How is the commercial real estate landscape changing and how do we adapt? How will we apply those learnings to our future as a technology innovator? These questions have been on the mind of the team at Yardi Canada as well as on technology providers worldwide. Commercial asset managers require flexible workspaces and integrated technology to adapt and thrive. Those foundations pave the way for greater efficiency, resilience and human-centric design. To further explore trending implementations of destination workspaces and integrated technology, a recent “Future of the Work Place” webinar hosted by The Empire Club of Canada provided valuable insights. More equitable, accommodating and accessible workplaces It begins with considering occupant safety. Yardi Canada is an occupier of offices in Toronto, Vancouver and Saskatchewan with 400 employees across the country. In addition to following provincial COVID guidelines, we are considering the very nature of the employee-workplace relationship and how that relationship may change to promote more equitable occupant wellbeing. During the webinar, Infrastructure Ontario president Toni Rossi explains, “Can tenants make it safely to work? Once there, can they work in healthy conditions? It is not just about feeling safe in a space, because that’s personal. It’s about leaving their homes and getting to work safely, and working safely, because more people (these days) have the responsibility to care for the elderly and for young children.” For managers of all asset classes, the pursuit of equitable workspaces encourages the creation of healthier environments for all occupants, including service workers and vendors who may not have remote work options. Previously overlooked spaces, such as control rooms, could be reconfigured to accommodate worker wellbeing. With such considerations in place, large office spaces can maintain their appeal and with the right technology, they can be managed remotely. Revisiting open floor plans and measures of productivity While the pandemic has challenged the popularity of open floor plans in residential real estate, commercial landlords are experiencing greater demand on this front. Yardi Canada agrees with the panelists concluding that open concept workspaces will continue to demonstrate value for commercial tenants. Before the pandemic, tenants who opted for open floorplans were looking to drive work environments that encourage teamwork, learning and creativity while supporting social activities. These spaces continue to serve the same purposes while offering the added benefit of social distancing without feeling isolated, open concepts permit a functional and healthy use of space. The open space also encourages inclusion and wellbeing in the workplace. Tenants can provide greater consideration to their employee’s work preferences, integrate biophilic design principles throughout the office and take advantage of amenities such as wellness rooms. Panelists acknowledge that many workplaces will uphold a hybrid model of in-office and remote work options. Sarah McKenzie, independent consultant – Innovation and Future of Work observes that the “office will likely shift from a central destination for all employees to a more fluid ‘hub’. Its use will fluctuate based on the needs of occupants.” At Yardi, we are engaging with employees regarding remote work and flexible, in-office options. Multiple factors will influence our decisions, from productivity to company culture and employee wellness. Such engagement, however, paves the way for workplaces that are both client-focused and employee wellness-centred. Asset managers would benefit from innovative tools to manage such flexible workspaces, offering access to tenants as a value-added service. Foundational tools for the future Asset managers must have access to reliable data to efficiently address the unique and changing needs of tenants. There are a lot of innovative products being developed in the industry today. The first step is to implement technology to streamline and automate processes which will promote greater efficiencies, increase insights and enhance decision making. With this as a base, leadership can take the next steps to create the vision of that future workspace. Technology that seamlessly combines portfolio health, tenant risk, deal management, budgeting and construction in a single connected...

Yardi sponsored The Mental Health Resource Library from the COVID-19 Rental Housing Support Initiative to help users navigate the pressures, challenges and unknowns of life during and after the pandemic. The library is just one piece of a content collaboration of The Institute of Real Estate Management (IREM), National Apartment Association (NAA), National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC) and National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM). You can learn more about all aspects of the Rental Housing Support Initiative here. Exploring the Mental Health Resource Library The Mental Health Resource Library offers tools to help manage changes in your home, work and social environments. Explore dozens of videos, articles and other media that are practical and easy to understand. While there is a lot of content, it is divided into categories that make it easier to get started. You can: Learn how to cope with isolation Discover how to adapt and bounce back after life changes Establish a sense of ease in the face of worry and anxious feelings Take control of your money to manage financial stress For optimal emotional, physical and mental health, we must learn to manage the changes in our environment. The Mental Health Resource Library provides tips, new perspectives and life hacks that bring change management within reach. Click here to explore the Mental Health Resource Library. Building a library takes a village The COVID-19 Rental Housing Support Initiative is proudly sponsored by Yardi. This collaboration between leading industry organizations offers solutions in key support areas. Each component meets the growing demand for research and education that can help the industry survive and thrive through the pandemic and beyond. Learn more about the Rental Housing Support...

The past year has been full of challenges from a traditional office perspective. These challenges have come in a series of phases ­­— initially sending employees home for an indefinite amount of time, implementing physical and tech upgrades to safely welcome workers and guests into offices, creating a potential hybrid working model to accommodate distancing in the workspace and now waiting on sufficient vaccine distribution that will encourage more employees to return to the office. As we look at the progress we’ve made toward re-entering physical workspaces, there is still a great deal of uncertainty as to when occupancy will return to pre-COVID levels. On a recent Realcomm webinar, a group of panelists was asked when they thought their offices would return to some sort of normalcy. Their answers varied: “When we hit 50% occupancy could vary, especially in California with its restrictions,” said Stuart Appley, managing director at CBRE. Appley suggested that around September he believes they could reach 30% capacity in office. CBRE Group is the largest commercial real estate services company in the U.S., and it employs a workforce of more than 100,000. Last fall, the firm formally changed its global headquarters address from California to Texas, where it already has a significant presence, handling property management, leasing and development services for Dallas and Fort Worth office space, as well as other commercial real estate assets. Susan Gerock, CIO and vice president of IT at Washington REIT, says she’s hopeful to be at 50% occupancy “at some point in the fall, but many companies won’t even try to start bringing people back until September.” Joe Rich, senior vice president at Related Companies, and Ilan Zachar, CTO at Carr Properties, both pushed their timelines out a bit further, with Zachar saying his customers believe the end of 2021 will bring some normalcy, while Rich admitted that a return to 100% occupancy is unlikely to happen at all in his opinion. This is a significant cause for debate among industry leaders, because while there is a chance that 100% occupancy is a thing of the past, there is a wide range of guesses as to what working models will look like long term. Once the pandemic is “over” in terms of social restrictions, all signs point to the elimination of a standard 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday to Friday schedule. Whether it’s fewer hours or fewer days in office, employees who have the ability to fully function remotely will do so more often than they did before March 2020. “This trend was occurring before the pandemic, but this just accelerated it,” Rich said. As Zachar mentioned, 25-30% of Carr Properties’ workforce was remote pre-COVID. Many companies were not worried about a drop in productivity when sending employees home, but were concerned about missing out on the tangible benefits to being in an office. Interpersonal relationships and hallway conversations cannot be duplicated on Zoom or Microsoft Teams. In the same manner that the office will lose its appeal, city centers are losing their vibrancy when workers aren’t in the offices. With studies showing that New York City is below 20% office occupancy, Rich expressed concerns about how viable this is for businesses throughout Manhattan and other major hubs. “Our vibrancy is currently at risk,” he said. “We can’t work without public transport.” The concern over mass transit use is one of the principal factors affecting a slow return to physical workspaces. Dallas, Houston, Austin and Philadelphia have all seen significantly higher number of employees returning to office than New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C, the latter three much more dependent on mass transit usage. Leveraging the right technology The panel made a point to differentiate between two unique sets of technology. “COVID tech” are advances such as thermal scanning, virtual conferencing and contact tracing which became necessary due to the pandemic. The second category, tech to encourage people...

Since 2000, the U.S. office market has witnessed a good share of trophy deals, which is usually a sign of strong market conditions. Using CommercialEdge data, the following is a review of the top 50 office deals of the last 20 years. Specifically, the report looked at office buildings of at least 50,000 square feet in size and mixed-use properties that have more than 50% office space (for further details, read our methodology). Additionally, the report highlights major deals in the Northeast, Midwest, South and West, as well as best-selling Class B office spaces and properties less than 250,000 square feet in size. #1 Office Deal of the Last 2 Decades: $2.8 Billion Sale of GM Building New York City occupies the first 12 spots within the list of top office deals of the last two decades – an unsurprisingly dominant presence in the ranking. As for office deals outside of New York City, only 11 transactions made the cut — with more than half of those being portfolio deals. The highest-ranking office deal from outside New York City was the $1.64 billion Century Plaza portfolio in Los Angeles. Sold by General Motors in 2014, the three-building portfolio totaling 3.3 million square feet placed 13th. Boston features four entries on the list, led by 500 Boylston and 222 Berkeley in 23rd place. EQ Office sold the 1.3 million-square-foot Boston office space to a joint venture between Oxford Properties Group and JP Morgan Chase in 2015 for $1.3 billion. Notably, several buildings were sold twice since 2000, fetching top prices each time. One such property is the General Motors Building in Midtown Manhattan, which also ranks as #1 office sale since 2000. Boston Properties paid $2.8 billion for the office tower located at 767 5th Ave. in 2008. The office tower had previously been sold in 2003 for $1.4 billion — landing it in 18th place for a second entry on the top 50 list. Another property with double entries in the list is the News Corporation Building, anchored by media giant Fox News. Located at 1211 Avenue of the Americas, its $1.52 billion sale in 2006 was the first sale to land it a spot on the list — in 15th place. Then, in 2013, Montreal-based Ivanhoe Cambridge acquired a 51% stake in the property for $855 million, enough to hand it the 50th position on the list. Highest-Ranking Office Deal of 2020 Falls Short of $1 Billion Mark for First Time Since 2012 In 2020, the $900 million sale of 330 Madison Ave. landed in first position, followed by the $810 million transaction of the former Master Printers Building — both in New York — and the $729 million sale of 245 Summer St. in Boston. It’s worth noting that the last time the leading office sale of the year was less than the $1 billion threshold was in 2012. At that time, Singaporean wealth investment fund GIC Real Estate paid $851 million for the 48-story 101 California in San Francisco. Likewise, the highest-ranking office deal in the West last year was the $664 million deal for the Transamerica Center in San Francisco, which was closed by a joint venture between SHVO and Deutsche Finance. In addition to the iconic Transamerica Pyramid, the transaction also included the 185,000-square-foot office building at 505 Sansome St. and the 52,000-square-foot property at 545 Sansome St. By comparison, Apex Capital Investments closed a $187 million deal last December for the 352,000-square-foot Grand 2 at Papago Park Center in Tempe — the priciest sale of a Phoenix office space for rent in 2020. Two other transactions of Tempe office buildings close out the ranking, trading for less than half of that amount: Discovery Business Campus – Northern Trust III for $65 million, and the Park Bridge and Park Garden at Fountainhead Corporate Park for $62 million. To the west, there was a much tighter race for the first...

Senior living community operators use portfolio-wide information compiled by Yardi Senior IQ to improve revenue, expenses, care and efficiency. The business intelligence solution contributes even more to fast, smart decision-making with the recent addition of Staffing Analysis. Staffing Analysis helps ensure that every work shift has the optimal number of care staff with the right amount of caregiving, nursing and other skills needed to meet care requirements. It does so by automatically drawing resident care information from Yardi EHR, an electronic health record system, then presenting the care staff, task time allotments and skillsets for each shift on a dashboard. If Staffing Analysis shows a shift is overstaffed or understaffed by care staff or skillsets, managers can transfer tasks or staff with drag-and-drop functionality. And when care plans change in Yardi EHR, the Staffing Analysis dashboard automatically resets task time allocations. As a streamlined staff efficiency tool, Staffing Analysis enables executive directors, lead nurses and others to leverage existing care records without interfaces and eliminates the inconvenience of compiling multiple reports, preparing spreadsheets or rekeying data. “Staffing Analysis combines the clinical aspects of senior care with finance and marketing to make Yardi Senior IQ a complete and fully integrated business intelligence solution for community operators,” said Ray Elliott, vice president of senior living for Yardi. Learn how Yardi Senior IQ and the rest of the Yardi Senior Living Suite create a comprehensive technology platform for senior living...

State and local housing agencies across the country are tasked with implementing emergency rental assistance programs for households and landlords in a secure, equitable and expedient manner. Funded by federal stimulus dollars, emergency rental assistance programs will help keep people housed as the U.S. recovers from the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The initial funding for the Emergency Rental Assistance program was $25 billion, which must be used promptly to support households struggling to pay rent and landlords who may have missed mortgage payments due to renter delinquency. Additional funding is also expected to be allocated by Congress. To disburse funds to eligible households, housing agencies must qualify applicants, track housing status (including offering support services) and complete the rental assistance deployment. Getting assistance funds to the right accounts with complete transparency and as efficiently as possible is a nationwide effort, and one that trusted real estate technology provider Yardi, a 40-year contributor to industry innovation, has the expertise to support. Yardi has released a new end-to-end software solution designed specifically for emergency rental assistance management called Rent Relief. This emergency rental assistance program (ERAP) software has online portals for applicants and tenants, automated workflows to qualify applicants for assistance, and secure technology to compete financial transactions. Rent Relief powered by Yardi provides an online portal for households in need to apply for rental assistance. The portal guides the user through the process of answering eligibility questions and uploading required documentation. Housing agency staff can then log in to Rent Relief to complete the steps of verifying eligibility for assistance. Staff can communicate online with applicants to advise of case status updates, missing information, determinations of eligibility and more. Steps required to qualify vary by state and are configurable within Rent Relief. Rent Relief is also the way approved households will receive funds in their bank account. The transactions are transparent and secure, leveraging Yardi’s industry-leading experience which includes managing more than 12 million U.S. residential units and processing monthly rent payments for more than 8 million apartments. To learn more about the platform, get more details and sign up for a personal demo at rentrelief.com. “Yardi is committed to do our part to help agencies keep renters housed as we endure the pandemic. We have nearly four decades of experience developing this type of full-service technology,” said Chris Voss, vice president of affordable housing and PHA at Yardi. Yardi has consistently stepped up in crisis situations to offer funds, resources and expertise. In 2016, Yardi worked with the Provincial Government of Alberta to develop a searchable, easy-to-use housing registry after 2,000 homes were lost in the devastating Fort McMurray wildfire. In 2017, after Hurricane Harvey devastated southern Texas, Yardi created a regional housing site and hotline for displaced residents and also donated $1 million in disaster relief. That response was repeated after Hurricane Irma later the same year. Last year, Yardi donated $1 million in support of rental support resources for the newly launched COVID-19 Rental Housing Support Initiative, a collaboration of The Institute of Real Estate Management (IREM), National Apartment Association (NAA), National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC) and National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM). If your organization has begun to implement an emergency rental assistance program and is in need of simple software dedicated to supporting the entire process, call Yardi at (800) 866-1144 or visit...

Remote work environments offer conveniences such as custom workspaces for employees and fewer overhead costs. Employers are learning, however, that employees may struggle to preserve corporate culture from a distance. This can be especially clear while hiring and onboarding new employees. A few practices can help you preserve and promote corporate culture within your organization whether employees are near or far. Use technology to invest in employee growth Working from home can feel monotonous or repetitive. Employees want to know that leadership continues to support their growth and development. Use e-learning software for continuing education opportunities. If feasible, allot a few hours per quarter that employees can dedicate to their growth through online courses. It’s a relatively simply way to show employees that they are supported and corporate culture facilitates personal and professional growth. Host virtual acknowledgements and awards ceremonies An encouraging smile goes a long way. On the toughest days, a nod or gesture from leadership can help employees feel seen, empathized with and supported. Unfortunately, virtual communication doesn’t lend itself well to such small gestures. Ensure that your employees don’t feel lost among countless emails and instant messages. To show that they are not overlooked or underappreciated, host virtual ceremonies via video conference. Make time to give kudos for a job well done or awards for more significant accomplishments. Rainmaker research reports that, “mutual respect, gratitude, and recognition between coworkers and leadership” was essential to employee satisfaction. Acknowledgement boosts employee morale and reinforces a culture of teamwork and camaraderie. Maintain your commitment to corporate social responsibility Social distancing has halted many volunteerism initiatives. Fortunately, technology makes a way to maintain your commitment to philanthropy while promoting employee safety. Each year, Yardi offices assemble committees that organize volunteer efforts and nonprofit grants. Of course, 2020 forced committees to get creative—and boy, did they rise to the occasion! Many offices transitioned to virtual fundraising committees. The Yardi Oxnard office took it a step farther. Oxnard invited candidates to submit video presentations summarizing their organization, its needs and goals. These videos replaced in-person fairs and still helped employees get a personal feel for each worthy cause. After viewing the videos, employees remotely cast their votes. The top-ranking candidates received grant funds for the year. Yardi CSD replaced their annual in-person 3k walk with a virtual walk to support Angela’s House. The group connected via Microsoft Teams and then chatted while walking their neighborhoods. It was a fantastic way to raise funds for the organization while participating in team building. Yardi is Energized for Good! Learn more about Yardi’s remote corporate philanthropy efforts on our Giving page. Host virtual clubs for employees If your organization didn’t have a social committee before, now is the time to develop one. These powerful, employee-driven groups get a feel for what interests their peers. They then create engaging activities and events. Virtual clubs are opportunities for employees to “hang out” after hours while enjoying a shared interest. Consider fitness clubs where team members log on simultaneously for yoga, dance or Tabata classes. Painting, cooking, crafting and gaming are all fun way ways for employees to casually connect and build a culture of camaraderie. Keep holiday traditions alive It’s important to continue holiday celebrations whenever you can. While group meals and dancing may not be in the immediate future, you can still make merry using technology. For Yardi Atlanta, Halloween is a big deal. Each year, employees decorated their departments, their desks and their bodies in hope of winning bragging rights and prizes. Last year, the Yardi Atlanta social committee came up with creative workarounds for a virtual celebration. A pumpkin carving  and selfie contest, throwback Halloween photo contest and virtual mixology class were among a few of the fun activities employees enjoyed together. Of course, there were costume contests! Teams made collages for group costumes and decorated their home offices. All submissions, voting and awards...

Helping residents receive COVID-19 vaccinations has become a critical task for senior living community operators. Fortunately, the Yardi EHR electronic health record system makes it easier to manage records associated with that effort. A recently added feature of Yardi EHR is an infection surveillance and immunization dashboard that allows health care staff to document that a resident has received, declined or missed appointments for COVID-19 vaccinations. A newly added assessment allows clients to record any side effects exhibited by vaccine recipients. The assessments incorporate Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines for administering COVID-19 vaccines. The third element of the dashboard allows facilities to identify residents who present symptoms consistent with COVID-19. The Symptom Tracker assessment sends an alert to the dashboard when such symptoms are documented. Staff can add indicators for other infectious diseases such as influenza, pneumonia and hepatitis, which will also populate the dashboard. “These built-in assessments are much easier to navigate than custom tables and other manual methods,” said Ray Elliott, vice president of senior living for Yardi. “Yardi EHR clients will be able to generate comprehensive vaccination reports for a single resident or an entire community with equal ease.” Yardi has dedicated special resources to help clients, communities and employees during the COVID-19...