Yardi’s Rob Teel, senior vice president of global solutions, and Todd Huebsch, vice president of commercial sales, discussed key trends in the commercial real estate industry in interviews at the recent Realcomm and IBCon conferences. Excerpts follow. Q: What are some key shifts that you’re seeing in commercial property management? Huebsch: From an enterprise platform standpoint, software products historically have been developed for people in back office operations such as accounting and property management. Now we see the emphasis rapidly changing to the front office—people in the field who are managing leases, construction projects and facilities. Enabling that move is a series of mobile apps and role-based tools that simplify tasks and help front office people do their jobs faster, easier and more efficiently while seamlessly connecting to the back office. These new capabilities speak to reducing risk and increasing asset value Q: What is Yardi’s primary focus area at present? Teel: There are three. One is Yardi Elevate, which, in contrast to the traditional chief financial officer focus of property management software, is tailored to a chief operating officer whose direct reports might include the leaders of leasing, asset management, construction and facilities management. Another key focus is energy management, which addresses the needs of COOs and chief engineers who are looking to reduce consumption and expenditures and boost sustainability. Yardi has made five acquisitions in three years in this area and it’s one of our leading long-term strategic visions. And coworking has gone through a revolution in the last two years. Today about 1% of commercial offices in the U.S. are tagged as coworking space but we think it might go to 5-10% in the U.S. and globally within a few years. We made two acquisitions that brought us the Yardi KUBE...

Investment capital isn’t in short supply—plenty is available from China, Europe, the U.S. and other sources. So why are real estate investors working harder, yet finding fewer high-return opportunities? One dampening factor is increased investor choosiness arising from due diligence activities that increased starting in 2009, when a low market virtually guaranteed returns and asset prices would rise. Plus, the regulatory climate has thickened. But the main problem today is that the marketplace, especially the U.S. with its abundance of capital, is chasing relatively few investment opportunities. Can fund managers under pressure to place money they’ve raised find, evaluate and capitalize on good deals? Yes, says Rob Teel, Yardi’s senior vice president of global solutions—if they have the means and ability to unearth opportunities they ordinarily wouldn’t consider, or even know about.  We asked Teel for insight into how technology can be an ally in the effort to identify investment opportunities and manage assets through their life cycle. Q: What’s a key trend among the real estate property owners, managers and investors you encounter? Teel: A lot of people are seeing the advantage of automating investment accounting, performance measurement and investor reporting with an integrated investment and asset management system. They realize that having all decision-making tools within a single system exceeds what’s possible with spreadsheets and separate databases. Managers dealing with hundreds of combined funds, entities, properties and investors are happy to be free of manually uploading data, relying on cumbersome spreadsheets and mining data from separate systems. Q: What matters the most to investment managers as they evaluate potential acquisitions? Teel: Getting a complete picture that helps them decide to acquire an asset and the best option and optimal time for renovating or selling it. This underscores the importance of automating the...