At the recent Yardi Advanced Solutions Conference in San Diego, leaders in real estate investment management exchanged insights into industry challenges, trends and how Yardi solutions make a difference in their business.
Participants in the briefing were:
- Adam Vanni, senior portfolio manager for Fairfield, a San Diego-based multifamily property investment company with about 42,000 units under management
- Bailey Breish, CFO for Alturas Capital Partners, which manages a real estate investment fund with more than 45 assets.
- Donnie Penney, principal business analyst for Invesco, a real estate investment manager based in Dallas.
- Josh Gladstein, chief technology officer for Berkshire Residential Investments, which manages more than 120 multifamily properties and about $27 billion of assets under management from its Boston headquarters.
- Taylor Waldo, director of IT project management for San Francisco-based Prime Finance, which invests across all real estate asset classes through 10 active funds.
The session was moderated by Yardi Investment Management team members Vicki Dodig, director of sales, and Susan Freehauf, senior director of professional services.
Discussion at the session, edited for length and clarity, included:
Keeping Pace with Evolving Technology
Waldo: “The accounting cycle doesn’t change, the tax cycle doesn’t change. But our team members need to constantly adapt to get their business done. So we try to create a culture of change that helps our team feel comfortable. I work to make sure everybody from the leadership team understands the impact that change will have on them and be trained on using the new technology. If you want somebody to give up their beloved spreadsheets, there has to be something in it for them, even if that’s just words of encouragement, words of acknowledgment that they’re getting help to do things the right way. My job is to get all our business teams to think about what’s going to drive the most efficiency.”
Penney: “I’ve always believed that using automation to increase efficiencies is great for everybody. New tools that increase efficiency and reduce cost create a better audit trail, which is especially important for publicly traded companies in today’s regulatory environment.”
How Do You Leverage the Yardi Investment Suite?
Breish: “We implemented Yardi Investment Accounting and Yardi Investment Manager to gain more control over our investor distribution process. We had been copying and pasting formulas in spreadsheets and hope they didn’t get messed up and introduce human errors. Automatically calculating each quarter’s figures in Investment Accounting has been a huge relief. It’s also helped our team understand the calculations – everybody can see them in the system and understand how they work. Meanwhile, our investors were clamoring for a portal, and we ultimately picked Investment Manager. We no longer have to upload data manually, which is a big time saving and gets data instantly to investors. It’s been great for giving them visibility into their funds and have one place for their statements and tax documents.”
Penney: ”Yardi Performance Manager has been a game changer in helping us calculate returns on the fly and do attribution analysis. Where it once took four hours to get an NCREIF submission from spreadsheets and our previous accounting database now takes 2 minutes with a couple of mouse clicks.”
Gladstein: “We have dashboards in Performance Manager that break down performance to the asset, investment and client fund levels. We can slice and dice the data for any fund at any of those levels at any time. So it’s really dynamic and valuable for our team, saves them a ton of time and allows us to be scalable.”
Waldo: “Our investor relations team uses Investment Manager to publish documents to about 1,300 investors and their advisors, which is about 2,500 contacts.”
What’s the Next Big Trend?
Vanni: “I think artificial intelligence is going to continue to play a bigger role, both in market research and selecting where to invest and on the valuations side.”
Breish: “AI is going to make jobs easier for people to focus more on analysis work and other things besides routine tasks.”
Gladstein: “It’s important to recognize that AI has been around for decades. What’s different now is that it’s more in the public domain and being talked about in boardrooms where that wasn’t happening so much before. AI makes our jobs easier on the operational efficiency side. Automation of repetitive processes is a form of AI too, and that’s necessary to become more scalable, more efficient and less error-prone. On the investment side, we should think about how to use AI as a differentiator and deploy it in a way that leverages our data to help with market selection and investment analysis and even ESG and climate impact.”
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