Could the most important component of technology be the instructions? It’s arguable that a complex piece of software cannot live up to its potential without well-trained users, no matter how well it is designed. Fortunately, Yardi has taken user training beyond a manual with Yardi eLearning, a dedicated learning management system just for Yardi users. Property management companies such as Viridian Management have found Yardi eLearning indispensable considering the benefits it offers vs. traditional training methods. Getting Started with Yardi eLearning Yardi eLearning arrived just in time for Viridian. Late in 2018, their leadership team was developing a training curriculum for staff to use Yardi Voyager, the property management, accounting and affordable housing compliance software used by Viridian. They soon found it was very difficult to craft training content for their users, even with all of the support documentation available for Yardi software. “We were in a bottleneck because there is so much to cover. As we inventoried the skills we wanted our staff to master, we found it would take hours and hours of training to get users where we wanted them to be. When we saw the courses included with Yardi eLearning, we discovered that about 70% of everything we wanted to teach was already available and ready to use,” says Patrick Patterson, president of Viridian. Training on Affordable Housing Viridian manages 120 properties with more than 4,000 affordable units spread throughout Oregon, Washington and Idaho. They specialize in developing and managing tax credit properties, and have experience with USDA Rural Development, HOME, HUD Multifamily Housing, as well as state and local sources of funds. Training for each of those housing programs is facilitated by specific learning tracks in Yardi eLearning. Viridian can simply assign staff to those learning tracks based on...

Since 1937, the benchmark for cost-effective housing has remained the same. Occupants can be expected to allot about 30 percent of their income on housing. Yet in the Triangle region of North Carolina, many low-income families cannot find housing at 30 percent of their income. The struggle is exacerbated when disability and other medical issues consume a significant portion of household incomes. CASA of Raleigh aims “to provide access to stable, affordable housing for people who are homeless or at risk by developing and managing rental communities.” The nonprofit acknowledges that homelessness is a complex problem. Yet CASA has simplified its approach: the solution to homelessness is housing. CASA in Action CASA has supported the Triangle region since 1992. The organization owns, manages, and rents homes to individuals and families in need. To date, CASA communities are divided with 70 percent serving as supportive units and 30 percent as workforce units. Populations served include those living with disabilities, veterans, families and individuals that have previously experienced homelessness or are at risk. Last year, CASA welcomed 137 new families into new homes and renewed leases with 300 households. Of those homes, 78 percent have one disabled member and 23 percent include a veteran. CASA’s programming relies on community support and donations. Contributions both large and small can make a significant difference in the lives of those in need. Yardi + CASA Yardi’s Raleigh office recently volunteered to construct gift baskets for current and incoming tenants of CASA communities. The baskets vary, some containing kitchen essentials while others were geared towards family time and activities. The latter included picnic-style baskets, meal kits, snack and activity kits. The staff at CASA will distribute the baskets to tenants based on their need. New tenants receive baskets that have...

Welcome to our third segment of the Senior Housing News (SHN) series, The Changemakers, sponsored by Yardi. These interviews demonstrate how adaptability and innovation pave the way for success. Shamim Wu, COO of Eclipse Senior Living, has been trailblazing for decades. With an emphasis on creating diverse, tech-driven workplaces, she has built a company that operates 100 senior living properties—and growing. While many companies scramble to appeal to Millennials, Wu has managed to assemble “a team made up of men and women across four generations, across almost every ethnicity and race that you can think of.” The diversity of her team and the wealth of ideas and experiences that it brings are her greatest accomplishments, she says. Eclipse has also placed work-life balance as a pinnacle of company culture. Employees receive unlimited time off to accommodate what life throws at them, whether it’s time with a sick loved one, welcoming a new addition to the family, or simply spending much needed time in nature. “We don’t just encourage people to have a life outside of work, we almost demand it,” said Wu. Tech integration is also woven into the culture. Eclipse has invested heavily in enterprise technology systems that increase efficiencies, collaboration, and visibility. Without mind-numbing administrative tasks to pour over, team members are free to focus on what matters: proactively adjusting to the demands of the industry with agility, accuracy, and customer focus. Wu talked to SHN about the Eclipse approach to the changing industry: Eclipse is on the leading edge of another change in the industry, which is the multi-brand strategy. How is that working? Wu: We’ve seen best practices in brand stratification in other areas, like hospitality. You’ve got Hilton Hotels, which has a certain cachet because of the Hilton brand....

Established in 2015, Shannon Commercial Properties (SCP) is a subsidiary of Shannon Group plc and provides commercial property solutions to commercial, industrial and aviation markets. The company owns and manages seven business and technology parks and has over 1.8 million square feet of office and industrial space, as well as approximately 1,600 acres of development land in over 40 locations across counties Clare, Limerick, Tipperary, Kerry and Offaly in Ireland. “We are focused on expanding our property portfolio in the Mid West region with the provision of further third generation office and industrial facilities, primarily located in Shannon Free Zone West, beside Shannon Airport,” said Jennifer Kearns, finance manager for Shannon Commercial Properties. SCP adopted Yardi Voyager to improve business processes and to gain better control and visibility of operations in one system. The move from disparate systems enabled SCP to handle all aspects of portfolio management including lease management, reporting, budgeting, maintenance, and financials from a single database. Prior to adopting Yardi solutions, SCP was operating across six different management systems. Initially, a new structure was proposed which detailed a four-system approach: property management, financial management, debt management and document management. However, after further examination and detailed discussions with Yardi about the company’s key needs, it became apparent that SCP could streamline onto just one system, Yardi Voyager. “Streamlining onto a single system has allowed us operate with a more reliable set of data. Multiple systems had resulted in unreliable data, which had increased the potential for inaccurate reporting. Combined with the powerful reporting functionality with Voyager, SCP is far better positioned to make strategic decisions than previously,” said David Neylon, capital sales executive for SCP. Gaining control over workflows was a key driver in SCP’s move to Yardi Voyager. Voyager enables SCP...

Welcome to our second segment of the Senior Housing News (SHN) magazine series, The Changemakers. Yardi is the presenting sponsor of this insightful set of interviews. SHN sat down with nine industry leaders who demonstrate how adaptability and innovation pave the way for success. In this installment, meet Patricia Will, Belmont Village founder and CEO. Will is accustomed to making waves. During her 20-year career, she has boldly challenged and improved upon traditional senior housing models. Will combined multiple levels of care into one building, collaborated with universities for care support, and developed an early-stage dementia intervention program. The future of Belmont Village looks bright. The organization recently entered a partnership with Baptist Health System of south Texas. Together, they will co-develop wellness-centered senior communities. What are some changemaking efforts you’re most proud of, within Belmont Village or the industry as a whole? Will: The first is a simple one, which is including independent living, assisted living, and memory care under one roof, in one building that’s fully licensed. We did that in an effort to accommodate couples, and in an effort to fight ageism. There’s a notion that people would object, in independent living, to seeing walkers or wheelchairs, and we decided to say that we have capable people who have different needs, and we don’t want to segregate them. That’s something that we did for the very first time on our first building in California, in San Diego, and we’ve now replicated in many parts of the country, although it’s still not done enough. We’ve integrated dining rooms, integrated gyms, integrated social areas and even integrated floors. Can you take me back to that moment when that was still a new idea, to integrate in that way? Will: Everyone in the industry...

About a year ago, Carmin Tomassi, vice president, controller at Silverado, walked through the doors of the Irvine, Calif., headquarters for the first time. He was promptly introduced to all 12 systems used by the AP department. From day one, he knew that greater efficiency would take the organization to the next level. He enlisted Yardi to help make that vision a reality. Identifying inefficiencies Silverado’s presence spans the west coast and midwestern United States. Its 59 properties specialize in senior care with an emphasis on assisted living and memory care, as well as hospice and home services. Each location offers a broad range of services for aging seniors. The sites require specialized equipment and steady maintenance. Each day, the accounts payable team received stacks of invoices in various stages of completion and accuracy. Approvals and reconciliation with the general ledger took days longer than Tomassi preferred. To create efficiency, he embarked on a campaign with two major goals. The first was to simplify the department’s software use. “We had maybe a dozen systems that affect accounting. They were all different which was just crazy to me. Even keeping track of your logins was ridiculous,” said Tomassi. “With accounting, things need to talk to each other, and it needs to be seamless. Otherwise, you’re asking for trouble.” The second goal was to expedite approvals by streamlining the filing process. “AP would arrive in the morning and there would be stacks of invoices in their little baskets: no signatures, no allocations, no coding, no nothing, right? They just kind of dealt with it for a while but I said, ‘No. We’ve got to figure out a way to make this more efficient.’ We also needed metrics so we can track the workflow and make changes.”...

Houston’s multifamily sector has certainly faced its share of challenges over the past few years. In 2017, Hurricane Harvey rendered between 7 and 11 percent of the metro’s units uninhabitable. Further, significant fluctuations in oil prices have also affected the city’s real estate market. Year-over-year rent growth, as of March, came in at a tepid 0.6 percent, while occupancy rates declined to 92.4 percent, according to a recent Yardi Matrix national multifamily report. But many investors are finding innovative ways to ensure returns on their investments. Some 14,000 units are under construction across the metro, the vast majority as part of luxury developments. Significant capital deployment is also underway in the realm of value-add acquisitions. Yardi client Sanmore Investments, a multifamily developer and redeveloper based in Houston, has been involved in the market’s value-add arena for more than five years, acquiring and rehabilitating several properties in the metro. Owner Boris Sanchez discusses recent trends in Houston’s multifamily sector and how investors can make their value-add acquisitions shine. How would you describe the overall appetite for redeveloped multifamily properties in the Houston metro? Sanchez: At Sanmore, we have personally seen the demand for our turnkey properties increase to an all-time high. However, in the last six months, that demand has been met and exceeded by the demand for value-add properties. As other areas of the country tighten, Houston’s higher cap rates and landlord-friendly laws have become more and more attractive to investors. In addition, we have seen a record number of residential investors turn to commercial for more opportunities, stronger economies of scale and less hands-on management. This is all coupled with Houston’s strong economic growth and growing population, creating a red-hot multifamily arena in Houston. Considering the metro’s slow overall rent growth this year, how can...

You may have a bit in common with Dennis McCarthy, chief information officer at SRI Management of Tallahassee, Florida. Like Dennis, your organization may be facing growth. And like Dennis, you may be searching for a solution to help you manage that growth and prepare for future success. McCarthy’s senior living management company is expected to double in size in the next two years. He and his team searched the globe to find software that would ease growing pains. SRI Management found success using Yardi EHR and Yardi eMAR. We sat down with McCarthy to learn how EHR and eMAR have made it easier to do business while quickly growing. Q: How did Yardi’s technology help you accomplish growth? A: Yardi’s technology has been phenomenal. It’s an integrated piece of software that anybody can see anywhere. As we’ve spread out, as SRI management has spread from one location to another, as we’ve had to add people to help us run all of these properties, it’s easy for people to see everything that’s going on because they can log in anywhere and see it anywhere. So, the standardization that we get from the software helps us grow easily and confidently. Q: How has technology impacted your world? A: Interestingly, our world is not a technology world. SRI is a management company that runs properties for owners, so we don’t really focus on the technology as much as we focus on the people. What the technology does is make it much easier for us to focus on taking care of people. It just makes SRI Management a much more efficient company because we have the background of the technology behind us to do our jobs as easily as possible. Q: What is the value that Yardi...

Yardi is a proud sponsor of the new Senior Housing News magazine series, Changemakers. This series of interviews highlights industry leaders that are impacting the future of senior living. The field of senior housing and services is changing rapidly. The ability to adapt to market changes has proven to be a differentiator for senior housing professionals. Those who forecast changes and adapt to consumer trends are leading the industry in exciting new directions. The Changemakers series focuses on individuals who are leaning into the winds of change. They are bold, innovative, and proactive. Senior Housing News, sponsored by Yardi, has identified nine Changemakers. During these in-depth interviews, you can learn what motivates these industry leaders and explore how they are shaping the future of the industry. Meet William Bullock William Bullock, president of Latitude Margaritaville, Minto Communities USA, is one of the first featured Changemakers. He had an idea that was so simple and so spot-on that many wondered why it hadn’t been done before. Bullock partnered with Margaritaville to create sprawling developments that offers residents a “Jimmy Buffett-inspired lifestyle.” What does that look like? Primarily, Latitude scrapped the traditional active senior housing model. The company based its new brand on feedback from its target demographic. It nixed words like “senior” and “retirement” and reimagined communities where wellness and fun were top priorities. Check out this excerpt from the SHN interview. SHN: What convinced you [to pursue Latitude Margaritaville]? Bullock: What’s great about the Margaritaville brand is, it’s synonymous with food, fun, music, escapism. It naturally fit what we were discovering from folks wanting to get away from golf and get into more active sports and wellness and nutrition, the fun. What we were seeing down in Naples with this transition out of Mediterranean...

The United Way of Greater Atlanta Shoebox Project is a creative way to provide more than 30,000 homeless people in greater metro Atlanta with daily necessities. Each year, Yardi Atlanta lends its creativity, time, and resources to help United Way fulfill its mission. This year was another success! The Shoebox Project United Way of Greater Atlanta is a nonprofit organization serving 13 counties in Georgia. These counties are home to nearly half a million children who live in communities with low or very low child well-being scores. Many of these children and their families may struggle with homelessness. In 2006, United Way of Greater Atlanta launched the Shoebox Project as a campaign to collect essential items for homeless populations. The organization reached out to individuals, families, and businesses to fill shoeboxes with toiletries for men, women and children. More than 13 years later, the Shoebox Project has been adopted by United Ways throughout the nation. Shoebox items include toiletries as well as first aid and enrichment items. Last year, the organization collected more than 35,200 shoeboxes with a value of more than $704,080.  Yardi + United Way Yardi’s preparation for the Shoebox Project is a year-round endeavor. Employees donate supplies such as undergarments, toiletries, hygiene products, first aid kits, and portable activities for children. Employees are encouraged to explore cost effective options by donating time or free items, such as complimentary goods from businesses. Near the end of spring, Yardi volunteers sort items, allocate them to shoeboxes, and then cover the boxes in gift wrap. This year, Yardi packed and wrapped over 75 boxes! The United Way collects its donations from volunteers throughout the metro Atlanta area. It then distributes the shoeboxes to local nonprofit agencies that serve homeless and low-income men, women and children....

Our latest Yardi leadership series profile comes from Amsterdam, which is home for Richard Gerritsen, Yardi’s regional director for Europe. He gave us an update on Yardi’s presence and progress in the region. Q: Richard, what is Yardi’s presence in Europe? A: We started with offices in London and Amsterdam in 2002 and now serve clients on the European continent who hold properties in 26 countries—from Norway to Spain, and as far east as Poland and Romania. We subsequently added offices in Mainz, Germany, and Cluj, Romania. Q: What are some key characteristics of the European real estate market? A: Property management has a distinct international component here: A portfolio might be owned in one country, operate in another country and report to investors in yet another one, or more. Each party most likely has its own currency and tax requirements. Even many locally focused property managers are increasingly serving clients from the U.S. and Asia. They all need a sophisticated software platform to provide a high level of efficiency, transparency and compliance for their clients, which is why Yardi Investment Management accounts for a sizeable portion of our sales on the continent. Being able to report on multinational holdings from one platform is a huge advantage. Q: So investment management is the primary focus? A: Yardi is heavily focused on asset and fund management in Europe because so many holdings are multinational. Our property management client base is smaller than Yardi’s share in the U.S., but we are well established among European commercial property managers and we anticipate some of our strongest growth to come from the residential market. Q: What has been key to Yardi’s growth and prominence in the market? A: We provide technology and support to meet the international requirements...

How do you create a better online experience for prospects and residents? Just ask the dynamic marketing duo at The Excelsior Group (TEG). Meet Brenda Studt, vice president of marketing, and Shelly Steitz, marketing manager. Together with their team and tools from the RENTCafé Suite, they’re transforming the online renter experience to better match the expectations of today’s digitally savvy consumers. When Brenda and Shelly visited the Yardi studio recently to film their Real Estate Questions Answered videos, we chatted about marketing, websites and themselves. Keep reading to find out what you can do to make your sites more appealing to people who are searching for a place to call home. Q: How does marketing work at TEG? Brenda: TEG is a group of real estate related businesses operating on a unified platform. Shelly and I work for TEG’s Creative Studio. We’re an in-house, full-service creative and marketing agency offering a variety of creative solutions specifically designed for real estate related clients. We focus our marketing strategy around client goals and consider owner goals and expectations for specific assets. Our largest client is TEG’s multifamily business. Shelly manages all marketing activity for this client and works with their property management and development teams daily to develop and execute annual plans for each property across the portfolio. Q: How do you make sure your property marketing websites engage and convert prospects? Shelly: We create engaging websites through strong visual storytelling. We take a “show, don’t tell” approach and that includes 360 tours, high quality amenity photos and vibrant gallery pages. And then we give the prospect as many ways to engage with that content as possible. Brenda: Using RENTCafé has been great for our clients. We’re able to understand user patterns and user experience better...

Yardi subsidiary PropertyShark was recently featured in the Queens Courier, one of New York City’s prominent real estate publications.  Vince Soriero, Business Development Manager for PropertyShark, has been a passionate advocate for the brand for the last seven years and was interviewed about the company and its valuable services for real estate professionals. Yardi acquired PropertyShark in 2010 and since then the platform has become the go-to destination for comprehensive residential and commercial real estate sales data in the New York City with a National presence. The PropertyShark site helps real estate brokers and agents streamline the information-finding process.  They can research property characteristic, sales comps, contact information, foreclosures, FAR, zoning, property taxes, mailing lists and more, all in one place. “We aggregate our data from hundreds of public resources updating our data and feeds nightly, providing our subscribers with a single definitive source for property information.  Without PropertyShark, users must search multiple websites to find these details,” Soriero explained in the interview. “We’ve done an amazing job at developing the most robust platform on the market,” he added.  “We’ve also worked hard to establish a strong presence in the New York City market.  PropertyShark is very well known here.” More than 15,000 real estate professionals make use of the PropertyShark platform.  In addition to brokers and agents, clients include investors, developers, banks, lenders, insurance companies, appraisers and more. A great new feature that will attract even more users is the recently added Platinum Real Owners. “With this new feature, PropertyShark users can instantly find the true owners names behind LLC’s, other properties they own, and phone numbers. This saves hours, if not days, searching through multiple websites to find such information.  It has an upgraded cost, but our users say it’s absolutely worth...

During the recent Yardi Forum for senior living and affordable housing, we sat down with Brandon Carter, director of information technology at Wallick Communities. Brandon has a wealth of knowledge about products from the Yardi Senior Living and Yardi Voyager Affordable Housing suites, and we were thrilled to speak with him in person. Wallick owns and manages affordable housing and senior living properties across the Midwest. More than 20,000 residents live in Wallick units. There are always more units on the way, as Wallick has experienced an average 23 percent growth annually. Wallick has worked with HUD tax credit programs for more than four decades, and has even been ranked first in the nation in affordable housing preservation. To put it plainly, Wallick is a big deal. Read on to learn how Yardi software helps Wallick achieve its mission. Q: Describe the value that Yardi products bring to your company? BC: Yardi has been a great partner for Wallick. Whatever the need, we can almost always find a Yardi product to help us fulfil it. We trust that Yardi is continuously working to develop new and exciting products to help us fulfil our responsibilities towards owners, staff and residents. Q: How does Yardi help to position your company for growth? BC: Having only Yardi software to manage makes Wallick extremely nimble and quickly scalable with growth. The Yardi platform allows us to focus on our associates and residents as we grow, instead of worrying about bringing on new technology. Q: What software challenges did Wallick face before adopting Yardi? BC: Before moving to Yardi, we used multiple pieces of software for our different business needs. That required us to spend additional time and resources bridging data gaps. It also created confusion for new associates...

Since 2013, the Yardi Cleveland office has hosted an annual food drive called the “Fight Hunger Games” as part of the Greater Cleveland Food Bank’s Harvest for Hunger.  Harvest for Hunger is a collaborative effort covering services in six counties. Food collected and funds raised make it possible to provide nutritious meals to local residents in need. For those struggling to make ends meet, the burden of hunger can be a difficult distraction at all times of year – not just the Thanksgiving to Christmas season, when much attention is focused on food charities. Hardworking families and seniors on fixed incomes across Northeast Ohio face tough choices – put food on the table or pay for other basic essentials such as medicine, utilities or transportation. One in five children in the greater Cleveland area is food insecure.  Yardi’s Cleveland office knew they could help make a difference through the Fight Hunger Games. The rules of the Games are thus: Yardi-Cleveland employees are divided into Team Districts.  The teams collect food and supplies. One representative from each team is selected (or appointed as some of them have experienced) to participate in the Hunger Games. Points are awarded to the winners of the games. Points are also added to the teams according to the number of donations the team has collected. Award ribbons are presented to the top three teams. There  a snack system to collect money to purchase donations for the Greater Cleveland Food Bank. Snacks are available at each suite. They are purchased by hungry Yardi employees and all profits are used to purchase items to be donated to the Food Bank. Friendly competitions for the Hunger Games included tower building with cans of food, a guessing game to promote office name retention, ball...

If you’ve ever heard of rocker Jon Bon Jovi’s philanthropy on behalf of a Philadelphia non-profit that creates permanent housing and support resources for the city’s homeless population, that was Project HOME. The HOME stands for Housing, Opportunities, Medical and Education. It makes sense that Housing is first in the list, because many homeless advocates consider stable housing to be the most pivotal initial step to getting homeless Americans back on their feet. The organization’s mission statement: “The mission of the Project HOME community is to empower adults, children, and families to break the cycle of homelessness and poverty, to alleviate the underlying causes of poverty, and to enable all of us to attain our fullest potential as individuals and as members of the broader society. We strive to create a safe and respectful environment where we support each other in our struggles for self-esteem, recovery, and the confidence to move toward self-actualization.” It may sound ambitious, but it’s working. Project HOME just celebrated its 30th year and is on track to provide 1,000 units of affordable housing in Philadelphia within a few years. The organization is also a longtime Yardi client. We recently caught up with Patrick Farrell, Project HOME’s business/financial analyst, who is a passionate advocate for the non-profit’s use of the Yardi affordable housing platform. Farrell has worked on Project HOME’s Yardi platform for the last six years – the organization has used the software for about twice that duration. “Yardi is the workhorse application for us at Project HOME,” said Farrell, whose job supports the property, accounting and human resources departments of the non-profit. “It is the foundation of all of the other applications that we use throughout our business.” As the organization’s mainstay database, Yardi Voyager data powers all...

It’s a well known fact that the senior living industry has struggled to identify and retained talented personnel. Yardi client The Living Springs has found a way to nourish its talented employees through programs that promote personal and professional advancement. Through its efforts, the organization—and the overall industry—can cultivate a stronger support staff and enhance resident care. Creative Problem Solving Three years ago, Lisa Maynard, director of people and process at The Springs Living, noticed a trend. Employees were eager for professional advancement, mostly in the nursing field. Yet they lacked the resources to make their dreams into a reality. Simultaneously, care providers strategized ways to attract and maintain talent, often in vain. Maynard and the team at The Springs Living realized that both issues could be addressed at once: a scholarship that empowered employees to pursue higher education. Through the Team Springs Scholarship fund, the brand could build loyalty with current employees. Those same employees would gain the education needed to provide higher quality care for residents. “Generally, we find employees want to gain more knowledge with the goal to return and help out our residents in a higher-level capacity,” explained Maynard. The scholarship fund is not limited to long-term care or health care, Maynard says. But that isn’t a deterrent. “We do have a mission to change the way people, think, feel and experience working in senior living.  If we can get our younger generations to see the career opportunities, we think they will come back in some form or fashion.  Even if it is just referring us to another talented friend or family member.” The Springs Living also invented the Shine Academy. The in-house program assists with on-boarding, on the job training, and continuing education.  The Shine Academy encourages staff to...

You never know where life will take you. Many of us find ourselves in jobs which may be unexpected. Fate, it could be argued, has as much influence on our professional path as our our conscious decision making. That type of fateful, unexpected turn is what Michael Joiner, manager of Yardi eLearning Client Services, seems to have experienced five years ago. While finishing up a PhD in Musicology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Michael began to teach writing courses. That step in his professional career came with a new appreciation for learning, as well as new options for the future. “Towards the end of my dissertation, I began to weigh options such as becoming a music history professor, a writing instructor or to work in the nonprofit industry with a focus on higher education,” said Michael. Teaching and learning is a common theme to each of those pursuits, so it was natural for Michael to become intrigued when he was referred to apply for a position on the Yardi eLearning team. “I realized I could use my passion for teaching and education in a new way with Yardi. It was also a chance to build on my experience in video and audio multimedia development,” said Michael. The rest, as they say, is history. Michael now manages of team of staff supporting Yardi eLearning, and is heavily involved in product development, creating new courses, implementing new clients and anything else that comes his way. “Working with clients is something that gets me going—I get pumped to create more courses or help them find creative ways to train their staff to help them use Yardi products as best as possible, and to be amazing property management professionals in general,” said Michael. Away from work,...

Said Haider, regional director of Middle East sales for Yardi, spoke to us from his office in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE) with an update on the region’s rapidly growing real estate market. Q: Said, what are your principal responsibilities and how Yardi is performing in the Middle East? A: I manage our sales and business development efforts in the region. When we started our operations back in 2012, we had handful of clients; now we work with more than 80 clients in the Middle East and North Africa regions, mainly in the Gulf Cooperation Council. Without a doubt, it’s one of our fastest growing markets. Most of our clients have varied real estate portfolios and almost 90% of retail space in the UAE is managed with Yardi software. Q: When did Yardi enter the market and what was the impact? A: We launched Yardi Voyager there in 2012 and almost immediately saw high demand across multiple vertical markets. We were able to replace customized solutions with a Software as a Service platform that fulfills virtually all business operations requirements out of the box. This allowed companies to focus more on their business and worry less about the tools. As we continue to grow, we are introducing the Yardi Elevate Suite, the most comprehensive set of commercial asset management solutions available on the market. Q: What are some key trends in the region? A: The commercial, retail and residential sectors are growing fast. The real estate investment trust and shared office space concepts are also gaining footholds. Q: What’s our approach to the Middle East and Saudi Arabia in particular? A: Customer experience is the key to competing in this market and that’s how Yardi made its mark. We offer a single integrated solution...