What a fantastic day it was at the Royal Lancaster London – 5 December, as our flagship MRI International Users Conference came to the UK for the first time.

Some 600 attendees joined us for what was MRI’s biggest event in the region to date – and the largest-ever, single-vendor proptech exhibition to be hosted in the UK.

It gave us the chance to show our appreciation to our valued clients – and hear from many of you about the challenges you face and how we can help to tackle them. Bringing together delegates from across the MRI solution suite, it was a packed day of product updates, industry content, Partner sessions and networking opportunity.

Here are some of the highlights:

The MRI company update

To begin the conference, CEO Patrick J. Ghilani and Executive Managing Director for Europe Dermot Briody welcomed attendees and discussed a momentous year for the organisation in EMEA. It’s not been without its challenges, but the message was clear; not only is MRI now one of the biggest real estate technology providers in the region, but we are steadfast in our commitment to be the best.

It was also revealed, live on stage, that MRI has acquired Thesaurus Technology – news that was shared to the wider market via press release shortly after the conclusion of the general session.

Keynote address

It was an absolute pleasure to hear from two UK sporting heroes, two truly inspirational women and two genuinely likeable and engaging characters. Kate and Helen Richardson-Walsh, stars from Team GB’s gold-medal-winning hockey team at the 2016 Olympics, delivered the perfect keynote address – sharing the wonderful story of their achievement, while offering lessons in goal-setting, collaboration and dedication that anyone, anywhere could learn from. Absolutely superb, and we know that many of you said exactly the same thing.

Your product, in depth

While there’s a range of content offered by the IUC, the main focus is sharing the latest developments and functionality within your MRI product or products – and that’s exactly what we offered in two dedicated sessions either side of lunch. Users got to see the latest features and benefits within their solution and take away actionable insight from a range of best-practice hints and tips. There are a number of exciting changes and enhancements happening across all areas, and it was a pleasure to be able to share these with you.

Meeting our Partners

As noted throughout the plenary presentation, MRI is committed to providing an open platform that allows our users to incorporate the benefits of multiple software and service providers. We are truly open for business, and we had more Partners in our ecosystem that we’ve ever had before for a UK event – and we know that next year will be even bigger and better. Thank you to our sponsors for their efforts.

A well-earned drink

After all of this and much more, it was fantastic to relax and enjoy a drink and a chat with many of you during our closing reception. Without our clients and delegates, quite simply, the event would not happen – and we thank you all for joining us and for your continued support. We’ll look forward to doing it all again in 2019…

Here’s a quote you’ve probably heard before: “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” At MRI Software, we gladly accept the compliments, but the impersonations have gone a bit too far.

We are proud to have led the revolution in bringing flexibility and openness to the real estate software industry. Our open and connected product strategy is the result of 47 years of collaborative relationships with our clients and partners. That’s why we raise our eyebrows when our competitors abruptly change their market positioning to make similar claims, while at the same time, we pat ourselves on the back for being the first to introduce a winning approach for the real estate market.

By now, you probably know that the software industry is trending heavily toward open technology platforms. Think IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat and the Salesforce acquisition of Mulesoft. Open platforms that play well with others are good for business because they give clients more control and flexibility over the software – which we think is only fair, because they’re paying for it.

A brief history lesson

When Patrick Ghilani took the reigns as CEO of MRI Software in 2014, we reinforced our declared mission: to be the first in our industry to go all in on an open platform. Later that year, we had taken action on this promise with the launch of MRI Information Exchange (MIX), enabling our clients to exchange data between our solutions and third-party or custom applications through secure APIs.

By the 2016 Realcomm conference, the word was out. In an interview with Pat, Gerry Katzman, host of Conference Live, said, “You guys went open platform. It’s a risky maneuver. It presupposes that your user knows things that you don’t know.”

That’s right. No more ‘best of breed’ solutions. Consumers want what’s best for them. And being truly open is about more than mere interfaces or data integration. It’s about application integration and interoperability. It’s about the Single Experience™, when users will move back and forth between software applications from different providers without even realizing it.

Lip service

Today, the real estate software industry has reached a tipping point, and our open and connected mission has not changed. But, interestingly enough, several of our competitors have implied that they have changed quite a bit – but have they?

If you believe the marketing messages of others in our industry, they are suddenly fully capable of providing the power of choice through true openness and integration with other providers, even though they have positioned themselves as a ‘single stack’ solution for the duration of their years in business. But is it really a choice when clients can only choose from that provider’s own solutions? We think not.

With increased market demand for open platforms, and unsubstantiated claims of openness, how do prospective clients know what to believe? Organizations evaluating and comparing software providers are challenged to find the truth. But, not to worry — earlier this year, we offered some guidance in our blog, “10 qualities of providers that embrace open technologies.”

Often imitated, never duplicated

Healthy competition is always good for the market; however, any marketer worth their salt knows the value of competitive differentiation and unique positioning. That’s why we launched a new brand identity in 2017 reflecting MRI’s commitment to give our clients the freedom to take their business where they want to go with comprehensive and flexible software solutions built atop an open and connected platform.

And, while we’re a bit miffed to see competitors jump on our bandwagon and claim that they, too, are “open,” we remain confident in our heritage as the founders of the open software movement for real estate. We’re years ahead of competitors that will need to rewrite their code base and rebuild legacy products to bring openness and flexibility to closed enterprise software systems. What’s more, at MRI, being open is both a technology and an operational paradigm. Our Sales, Support and Development teams closely collaborate with our partners to provide joint solutions that meet the unique needs of our clients. Partners play an essential role at our annual users conference, and the MRI ecosystem was on full display earlier this year at our 2018 International Users Conference in Atlanta.

The misleading messages from other solution providers confirm the market demand for open platforms. Our concern is that it also creates confusion about whom to believe. It’s to be expected that the competition will seize the opportunity to claim that they also provide openness, choice, and flexibility. For MRI clients, this should sound very familiar. And for those of you who aren’t yet familiar with us, we look forward to helping you sift through the promises to find out what a truly open platform really looks like.

Brace yourselves. Packages are coming. The holiday season is upon us, and if packages haven’t already flooded the leasing office at your multifamily property, then just give it time. With the influx of packages, it can be an exciting time for multifamily properties that have confidence in their package management systems and a stressful time for ones that do not.

In a recent episode of “Building Success: A Real Estate Podcast,” CEO and co-founder of Notifii, Anh Tran, argued that despite the uncertainty, the holiday season can be the perfect time to gauge and improve resident satisfaction through successful package deliveries.

How can package management reduce holiday stress for property operators and residents?

The phrase “property management challenges” might as well be synonymous with the holidays. The flood of deliveries to multifamily leasing offices frequently causes headaches for both the property operators who become overwhelmed with packages and the residents who inevitably feel the results of an office’s preparedness or lack thereof.

A good way to keep residents satisfied is to provide direct notifications when packages arrive at the leasing office or are delivered to their door. Residents often face their own hurdles when it comes to having packages delivered. Some might be travelling, some might have family over, others might have shifting work schedules. All of these things make it difficult for residents to keep track of the packages they order, and it’s why going the extra mile to keep them up to date on all their deliveries is crucial.

In time, this will also take stress off leasing office staff. By taking the first step and keeping residents informed on their deliveries, you can easily reduce the number of calls from residents asking whether their packages are at the office. And as always, taking this initiative with a smile and a warm greeting can go a long way during the holidays.

Improving resident communication as a whole

It’s important to remember that all of these package tracking notifications will only be beneficial to residents if you have the proper communication strategy. While email might still be the proper way to keep residents informed on detailed issues, the quickest and easiest way to reach someone in the 21st century is via text message. Adopting text message notifications can help you get information to residents faster than ever before, leaving less room for something to fall through the cracks. However, different communication strategies will look different for different properties.

Adjusting office hours could also be helpful to your multifamily property this holiday. Staying open an extra hour of the day can give residents the time they may need to pick up their packages. Dealing with work, family, and vacations can be a hassle, and any measure taken to make your residents’ lives easier will go a long way when it comes time for them to renew their lease.

To learn more about package management, multifamily property challenges, and other real estate updates, check out “Building Success: A Real Estate Podcast.”

This week, IBM announced its intent to acquire Red Hat (read the press release here), making a huge leap into open source and hybrid cloud, and doing so in a way that a more traditional IBM may have never considered — by embracing openness and connectivity with others.

With arguably the strongest open source community, Red Hat has already figured out how to leverage the power of community to further technology. No longer do the best ideas have to come from the engineers in the ivory tower. Open source communities continue to drive innovation, accepting contributions from a wide array of talented individuals whose passion is furthering technology, not enterprise value. The community is not constrained by budgets or quarterly financial results. The community is focused on technological advancement.

The new normal

Hybrid cloud also represents a departure from a traditional, insular, enterprise focus where a bias towards IBM technology was how business was accomplished. By entering a hybrid cloud world, IBM no longer has to fight a displacement battle to win share. Instead, they can now work in collaboration with other cloud providers, including the client’s on-premise computing infrastructure, to enable solutions that are decreed by the client, as opposed to those that IBM may prescribe. Recognizing that the hybrid cloud is the new normal for clients is a huge step for IBM and how they approach and interact with clients.

The Salesforce acquisition of MuleSoft (which adds the capability to connect to all means of applications) and the IBM acquisition of RedHat (which adds the capability to connect to all means of infrastructure, as well as embrace the open source community) reveal unmistakable macro trends. The traditional walls of enterprise software and computing infrastructure are being reshaped to be more open and allow more connectivity.

We, at MRI Software, see the world through the same lens. Embracing openness and connectivity are keys to the future of technology. Organizations who continue to try to do it all themselves, who are insular, and who don’t play well with others will continue to fall behind the community of providers who know that we can do better together.

We’d like to applaud all who were honored at the inaugural MRI Innovation Awards! Presented at the 2018 International Users Conference in Atlanta, these awards were given to clients who have embraced the power of the open and connected ecosystem and pushed the limits of what’s possible for the industry. The winners of these awards embody innovation, change, and community, and we’re proud to call them our clients.

And the award goes to…

Phillips Edison & Company (PECO) – Impact

Phillips Edison, a nationwide owner and manager of grocery-anchored shopping centers, received the Impact Award for its pioneering use of robotics and machine learning in concert with MRI solutions. The result has been increased business productivity through optimized decision making, enhanced cross-functional data sharing and heightened analytical precision.

CBRE Group – Flexibility

CBRE Group, the world’s largest commercial real estate services and investment firm, was honored for its innovative use of the MRI Information Exchange (MIX) APIs to connect its own proprietary systems with MRI’s financial and accounting platform. As a result, CBRE was able to streamline data audits, simplify reporting and reduce manual processes.

Mirriam Livingstone (Village Green) – Ambassador of the Year

Mirriam Livingstone, vice president of operations services at Village Green, one of the nation’s largest apartment property management companies, has made exemplary contributions and displayed strong leadership in the real estate community. Mirriam and her team actively participate in MRI users groups, and they have provided instrumental input into MRI’s residential management feature sets and partner integrations. As a genuine advocate for her organization, Mirriam’s collaboration with MRI has truly helped shape the future of real estate software.

VTS – Partner of the Year

VTS, the commercial real estate industry’s leading leasing and asset management platform, was selected as an outstanding member of MRI’s Partner Connect program. VTS ranks among MRI’s highest rated partners in client satisfaction, offers the capability to integrate with MRI’s solutions across the world to serve clients globally, and has one of the highest adoption rates of any partner among MRI clients. The commercial success of this partnership is possible through the strength of the VTS solution and the active, close collaboration between the MRI Partner Connect and VTS teams.

To learn more about these incredible clients and all the work they’ve done, check out the full press release regarding the MRI Innovation Awards.

This year’s International Users Conference in Atlanta was an overwhelming success, and so we’d like to thank our wonderful partners whose continued support is essential to the MRI Ecosystem.

We want to give special shout outs to our Diamond Sponsor, AvidXchange, and our Platinum Sponsor, Nexus, who were both incredible partners of this event.

At MRI, we pride ourselves on promoting an open and connected ecosystem that works for all of our clients. A successful ecosystem such as this is only feasible with partners who share that same vision and work to achieve it together, putting client over business. Through our Partner Connect program, we seek to offer our clients access to third parties who share our commitment to the “open and connected” way, and the exhibit hall at IUC was the perfect visual representation of how MRI Software, our clients, and our partners all work together to achieve greatness.

Announcing Spreadsheet Server – MRI Edition

But the client/partner interaction didn’t stop at booths on the exhibition floor. At this year’s IUC, insightsoftware announced a new partnership with MRI that includes “Spreadsheet Server – MRI Edition”. This partnership makes it even easier for MRI Platform X users to produce consistent Excel-based reports and improve financial and operational reporting. To find out more, read the press release here.

Awarding great partners

Congratulations to VTS, who won the award for Partner of the Year at the inaugural MRI Innovation Awards! The Partner of the Year Award goes to a partner that best embraces the innovation, client support and integration capabilities necessary to promote an open ecosystem. VTS has been a wonderful partner, and we look forward to working with them as they continue in their client-first efforts.

MRI also gave out several other awards in the exhibit hall that included awards for Most Active in MRI forums, Most Referrals through MRI Web Forum, and more. These awards went to well-deserving partners such as Loci Solutions, TopUp, Assetsoft, and RealFoundations.

As we reflect upon this year’s IUC, it’s clear to see that the MRI Ecosystem would not be possible without the support of our incredible partners, and we look forward to seeing how these organizations continue on their quests to liberate real estate.

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.