How have sales teams adjusted to reduced face-to-face consultations during the pandemic? How do clients stay connected with leads? What product offerings will Yardi focus on in 2021? Richard Nix, senior director of senior living sales for Yardi, covers these topics and more. Below are excerpts from an interview that was published in Senior Housing News. Q.: You’ve spent your career in technology with a lot of time in the senior space and you’ve been with Yardi since 2014. What lessons do you draw from most frequently in your current role? A.: The main lesson is to always talk to people. A lot of folks like to communicate using technology, such as emails and text, but there’s nothing like getting on the phone with people and really learning their issues— especially now that we’re not seeing them at client meetings and at conferences — and to see what is really driving them and what issues are pertaining to them right now. The other key point is teamwork. The Yardi culture is all about teamwork. We have a great team, and we work to solve problems together for our clients. Q.: One of the early outcomes of the pandemic was the increase in technology adoption, including among sales and marketing teams. What are the most important ways that you’re seeing technology augment the diminished in-person sales calls in 2020? A: Salespeople depend on technology for handling many client requests. Since face-to-face meetings have been hard to arrange during the pandemic, continual contact with clients by other means became critical. In terms of specific technologies, the use of the video meetings has been a shift. This is a personal thing, but I like to put the camera on myself at the beginning of a video call....

Dreams connect us with endless possibilities. They encourage us to step out on faith and believe that we can receive good from the world. For children with life-threatening conditions, dreams sustain hope and the will to live life to its fullest. Andrea Siracusa is the director of community relations with Dreams Come True in Jacksonville. For 11 years, she has witnessed the transformative impact of dreams fulfilled. The prospect of helping her community is what attracted her to the organization years ago. “I have always had a passion to give back to the community I grew up in,” she says. “I was driven by the knowledge that all my hard work and dedication was being applied toward providing services and support to those less fortunate in Northeast Florida.” After graduating with a degree in communications and public relations, she soon joined the organization because she felt connected to its vision. “I immediately feel in love with the mission to bring hope and joy to children and families stricken by life-threatening illnesses. To have the opportunity to share the stories of our dream children and find ways to connect our community to the mission, was a passion I developed immediately after stepping through the doors.” The power of a dream Dreams are more than just a trip, shopping adventure or bedroom makeover. They are often motivation for the children to keep hope alive when times seem unbearable. “For many of our dream children, the reality of a life-threatening illness can be very daunting. I have heard many stories of children who have given up on their treatments, but when the discussion of a dream trip was started a new light emerged. They now are focused on getting better and finishing the treatments that are before...

Have you ever heard the saying that attitude is everything? How we choose to respond to a situation impacts our outlook, our possibilities and the responses of those around us. During tough times, one young woman in Raleigh constantly recommits to her positive attitude. Her decision to do so has positively impacted the entire community. Meet Victoria Meet Victoria Polston, activity and wellness director at Spring Arbor of Raleigh, an HH Hunt Senior Living community. Victoria is like many employees in assisted living communities: compassionate, patient and heavily caffeinated. She also exemplifies personality traits that have become indispensable during the pandemic: creativity, grit and optimism. As cities issued quarantine mandates in the spring, Polston faced a community of seniors who were more isolated from their loved ones than ever before. Excursions and visitors were no longer an option. Some seniors couldn’t understand the severity of the pandemic or their vulnerability. They were hurt, depressed and confused that their loved ones were no longer coming to visit. Polston got creative with engaging activities for her residents. “My goal is to make the lives of residents fun, active and worth living,” says Polston. “When I do something, I like to go all out.” Fun for every season In the warmer months, Polston offered seniors hula dancing and a luau, fake tattoos, a Mardi Gras party and a butterfly exhibit. She even coordinated a farmer’s market on the premises to replace an excursion that residents missed. As the weather cooled down, the activities continued indoors. Seniors made gourmet truffles, and danced during a neon glow stick party. They customized their shirts with glow-in-the-dark paint and donned glowing necklaces and bracelets. “I filled our activity room with black lights and all my residents were so excited when they...

Yardi continuously strives to make its property management software more valuable to operators of senior living communities. As new features are incorporated into the Yardi Senior Living Suite, the upgrades are documented, compiled into manuals and made available to clients. Recent upgrades and plug-ins include: Yardi Voyager Senior Housing: You can track monthly fee deferral requests, recovery schedules and generate payment plan agreements for signature with the Deferral Plan functionality. Community Analytics and Senior Financial Analytics reports are easier to use. Watch the video overview Yardi Senior CRM: Check out an enhanced user interface that includes a new dashboard with optimized graphical reporting, several new KPIs and goal tracking, and a redesigned prospect profile that includes a new activity feed view and streamlined navigation among prospects. We also added specific approver roles to the leasing workflow and a new Past Due Activities report that provides real-time data on overdue activities. Watch the video overview Yardi EHR and Yardi eMAR: EHR: Service plans can now be signed digitally. The Clinical Move-In workflow lets clinical teams move residents into EHR without impacting the financial Move-In process. There’s also a new Shower/Laundry/Housekeeping Schedule report that covers seven days of upcoming tasks. eMAR: Quantity tracking is enhanced, as is the ability to perform blind counts of controlled substances and identify discrepancies. You can set up the Order Change report to run nightly and send automatically to the pharmacy in a password-protected email attachment. Watch the video overview You can also join a webinar to gain even more insight into our comprehensive solution for senior living...

While the industrial sector shows strong occupancy and rent performances, office and retail face a host of challenges including deferrals, concessions, spiraling vacancy rates and, of course, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. How can commercial real estate companies not just adjust, but thrive in today’s environment? A recent Executive Briefing hosted by Yardi, invited Tom Sheraden, chief technology officer for the QuadReal Property Group, one of Canada’s largest asset managers, to describe how his team used advanced property management software to successfully adapt to the rapidly changing environment. A major advantage for QuadReal was a company culture that embraces not just accepting change but owning it. “Our workforce embodies a deep personal drive to make things work better and to own change, not just accept it,” Sheraden said. A versatile technology platform capable of handling the breadth of QuadReal’s real estate activities also helped make the global real estate investor, operator and developer fully equipped to press ahead with major projects. Through Yardi Elevate, QuadReal can manage the deal pipeline, visualize portfolio health, easily view space availability, analyze risk, complete accurate budgeting and manage construction projects from a single connected solution. “A lot of companies would have taken their foot off the gas. But thanks to our culture of accepting changing technology, we were able to spend our time on forward-looking opportunities versus just surviving,” noted Sheraden, who also paid tribute to staff members whose duties required them to remain onsite throughout the pandemic. Prior to adopting its asset management system, for example, obtaining full operational and financial data typically required a separate business intelligence platform. But Yardi helped QuadReal shift that responsibility to the people with the deepest knowledge of the business. “Our strategy is to empower those analysts with great data, great tools...

Full-service real estate company LBA Realty is continuing its portfolio-wide partnership with Yardi Pulse® as the company implements a Smart Building Program to enhance their sustainability strategy. LBA and Yardi® conducted an initial proof of concept pilot at a single property. In January 2019, LBA Realty adopted a phased approach to roll out Meter Insights and Fault Detection to eleven office properties in four different states. Leveraging pulse modular capability, these initial solutions provide real-time electrical meter monitoring and analytics, as well as HVAC fault detection and diagnostics. This allows the LBA engineering team and Yardi’s consulting services to identify hidden performance issues including extended run time, overlap in HVAC mode conditions and an inefficient sequence of operations. LBA now receives timely and accurate energy use data for 5.9M square feet of their office properties. Year-to-date, the program has resulted in energy use reduction of 16.2M kWh, which equates to savings at $0.32 per square foot. After gathering quantifiable results, LBA is now entering the second phase of implementation, Pulse Building Optimization. “With Pulse Building Optimization representing our artificial intelligence software, we look forward to realizing our vision of bringing intelligent buildings to life,” said Perry Schonfeld, principal and chief operating officer of LBA. “It is exciting to see the progress LBA Realty has made with a phased approach to implementation and the value of their incremental steps. We foresee continued success of LBA’s energy platform and growth of the Yardi-LBA partnership,” said Akshai Rao, vice president at Yardi. Download a brochure to learn more about the Yardi Pulse...

Due to unique challenges this year, the 2020 Realcomm | IBcon Conference changed to a new hybrid format with two days of virtual sessions followed by a day of in-person sessions. As part of the virtual event, Yardi president and founder Anant Yardi participated in the opening session panel, as well as a thought leadership discussion with other industry software providers. Mr. Yardi’s vision for the future of the commercial real estate industry was optimistic, while stating the importance of businesses adapting to a new normal. In the opening session, “#COVID.RE.Economy.Technology.NewNormal,” he reflected on the difference between gathering 2,500 people in one venue at the last Realcomm conference in June 2019, versus a virtual environment over two full days of content in October 2020. “I yearn for those times when we were able to be face to face,” he stated. “But we understand change, we recalibrate and navigate that change.” Property owners and managers are likely to have some concern over whether tenants will need their space at the end of the lease, but enterprise corporations such as Microsoft and Exxon are leading the way on hybrid work models, which may be the new normal. Workers could access the office at some points during the week for team collaboration and then continue to function normally from remote environments, be it at home or a shared coworking location. For those companies seeking more space, often satellite offices, Mr. Yardi sees a trend where clients search available sublease space or sections of coworking offices to bring workers back into a collaborative environment. A significant challenge for the future of the office sector is occupancy levels. While a majority of tenants have managed to successfully pay rent and offices are slowly beginning to reopen, capacity restrictions and...

What is lead attribution and how can it help senior living community operators get the most out of their marketing spend? Lead attribution is the process of determining how leads from a Facebook page, Google ad, directory listing or other source become associated with a property. Understanding all sources that a prospect touches on the path to becoming a resident can help property managers determine how to allocate their marketing money and staff resources most efficiently. RentCafe Senior CRM illuminates lead attribution with a “lead journey” feature that shows how many prospects who became residents spent time on the Facebook page or follow a Google ad to the website. The lead attribution report, another element of the solution, analyzes data to reveal, among other things, the organization’s top sources for prospects. Other reports illustrate the top and bottom sources for resident conversions. The system assigns scores for each source using attribution models that split prospects across the sources in their journey and includes prospects who submitted an inquiry and toured the community. Yardi Senior CRM scores all sources that contributed to a prospect’s inquiry, with full drilldown to the score’s elements. Marketing managers might want more nuanced source information than just “property website” from a lead that comes into RentCafe Senior CRM from a website. What’s of greater value to them is the site the visitor was on when they clicked the link that brought them to their site. RentCafe Senior CRM tracks the true source of a lead journey when a prospect submit information from the “Contact us” of “Schedule a tour” page of a Yardi-hosted website. With these data and analytics, which include each marketing touchpoint that contributed to a lease and not just the first source that generated the lead, sales...

The COVID-19 pandemic has been inconsistent in the way it has affected the U.S. employment market, creating a wide disparity between metro and job segments. This is the main conclusion of the latest special employment report from Yardi Matrix. Leisure and hospitality was by far the biggest employment sector loser, with 3.8 million jobs lost. In contrast, only 1.8% of the jobs in financial services have been lost since the start of the pandemic. However, the overall impact varied greatly depending on the city. Metros with the best job performance include those with relatively small leisure and hospitality industries and those that have lost relatively few jobs in the segment (Indianapolis, for example, lost only 6.5%). One outlier, Austin, has added 8,200 professional and business services jobs and 7,300 financial services jobs since February. While the size of a metro’s leisure and hospitality segment is a key in the extent of job losses, a more significant factor is how thoroughly the metro shut down to stop the spread of COVID. Few of the top 10 metros in the percentage of jobs lost since February are among the leaders in leisure and hospitality jobs, but all are at or above the average proportion of jobs lost in the segment. New York City, for example, has a relatively small leisure and hospitality segment (9.8% of all jobs), but a whopping 42.3% of those jobs disappeared. “The data does show hope for the future for the gateway metros that have been hard hit, because the core industries in those metros, such as finance and professional services, remain viable,” states the report. “Once a vaccine is available and people feel safe going back to entertainment venues, restaurants and the like, gateway cities (like New York, San Francisco, Boston...

Yardi has been building Yardi EHR, a full service electronic health record solution for senior living, for the better part of a decade. Client feedback and ongoing development give rise to regular product enhancements. Here’s a sampling of recent upgrades. Clinical move-in Users can now execute a clinical move-in process that includes adding global contacts, allergies, diagnosis, orders from a library, and schedule assessments.  This new feature allows a facility to perform a financial move-in prior to the resident physically arriving in the building or vice versa.  Clinical staff can move a resident in and the billing staff can complete the financial move-in when they return. A new KPI shows a resident’s pending move-in status, allowing the facility to easily monitor resident move-in activities. Medication tracking Recent enhancements allow counting of controlled substances between shifts, check-in of medications delivered to the community and documentation of medications disposed of. Facilities can also update the quantity of medication on hand when new deliveries arrive. Digital care plan signatures New functionality enables digital signing of service plans. Five new KPIs monitor the signing status. Continuity of care document interface (CCDA) Facilities can now create, send and receive CCDA documentation using the KNO2 interface. The CCDA document sends and receives data elements in a standard format. Information exchanged includes advanced directives, allergies, adverse reactions, medications and social history. The CCDA user interface lets you search for documents by a date range or create a new document. Shower/housekeeping/laundry schedule A new report assists staff with weekly shower, laundry and housekeeping schedules. Filters allow for multiple schedules to be displayed and is viewable in a list or calendar view. The list view can also display task details. Simple wounds The wound module has been streamlined and enhanced for assisted living...

Like property and investment management technology, satellite imagery capabilities and applications are constantly evolving. The Balance Sheet revisits a topic we first explored in 2017. How can satellite imagery help improve business performance? The benefits can start with simple counting, as when Swiss investor UBS Investment Research started using space-based data to determine the population of Walmart parking lots about 10 years ago. The retail giant’s quarterly sales could be estimated from the number of cars entering and leaving the lots over periods of time. UBS thus was “one of the first financial institutions to leverage satellite imagery to gain useful investment insights,” notes Valerie Hernandez, writing in banking, finance and world affairs analysis publication International Banker in June 2020. Other satellite imagery providers now count attendance at McDonald’s, Costco, Starbucks, Whole Foods and other retailers. In the decade following UBS’s breakthrough, satellite technology evolved from a passive eye-in-the-sky to a predictor of corporate profits and a key analysis tool for the investment community. Data collected encompasses everything from solar-panel installations, sawmills’ lumber inventories, the number of cars produced at an auto plant and the mining of metals – all key metrics of business performance. In fact, Hernandez says, “whether it’s counting cars in a retailer’s parking lot as a measure of sales activity, tracking ships across the seas, monitoring crops or scanning the activity at oil rigs, refineries and ports, satellite imagery is proving incredibly useful as a way to measure levels of industrial activity that may not necessarily be possible to determine at ground level.” UC Berkeley law professor Frank Partnoy, writing in The Atlantic, recounts the derailment of a train carrying iron ore in Australia in November 2018: “Iron-ore prices soared on the news that the supply of a resource used...

Registration has started for the Pharmacy Partnership for Long Term Care Program. This innovative collaboration facilitates free, on-premises COVID-19 vaccinations for senior living providers. CDC facilitates vaccination services for senior living residents The Center for Disease Control (CDC) has partnered with CVS and Walgreens pharmacies to offer vaccination services for residents of senior facilities. The new program, called Pharmacy Partnership for Long-term Care (LTC), “provides end-to-end management of the COVID-19 vaccination process, including cold chain management, on-site vaccinations, and fulfillment of reporting requirements, to facilitate safe vaccination of this patient population, while reducing burden on LTC facilities and jurisdictional health departments,” reports the CDC. Senior living providers gain free access to services such as: on-location clinic dates orders for the vaccine and necessary supplies vaccine administration cold chain management for the vaccine reporting to local, state and federal jurisdictions compliance with Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS) COVID-19 testing requirements for LTCF staff Skilled Nursing facilities (SNF) must register through the National Healthcare Safety Network. Assisted living facilities (ALF) must register via REDcap. Registration is non-binding and facilitates may opt out at any time. What to expect during Pharmacy Partnership for Long-term Care registration Providers will have the opportunity to select between CVS and Walgreens as their pharmacy partner for the initial phase of the vaccinations. After the initial phase (about two months) facilities may chose a pharmacy provider of their choice. Online sign-up details will be disseminated through the providers’ communications channels including but not limited to websites and email. The CDC will coordinate facilities’ preferences with the pharmacy partners. Please be advised that the CDC may reassign facilities to accommodate availability and other considerations. Registrations for the program ends November 6. Explore FAQ regarding the Long-Term Care Program for COVID-19...

COVID-19 has had a jarring impact on commercial real estate in the form of health risks, stunted growth prospects, permit and construction delays, reduced income for property owners and the acceleration of e-commerce at the expense of physical stores, among other disruptions. The pandemic precipitated what global management consultant firm McKinsey & Company calls “an unprecedented crisis for the real estate industry.” What will the CRE landscape look like when the pandemic fades? For one thing, new building codes designed to limit the risk of future pandemics could affect standards for HVAC, square footage per person and amount of enclosed space. Office building tenants will almost certainly be driven “to look beyond their traditional building preferences. In this new environment, tenants will gravitate towards the properties that best solve for flexibility, adaptability, and well-being,” according to Erin Saven and Evan Danchenka of Gensler, a global architecture, design and planning firm. Maria Sicola, a founding partner of real estate planning services provider CityStream Solutions and sales and training consultant Integrity Data Solutions, believes tenants will likely make their space “more personalized and less communal – we will likely not return to all-private offices and fancy conference rooms. But all space – personal and meeting — will need to be viewed with more breathing room.” And, of course, cleanliness will command more attention than ever. Commercial Property Executive predicts that “some products and techniques that have been used in medical office buildings and in hospitals are going to be brought to the office sector,” such as microbe-resistant door handles and elevator buttons and sanitation with ultraviolet light. Amenities as differentiators Building owners and developers, for their part, would be well advised to explore “new real estate design strategies that can differentiate them from the competition and...

Amenities can be the irresistible lure that persuades apartment searchers to choose one community over another. Rooftop pools, fitness suites, concierge package service, housekeeping, business centers and dog wash stations all have devotees. “Over the past several years the multifamily asset class has been engaged in an amenities war, with projects offering better and more luxurious add-ons in order to draw in residents,” GlobeSt.com reported in April 2020. But COVID-19 prompted some apartment residents to rethink what matters to them, which in turn forced owners and managers to reevaluate their offerings. “Everybody is really searching for creative solutions right now,” Jeremy Brutus, co-founder of gym facility management company Urbn Play, told the New York Times in September. “I don’t think amenities will ever go back to the way they were before,” added Whitney Kraus of New York residential sales and leasing specialist Brown Harris Stevens Development. Several of the most common changes are fairly unobtrusive, such as lounges repurposed as schools, limited capacity in common areas, clubhouses divided into separate rooms, movable couches, touchless key fobs, cordoned-off work and recreation areas, and mandatory reservations for facilities. Package delivery and storage services and HVAC upgrades to make interior air cleaner are also in greater demand, according to Rick Haughey, vice president of industry technology initiatives for the National Multifamily Housing Council. Some communities have even swapped steel handles on barbells, weight machines and other equipment for copper, which is more expensive but harbors the coronavirus for a shorter time. Apartment communities on the high end of the rental scale, such as New York’s Madison House, can get even more creative with members-only primary care and emergency medical service offerings. Sollis Health, which services the building, says 50% of its business is house calls made by...