Consider how much of your everyday business can be done without paperwork. If you want to fly, for example, you can do everything from booking your seat to gaining clearance to board the aircraft using just your cell phone. In contrast, many national and multinational real estate companies still generate, circulate and approve invoices using paper and manual routing. This highly inefficient process is costly, time-consuming and contrary to prevailing environmental sensibilities. A paper invoice can cost as much as € 4 to generate and route by air and ground transport. The cost of processing it can set the recipient back anywhere from € 15 to € 30 because he or she often has to rekey the information into his or her own database, then route it to multiple approvers. There can be dozens of touchpoints, each one of which consumes resources and presents opportunities for error. And that’s just one document. Multiply this sequence by the hundreds or thousands of vendors and partners some real estate firms deal with. This approach to invoice processing doesn’t just seem outdated with the potential to drag a business down – it is. Payables made easy Real estate companies’ profit margins might remain slender through the COVID-19 era. Besides that, tenants, investors, communities and regulators are imposing increasingly stringent environmental performance standards for businesses. These developments might inspire real estate companies in Europe to consider replacing the manual steps – and paper – in the accounts payable process with advanced software applications that scan invoices into electronic files, route them to approvers and pay suppliers with electronic funds transfer. This approach can sharply reduce costs as well as the material and energy required to create and move paper invoices to their various destinations. In fact, savings of...

Editor’s note: The following article originally appeared in Vastgoedmarkt, a Netherlands-based real estate magazine. It is reprinted here with permission. Mapping the future of living, working and recreation, will require being responsive to the needs of millennials.  For this, proptech is essential, according to Richard Gerritsen of Yardi. Most of the technology is already available, but the drive to actually apply it to some sectors of the global real estate industry is still missing. Richard Gerritsen has been working for Yardi since 2005, and currently serves as regional director Europe. The American real estate automation supplier is doing well, the regional director says. ‘We started with offices in London and Amsterdam, but Yardi is now also in Germany and Romania, and will soon also be present in France. Our goal was to double our turnover every five years. We succeeded in that and recently, we have been even growing faster than that. Yardi saw its European turnover grow by 44 percent in the year 2019 alone. Now that Yardi is an established party in Europe and in the Netherlands, Gerritsen also sees it as his mission to stimulate more enthusiasm for proptech in the real estate industry. Unlimited possibilities ‘I want to make the industry aware of the great importance of proptech.  When I started at Yardi in 2005, I learned that I shouldn’t use the word software in my conversations with real estate professionals. The software department meant the lads at the end of the corridor where it was always dark. But now, technology and proptech play a much bigger role in (office) life.  Yet technology is still not a popular subject in the boardrooms. This is related to conservatism within the real estate industry, but it is also because those aged over...

Developing financially successful shopping centres has become a significant challenge in the face of major threats to the traditional retail business model. The retail experience is shifting from a point of sale to an immersive experience; instead of endless rows of shops, the modern retail centre features restaurants, cafés, movie theatres and a variety of personal services. In response, many retail operators are implementing emerging innovative technologies that can strengthen their static trade and thus compliment and compete with e-commerce. A successful strategy for attracting customers to retail centres arises from first analysing and understanding regional trends including demographic shifts, culture and politics. Utilising that data and understanding it is key to determining a successful revenue generating tenant mix. Centre size and location, along with other factors, will determine the degree to which new technology can and should be implemented. One business-critical element, however, stands at the centre of every successful strategy—data. Retail asset managers and investors are discovering the benefits that business-wide technology platforms provide. Instant access to sales, leasing, prospect information and much more has surpassed both timeliness and the hassle of consolidating data from multiple disparate systems. Furthermore, merchants are keeping pace with a mobile-enabled consumer base by adopting mobile payment and shopping capabilities, and they expect no less as they interact with their retail landlords. Such technology can help retailer centre owners and operators reduce costs, drive revenue streams and increase asset value. Data’s key role Thanks to technological progress, the retail sector is now able to define persuasive offers with the help of big data. Because the retail sector generates more data per month than many other vertical real estate markets, simple tools and tables for gaining valuable insights into retail businesses and trends have become obsolete. Advanced, but...

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...

It’s 2019, and safe to say that the world is fully immersed in the digital age. A recent report from Hootsuite claims that 67% of the world’s population are unique mobile users and 57% are internet users.  There are around 4.38 billion users of the web, and 95% of the population of Western Europe has internet access available. According to the “Manifest 2018 Consumer App Survey,” around 51% of respondents use apps between once and ten times a day. And as of late 2018, there were approximately 4.1 million apps available from the Google Play and Apple App Store. Consumers have now come to take it for granted that live in a fully digital world.  There is increasingly a sense of expectation, tinged by frustration, when we cannot find a digital application to accomplish a given task. The new norm is an expectation that, within a matter of seconds, we will instantly be able to access and assess millions of pieces of data on almost any topic. The Internet, the go-to source to conduct research and answer any question serious or frivolous, delivers the ability to arrange and organise our daily lives. Instantaneous research helps us with personal, informed decision-making as well as educating us and helping us make specific lifestyle choices. The list of life-altering, or some may say, life-enhancing applications are mind-blowing when put in perspective. Take travel as an example. Researching a holiday destination, finding accommodations, sourcing and booking door to door transportation, researching and building your trip itinerary, where you will visit, where you will eat and even checking out the anticipated weather conditions before you pack means you can organise the perfect trip in a short period of time from anywhere. The list of examples doesn’t end there and...