We had a great time in Atlanta at the 2018 International Users Conference! MRI users got a closer look at the software we develop to help their organizations, and we got to learn more about some of the challenges they face.

Just as it is every year, there was a lot of information covered at the IUC, including some of the most recent MRI news and updates! For those unable to make it to the conference, we’ve compiled some of the announcements and highlights from the event. Also, be sure to check out this Whiteboard Wednesday for a video recap of the IUC!

Announcing a new Debt Management solution

During the General Session on the first full day of the conference, we announced our latest real estate solution, MRI Debt Management. Built on Platform X, MRI Debt Management increases operational efficiency and reduces the risks of bad data by moving debt management accounting into a tool that is fully integrated with MRI General Ledger. Debt Management aggregates all debt information including loans and their terms, abstract and contractual information and lenders, regardless of whether debt is a liability or an asset.

2018 MRI Innovation Award winners

The inaugural MRI Innovation Awards were a great success with all the pomp and circumstance our users have come to expect from IUC. We’d like to extend special congratulations to the winners of the first ever MRI Innovation Awards!

• Impact: Phillips Edison & Company (PECO)
• Flexibility: CBRE Group
• Ambassador of the Year: Mirriam Livingstone, Village Green
• Partner of the Year: VTS 

These well-deserved winners are all MRI clients that showcased extraordinary partnership with or use cases leveraging MRI and its powerful, open and connected software. Pat Ghilani had this to say about the winners: “These four award winners, in particular, stood out in our eyes the past year. Not only are they leveraging our solutions to the fullest extent, even at times beyond what we imagined possible at this point, but they’re fully engaged as partners and true MRI evangelists.”

Expanding affordable housing – Welcome IPM Software!

The MRI family is proud to welcome our latest addition from the affordable housing sector: IPM Software, a provider of property management, accounting and compliance solutions for the affordable housing industry.

IPM brings deep affordable housing expertise and market share, furthering MRI’s continued scale and growth in a key market. Headquartered in Texas, IPM Software serves hundreds of clients with its affordable housing property management and contract administrator solutions.

The affordable housing market is actively seeking innovation, and together, MRI and IPM Software are answering the call. Combining IPM’s experience and knowledge with MRI’s well-established real estate software capabilities positions us to match the needs of an ever-changing market at scale with continued innovation. This acquisition reflects a bright future for MRI, IPM and affordable housing owners and managers.

Until next time…

We wave goodbye to this year’s North American MRI International Users Conference excited about all the things we’ve learned and looking forward to what the future holds. It gets better and better every year, so mark your calendars for October 13-16, 2019 in Anaheim, California!

People are living longer now than ever before, and while that should be celebrated, the real estate side of pensions funds recognizes that this creates a unique challenge for their pension fund management. These pension funds need to determine the optimal point to get the maximum output from the fund. Across all of that, they also need to be continually managing risk and keeping track of market fluctuations considering they have a commitment to payout at any given time.

Pension fund managers have to strategically plan for the future by taking that lump sum of money that’s been invested in the real estate portion of the pension/insurance fund and deciding how to allocate that sum to drive performance.

How can technology help?

The real estate aspect of pension funds needs long-term sustained growth to satisfy the retirement needs of clients. Like all good businesses, they need to manage debt to maximize returns, and ensure they have enough cash on hand to pay out at any time.

Strategic forecasting
Pensions funds have to think very strategically, and putting an emphasis on forecasting is critical to this particular market segment. Technology can help pension funds efficiently assess the impact of speculative pipeline deployment to compete for funds against other equity types. The ability to make quick strategic decisions about how to deploy several million dollars is critical in addressing needs.

Analyze market fluctuations
The right software solution can also help pension funds prepare for the future. These funds need access to technology that can easily analyze volatility and sensitivity to market fluctuations. When thinking about the future of pension funds, questions such as, “what if interest rates increase?” must be addressed proactively. Being able to assess these questions easily and with the help of technological solutions can help funds ensure that they’re properly set up with diversification and less risk exposure. That way, their clients’ retirement funds are can be properly secured.

Global capabilities
Pension funds are much more global today than ever before, and fund managers need software systems to provide comprehensive global, cross-border capabilities to address multicurrency requirements and regional standards. Even if funds are centered around a much more local group of investors, the assets in which they invest are highly globalized and highly diversified to hedge their bets across multiple regions and asset classes in markets. The ability to address multicurrency translation and multicurrency consolidation, as well as the ability to conform to regional standards of reporting, is critical. To manage risk without a globally applicable system requires an overwhelming amount of internal effort, knowledge, and processes, all of which are costly and time-consuming.

Drive performance
Pension funds also benefit from technology that can ensure maximum output by testing different exit strategies. This can be done by identifying low performing assets quickly so that they can be discarded at the discretion of the fund and the capital recycled in a proper way.

Finally, software that can quickly produce attribution reports can aid pension funds in optimizing performance across asset classes, regions, and strategies. As a pension fund, you need to be able to generate reports that can drill down into all the information and divide everything into proper groupings such as asset type, sub asset type, region, sub region, and so on. This ability is critical to identify the strongest and weakest parts of a pension fund’s portfolio, so the fund can plan even more strategically for the future.

What’s the solution?

The challenges facing pension funds can feel daunting at times due to the nature of the business, but adapting these types of technological solutions can make any organization more prepared for what may lie ahead. For these challenges and many more, MRI Investment Suite provides pension fund software to help funds compete on a more even level with other private equity firms and organizations.

Watch the on-demand webinar here to learn more about MRI’s investment solutions and how they can help overcome the challenges facing your fund.

For more than a year now, MRI’s global growth strategy has been in full swing. The demand for open and connected real estate software has fueled significant growth, and we’ve achieved several milestones as a result.

Within the past few months, we introduced our tried-and-tested Residential Suite to the UK Private Rented Sector. We’ve extended our capabilities in southern Africa with the acquisitions of MDA and PropSys. In the US, MRI is now the market leader for public housing, and more than half of all affordable housing units are managed using MRI’s solutions. In total, we’ve added nine companies to the MRI family since September 2017, and welcomed countless new colleagues around the world.

The revolution goes global

With so much positive change taking place in a short amount of time, we faced a new challenge: revamping our digital footprint to present a unified picture of our expanded capabilities that accurately portrays who we are today. The MRI Marketing team embraced this challenge on a global scale, with the goal of showing the world the new breadth of products and solutions MRI has to offer.

Truly open for business

We are proud to announce our new and improved websites to the world. Our digital footprint truly reflects our global capabilities, from North America to the UK and Europe, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Asia. With a solution-centric navigation, real estate businesses around the world can benefit from the flexibility offered by an innovative, open platform.

Rapid growth, milestone achievements, and continued innovation make for a wild ride. But everything we do centers around giving our clients the freedom to succeed on their terms. Keep riding the revolution with MRI.

The property management industry has a diverse mix of communities spanning investors, occupiers and managing agents. From tenants, landlords, investors, suppliers and contractors – technology must cater to and work for all.

According to KPMG, 74 percent of Proptechs feel that technological innovation engagement across the commercial real estate industry increased over the course of last year. And yet, in the same report it was also revealed that only 13 percent of organisations feel that they are at the ‘cutting edge’ of PropTech. Perhaps this is caused by the common view that coordinating external relationships and exchanging information is complicated or restricted by too much red tape. Yet it’s clear from the highly capable technology available on the market today that this cannot be the case. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

Collaboration is key to streamlining processes and ensuring that information can be shared between parties quickly and efficiently. Data such as exchange rates, credit ratings, property valuation indexes, customer and supplier data must all be available at the user’s fingertips, and accessible in accordance with data protection stipulations.

Software at the vanguard of the information revolution

As such, we’re rapidly developing into a paperless world. Instead, cloud-based online portals tailored to the end user are becoming the norm. During this shift, it’s important to remember that one size certainly does not fit all, and we have witnessed a rise in expectations from the industry demanding a personalised and digitally secure online experience. To keep up with the times, property management software must be adaptable and allow access to information intelligently; for example, data available to a property manager should look very different to that of, say, a managing agent. As ultimately, the two have very different needs.

Take sharing valuation information as an example. An ideal technology solution would take a snapshot of the current portfolio showing percentage occupancy, vacancy and rental metrics. This could then be shared directly with a valuer in a range of formats that can be easily uploaded to their system and then sent back for storing, maintenance and recording in the core database.

Aiding collaboration

A primary example of the departure from paperless to online – and technology facilitating the communication of tasks between multiple stakeholders – is workflow transaction management. Structured and proactive, business processes can be easily automated and passed seamlessly from one stakeholder to another. In addition, all parties will receive automated emails, texts, and other relevant content at defined stages of the process to keep them in the loop and pre-empt any queries they may have.

Why is this significant? Ten years on from the financial crash, the hangover is still there. The necessity for not only managerial oversight, but also complete transparency, governance and compliance of data, is desperately apparent. Bringing procedures such as workflow online has been fundamental in implementing these changes.

There’s no doubt that we’re currently in the age of the customer. Not only are they savvy and empowered – they know it too. And because of that, any company claiming to ‘do it all’, so to speak, will almost certainly compromise on the quality of product or service provided.

To counter this we’re witnessing an increase in strategic business partnerships across the board, regardless of sector. According to a report conducted by KPMG, 49 percent of Proptechs expect to collaborate with an existing or new supplier to develop their technological innovation capability. Doing so ensures that your service has a unique edge on competitors, and guarantees that every touchpoint of the customer journey has been catered for.

As such the need for open and connected technology is paramount. Technology stacks are one example of an answer to this – made of multiple layers, they act as a gateway for external information sources and enterprise systems. These are particularly important in PropTech, where selectively linking with best-of-breed partners is crucial to help build professional networks, enhance your offering, and thus offer clients an end-to-end solution. To date, Qube, An MRI Software Company has established in excess of 140 partnerships with a combined global client total of 6600. Recently, Qube has partnered with a sustainability consultancy and software provider, as well as an AI-powered data extraction platform. The latter will speed up and streamline our processes and is timely, too – with the impending IFRS 16 standards promising to radically alter the way in which we measure, present and disclose leases.

Software that facilitates effective partnerships

Of course, when you partner with another business it’s not as simple as a signature on the dotted line. In tech, it’s crucial that software has the capability to integrate with third-party providers. Any technology worth its mettle will be created with this in mind, and all interfacing applications can be changed or upgraded independently of one another. This makes integration relatively easy, and any customers or partners therefore have the flexibility to keep their technology up-to-date whilst minimising the cost of uptake for software upgrades.

The primary method of achieving integration is by using open or public Application Program Interfaces or ‘APIs’. The cornerstone of interconnectivity online, APIs facilitate an accessible network by allowing external parties easy access to a proprietary software or service. As such, PropTechs can expand their partner bases without having to develop any niche software. APIs can be beneficial in multiple ways – namely, in the exchange of transactional data. However, an API is equally useful for communicating any data to or from a system, such as credit ratings, property valuation indexes, and customer information.

It’s no secret there is a tendency for different departments within an organisation to work in silos – from HR, finance, to marketing – although one may not function without the other, often there’s little cross-collaboration. It’s common for departments to each have their own technology that drives their everyday processes – the sales team may use a CRM system that is alien to the HR department, for example. Working this way can limit collaboration, misalign priorities and damage customer experience. One way of tackling this is by ensuring all departments use the same systems and adhere to the same processes.

By sharing an online platform that acts as a base from which all internal parties can work from naturally supplies the visability and tools required to work collaboratively. This also adds an element of management oversight, wherby an individual’s workload can be monitored to gauge whether they need to be assisted with a certain task. If that is the case, management can “escalate” the task and reassign it to another team member, proactively assisting with day-to-day activities and informing upon the decision-making process.

Unifying internal processes

To facilitate this departmental collaboration, the ideal tech stack needs to be built around people, priorities and property performance. Ideally, organisations will use a central online business hub whereby all employees can view upcoming tasks related to the individual, the department and organisation as a whole. Alongside this high level of viability, pre-set workflows and built-in business intelligence tools should be in place to bring relevant tasks and insights to the right team member at the right time. A visual representation of relevant business processes that facilitates a single source of data equates to a single source of truth, and removes the need for staff to be keeping multiple systems in-check.

The ideal solution will also need to be easily adaptable to adhere to a company’s sector, branding and espouse its core value proposition. Take a property investor as an example, the focus will be on having a high-level snapshot of the asset portfolio – and a digital arm of assets and team members. One system with fully integrated property management, accounting and facilities management software that automates real estate activities with a complete purchase-to-pay and intelligent invoice scanning solution.

The interface of this central system can be tailored to the end user, and tailored to match personal preference, so it caters to every user from the C-suite to accountants. Intuitive by design, it requires little to no training to use. Across all departments, it provides clear business intelligence for improved decision-making, operational efficiency, smarter resource utilisation – and most importantly, cross-team collaboration.