More than 100,000 Dubai residents rely on 10 housing communities, ranging from studio apartments to luxury villas, owned by Dubai Asset Management (a subsidiary of Dubai Holding). The subsidiary of Dubai Holding developed its portfolio of 20 million square feet of leasable assets by providing the best customer experience in terms of product, pricing and location, and resident services. Maintaining outstanding customer service as communities, headcount and staffing grow larger isn’t easy. Company leaders realized that retaining stature as Dubai’s premier provider of residential property required better technology and increased staff efficiency in the form of real-time property availability, online leasing, rent payments and resident self services, along with 24/7 online and mobile access to account data. Achieving this goal required a technology platform capable of managing the entire residential lifecycle. In 2015 Dubai Asset Management adopted Yardi Voyager as its property management and accounting platform. Yardi Voyager centralised Dubai Asset Management’s operational, financial, maintenance management and compliance data on a single connected solution. With information easily available online and via remote devices, Dubai Asset Management can show prospective residents real-time apartment unit inventory, including floor plans, which helps the company close leases faster and achieve occupancy targets. The easy access to information also helps the company make and implement better-informed decisions. The full integration of Yardi Voyager with RentCafe and Yardi Maintenance further enhances Dubai Asset Management’s resident service and staff efficiency. Units available for lease are displayed online as soon as they become available, enabling faster unit turnover. Residents have the convenience of making rent payments online, and the company’s maintenance staff can manage work orders in the field without returning to the office. Leasing agents can close deals as easily in the field as in the office. The portfolio-wide data transparency enabled by Yardi Voyager also enhanced reporting efficiency by reducing the time staff members spend manually compiling data. “Yardi Voyager reduces the friction of moving in, moving out, contacting maintenance and paying rent. These benefits make our communities more convenient and satisfying for our residents and solidifies our reputation as a leading residential services provider in Dubai,” said Mohamed Roushdy, head of technology for Dubai Asset Management. Learn more about Dubai Asset Management at dubaiam.ae/. Learn how Yardi serves property management companies across the Middle East at...

Editor’s note: The following article originally appeared in Gulf Property Executive and is reprinted here with permission. Yardi is now the most used real estate solution for residential units in the Middle East. The company’s game-changing, cloud-based technology helps property and asset managers reduce the costs of managing properties, improves operational efficiency and allows real estate professionals to focus on adding value, a senior official said. “We have already implemented our real estate solutions with some of the largest developers and asset managers in Middle East to manage their units with our property management system, and we expect our business to continue growing at a fast pace,” Aditya Shah, director of Middle East operations for Yardi, told Gulf Property in an exclusive interview. “We help them to reduce costs and drive efficiencies in the way they execute many processes across the real estate lifecycle; the management of service charges being a prime example.” Shah comments that some of the largest UAE-based developers and asset managers use Yardi’s flagship product, Yardi Voyager, to centralise operational, financial, leasing and maintenance management for their entire portfolio in a single database. Yardi is a global real estate solutions provider that manages more than 12 million residential units worldwide through its cloud-based software platforms including Voyager, the RENTCafé Suite and a range of other solutions that support the entire real estate lifecycle from procurement and maintenance to business intelligence and reporting. Established in 1984, the 35-year-old company employs more than 6,500 professionals in 40 offices across the world. The UAE’s facilities management market is growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.8 percent and expected to generate $23.88 billion revenue by 2024. The growth is driven by the higher number of new residential supplies that is also putting pressure on rent and property prices. According to industry reports, more than 60,000 new homes will be delivered in Dubai in 2019 and 2020 as the emirate prepares for the World Expo 2020. “The supply glut is considerable. In 2018, about 43,000 units were added to Dubai’s total residential stock (which stood at around 491,000 units at end of 2017) and about 8,000 to the Abu Dhabi market (251,000 units at end of 2017),” Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL), a global real estate advisory, said in a report. According to a recent report by global property management advisory Knight Frank, rental rates across Dubai fell on average by 7.7 percent from January to November 2018 with apartment rents falling by 8.4 percent and villa/townhouse rents by 8.3 percent over the same time period. Gross yields in Dubai currently stand at 6.27 percent as at November 2018, down from 6.45 percent a year earlier. This is as a result of rents declining at a faster pace than sales prices over this time period, the report said. Shah estimates rents to decline at around 7-8 percent this year, matching that of Knight Frank. Despite that, he says, Yardi’s business will continue to grow. “The new supplies will expand the property management market and these new units will require efficient property management. With falling rents and property prices, property managers will have to find ways to reduce costs while efficiently managing the buildings and servicing the residents. This is where the deployment of Voyager and other solutions becomes crucial for property managers as it helps lower costs and ensures better property management,” Aditya Shah explains. “Although the real estate market is bottoming out in the UAE, our business is growing at a double-digit growth rate, due to the cost savings and operational efficiency that our system provides.” The major drivers for the market are the increasing investments in the construction sector and the continued growth of the tourism industry. What’s become paramount is the need for the real estate sector to ensure the continuous functionality of these built structures. This applies equally to residential buildings, transport infrastructure like...

Better Homes LLC in the United Arab Emirates takes pride in seeing things just a little sooner than almost everybody else. Linda Mahoney formed the company in 1986 after noticing the lack of professional real estate companies in Dubai, the country’s largest city.  Since then, she and her team have dedicated themselves to understanding their markets inside out, eventually growing Better Homes into the UAE’s leading real estate company.  Better Homes’ services include residential sales and leasing, commercial sales and leasing, property management, and holiday homes.  The company has offices in Oman, Jordan and Qatar in addition to branch offices across the UAE. Launched as a rental agency, Better Homes opened a sales division in 2002 that has served tens of thousands of buyers and sellers.  Another division created in 2015 organizes and promotes off-plan projects—properties without structures—in Dubai. Better Homes expanded from one woman working from a desk in a dining room to almost 500 employees staffing offices across the UAE.  It preceded the Burj Khafila, the Burj Al Arab, the Marina, and other landmarks of Dubai’s stunning real estate development.  This expansion arose from a business model that emphasized reliability, convenience, and visibility supported by a website that welcomes 24,000 page visits per day. “Every day, we look for ways to bring new and better services to our clients and maintain our market position,” says Ryan Mahoney, CEO at Better Homes.  “The key for us has always been finding places for people to live.  Our business is really quite simple: people and their homes.  We do much more than that, of course, but people and their homes will always be at the heart of what we do.” Using the latest and most advanced property management technology is one way Better Homes executes its business with the desired level of personal service.  Client service and internal efficiency were the principal factors that led Better Homes to adopt Yardi Voyager as its property management platform in 2014. “With our company growing across multiple verticals in the UAE, we needed a way to get an overview of the portfolio at one glance,” says Zubin Firozi, Director of Operations at Better Homes. “By housing financial and operational data in one place, Voyager gives us a full-business platform that covers all aspects of lease administration for every market we serve.  Voyager delivers simple and understandable reports, electronic receipts and service that’s customized to each client’s unique requirements.  Our staff spends less time on data entry and administrative tasks and more time managing our properties effectively—and finding homes for people.  From an internal standpoint, Voyager makes data easily accessible to employees and saves money by reducing our reliance on paper.” Firozi applies more than 12 years of experience, five of them with Better Homes, to helping clients buy, rent or sell property.  In his earlier role as head of property management, he oversaw an 80-member team that managed residential and commercial properties.  Previous positions in business development and leasing management provided additional skills that help him back up founder Mahoney’s assertion that Better Homes is “the Middle East’s most trustworthy and dependable property agency.” “Real estate is all about the human connection.  We constantly look for ways to offer new and better services to our clients.  As a key collaborator and one of the world’s Top 100 private cloud companies as ranked by Forbes, Yardi helps us do that,” Firozi says. Learn more about Better Homes. This article previously appeared in Arabian...

Located in the heart of Abu Dhabi, Dalma Mall is one of the most diversified shopping malls in UAE. It serves as a vibrant neighbourhood resource and shopping destination. The mall helps meet Abu Dhabi’s 2030 strategic vision and the Emirate’s framework for long-term economic and social growth. Bhupinder Singh, the General Manager and Chief Financial Officer of Dalma Mall, is responsible for shaping Dalma Mall’s retail management software operations to help optimize the company’s strategy. Singh has more than 20 years of experience in retail real estate, managing multiple hospitality and residential portfolios with brands such as MAF, Emaar and Meraas. Singh summarized his approach to the business: “Over the last 7 years I was honoured to influence the process of enhancing the assets’ functionality. Ultimately, everything drills down to numbers and my passion is to see numbers move.” Dalma Mall, with near-full lease occupancy, has a total gross leasable area of 151,000sqm, including more than 400 stores, 6,500 car parking spaces, a 14-screen cinema, game zone, food court, and a number of restaurants and cafés including several international fashion brands. The mall is a development from The Developers Holding, a property development firm owned by a consortium of Abu Dhabi’s leading business houses. The Developers brand name has become synonymous with delivering world class projects and optimal consumer satisfaction across the GCC. Singh noted: “Our strategy is to provide customers with the ultimate experience and most importantly a place to socialize. Communication is the key to enhancing customer satisfaction.” One of the most significant phases in digitizing Dalma Mall processes was adopting Yardi Voyager, the cloud-based property management and accounting platform. “Organizing, managing and reporting are the main functions in any business sector. I have been able to practice these functions following the introduction of computer technology on an industrial scale. Moving forward from manual book entries and accounting in excel based reports, our target has been to continuously, evolve to use the latest and most advanced technology,” says Singh. “We reviewed multiple vendors and found that the Voyager 7S platform was not only designed to support local requirements, but also delivered enhanced functionality that was specific to the specialist needs of the retail sector.” Dalma Mall also implemented Yardi Orion Business Intelligence, a solution that is designed to provide a portfolio-wide view of occupancy, vacancy, accounts receivable status, actual revenues vs. budget and other key leasing, asset management and accounting performance indicators. “Data is fundamental to our business. From monthly reports and analysis, leasing status to funneling sales figures, we have always been inundated with data. After the implementation of Yardi Voyager, we became fully equipped to embrace the power of big data and use it strategically to optimize our retail management operations,” Singh said. “We decided to move forward with a comprehensive process of selecting a new platform to help us enhance the management of our retail operations. The fully integrated Voyager 7S solution brought us immediate benefits, successfully delivering the capability to strengthen our forecasting abilities with automated budgeting, valuations and modelling,” explains Singh. “The implementation of Voyager was a game changer for us, revolutionizing our property operation strategies while providing us with a platform to manage business intelligence, contact and prospect information, asset maintenance and more from our mobile devices” Technological change continues to be a key driver for the retail industry as it can benefit consumers and retailers simultaneously. “At Dalma Mall we encompass a variety of technologies to engage with our customers,” Singh said. “Yardi’s innovative technology is an essential move to achieve organizational growth and the journey so far has been educative and rewarding. The relationship with Yardi and the solutions they provide has helped us improve our efficiency and enhanced our reporting culture. The future of the relationship is exciting and we looking forward to working with Yardi long term, and are already looking to implement other solutions from...