently, sustainability must also be entrenched in construction and waste management. News from the Frontline The passion and enthusiasm to see more collaboration in the market was apparent, especially when it comes to data sharing. Michela Hancock, Managing Director, Development & Construction, Greystar Europe, shared some interesting demographic data from Greystar’s Salemakers development. Hancock explained how Salemakers is occupied by 50% students, a figure much higher than expected, that the average age of build to rent residents is 29, and that 48% of residents are male. Ian Gibbs, Director of Neighbourhoods, Get Living, delved into behavioural data sharing that 20% of the East Village population transfer internally when relocating because they know the Get Living brand. Gibbs also stated that 50% of people who have lived in a tall, residential tower building, are more likely to rent...

Developing financially successful shopping centres has become a significant challenge in the face of major threats to the traditional retail business model. The retail experience is shifting from a point of sale to an immersive experience; instead of endless rows of shops, the modern retail centre features restaurants, cafés, movie theatres and a variety of personal services. In response, many retail operators are implementing emerging innovative technologies that can strengthen their static trade and thus compliment and compete with e-commerce. A successful strategy for attracting customers to retail centres arises from first analysing and understanding regional trends including demographic shifts, culture and politics. Utilising that data and understanding it is key to determining a successful revenue generating tenant mix. Centre size and location, along with other factors, will determine the degree to which new technology can and should be implemented. One business-critical element, however, stands at the centre of every successful strategy—data. Retail asset managers and investors are discovering the benefits that business-wide technology platforms provide. Instant access to sales, leasing, prospect information and much more has surpassed both timeliness and the hassle of consolidating data from multiple disparate systems. Furthermore, merchants are keeping pace with a mobile-enabled consumer base by adopting mobile payment and shopping capabilities, and they expect no less as they interact with their retail landlords. Such technology can help retailer centre owners and operators reduce costs, drive revenue streams and increase asset value. Data’s key role Thanks to technological progress, the retail sector is now able to define persuasive offers with the help of big data. Because the retail sector generates more data per month than many other vertical real estate markets, simple tools and tables for gaining valuable insights into retail businesses and trends have become obsolete. Advanced, but...

It was great to see 400+ people representing the UK’s fast-growing build to rent sector last week at the UKAA Expo 2020; the third event of its kind hosted by The UKAA. Yardi was there in full force with a team of seven passionate residential specialists, all eager to learn, network and engage with the market. Early bird catches the reverse-trade show worm For many, the day started at 10am, but for the exhibitors and operators, it was an earlier start. A conventional tradeshow concept was flipped on its head at The Reverse Tradeshow, giving exhibitors the opportunity to attend 10-minute quickfire meetings with operators. It is great to see companies like EcoWorld, Folio London, Henley Investment Management, PLATFORM_ and Packaged Living investing time into further supporting the growth of the market. Networking and more networking It was all systems go when the doors opened at 10am. The exhibition was home to suppliers from all corners of residential real estate, including PropTech companies, law firms and regulatory organisations. Market Perspectives We were keen to ask other eventgoers how they found the day and get a perspective of their understanding of the market. Justin Harley, Regional Director at Yardi interviewed Lesley Roberts, President of the UKAA and Partner & Executive Director at Allsop, who advised BTR operators to be passionate about customer service, understand the market and find good suppliers. Justin also interviewed Paul Belson, PRS & BTR Investment Consultant who recognised the increase in PropTech innovation and The UKAA’s CEO, Dave Butler, who explained the key to success is to know your customer. Click on each image to watch the full interviews.       Session Take-Aways Richard Lankshear, Innovation Manager of NHBC was first to take to stage where he gave some inspiring...

Editor’s note: the below perspective on 2020 and the decade ahead for technology and real estate comes from Neal Gemassmer, vice president of international for Yardi. Originally published in Property Week, it is reprinted here with permission. The festive period was an invitation to reflect on the year gone by and the year ahead, even more so than usual. After all, it was the end of one decade and the beginning of another. Naturally enough, all eyes are on Brexit, but from a real estate perspective the impact that technology is having on our industry offers the most interesting food for thought. New technology has had a greater impact on property in the last few years than in the previous three or four decades combined. In 2010, the term ‘proptech’ had not even been coined; today, it is ubiquitous. However, in my view we have barely scratched the surface in terms of its influence. In the years to come, it will redefine how real estate functions. Here are a few ideas as to how. First, consider the build-to-rent (BTR) market. More and more investors are moving into the sector and technology has the potential to act as a major enabler. Digital technologies can allow owners and operators to cut out the middle-man – the letting agent – and communicate directly with potential customers, who can view different buildings and get a feel for the quality of the accommodation and the amenities on offer. Virtual reality lets potential tenants view a property remotely, while online tools can arrange physical visits without the need to call or email ahead. Applications and background checks can also take place digitally and customers will be able to sign their lease and pay their deposit online. The whole process will become virtually...

AMSTERDAM – Terrence Wong (Yardi), Remco van de Wetering (Newomij), Hans Touw (Redevco), Robert-Jan Reeuwijk (CBRE) and Jaap van der Bijl (Altera) were recently invited to discuss the impact that social issues such as sustainability and affordability have on the value of residential property. According to Reeuwijk, the current housing market places even greater emphasis on the importance of an objective valuation of (properties) in a residential property portfolio. “When determining value, you use multiple sources so that you can look at standard parameters such as vacancy values or rental values. Then, using databases you can add new quality-defining elements such as the year of construction, the energy label and the location of the complex in question.” Transactions Van de Wetering states that the assessment of quality – and thus of value – has always been an issue in transactions, but he places even more emphasis on this fact for acquisitions. “More and more restrictions are being introduced at a local level for the mid-rental market segment and even then we don’t exactly know where the government wants to go in terms of regulation. But in determining the value of a portfolio, it is important to be aware of this both for the investors and the end users.” End user According to Touw, this depends on which definition you attribute to the term “end user.” “In my experience you are talking about the tenant. When determining quality, you start with the question of what the tenant’s experience is of this property, rather than just determining how good you think the product is for the tenant through the lens of the provider.” Measurable “What represents quality for one investor, does not for another,” asserts Van der Bijl. “As property investors, we want to measure, manage...