Yardi Opens Paris Office

Expanding in France

By Yardi Blog Staff on Sep 1, 2020 in Global

Developing investment and property management software since 1984, Yardi, world leader in the real estate technology sector, has entered the French market with the opening of a Paris office. Richard Gerritsen, regional director for Europe, explains what the company intends to bring to the French real estate sector in this interview, which was first published in Business Immo Europe.

Business Immo: What is Yardi proposing to the French real estate sector?

Richard Gerritsen: We don’t consider ourselves a software company anymore, but a technology partner that provides solutions and services to support the activities of investment and asset managers. We provide the dashboards, the reports and the data that our clients need to make their decisions, which means we provide more than just software. Where we traditionally focused on the back-office activities, we are now completely focused on providing insight on the performance and the health of the portfolio, whether it is more on the day-to-day asset management functions such as lease or vacancy levels, or at a higher strategic level, on the performance of the assets.

BI: Yardi has opened an office in Paris. What is your plan for France?

RG: Our clients have properties in 29 countries across Europe, where we have seen an increased interest in high-quality modern technology helping asset managers. Over the last two years, we have spent a lot of time in France, which is now the fastest-growing country on the continent for the adoption of Yardi technology. Because we have high expectations for the continued growth of Yardi in France, we feel the time is right to open an office in Paris.

BI: How does Yardi differentiate itself from its competitors in France?

RG: Traditionally, the French real estate market has been served with software firms that provide separate property management and asset management solutions. What makes us unique is that we do both, but our offering is even broader because the Yardi platform provides complete transparency from the investor level all the way down to the lease level. That means you can, on one platform, not only execute your property management and accounting requirements, but also your facility management and the calculation of the portfolio’s performance, while being able to report all that back to the investor. We therefore bring a simplification to the way properties and units are managed, because all the data is on the same platform, and therefore delivers a huge increase in efficiency.

BI: Where do you see Yardi’s platform going in the future?

RG: We are currently exploring a range of solutions that utilise big data and artificial intelligence; this is because we feel we are one of the few companies that can drive this level of innovation and service to the real estate industries. The Yardi platform has access to the data and the computing power to apply those concepts to our sector, and we will look to bring them to Europe in time. Also, we feel we can add another level in the detail of the data relating to facility management. We think real estate is becoming more and more a consumer market, which means it is not about the property itself or the tenant, but about the end users. As a technology partner, we are therefore going to drill down more and more into their needs and the data that they generate, to help us analyse who they are and help our clients understand them.