Connected Tech Is Reshaping Commercial Real Estate
Listen to this articleToday’s CRE owners and operators face relentless pressure to improve efficiency, gain better insight and deliver stronger tenant and customer experiences. Yet across many portfolios, data silos and disconnected point solutions continue to create friction – delaying execution, obscuring risk and making it harder for leadership to understand what’s really happening across the business.
Moving to a single platform
When marketing, leasing, legal and operations teams work in silos, they’re forced to manually bridge gaps between systems. A single connected platform offers a proven way to strengthen operations by centralizing data and documents, aligning internal teams and external stakeholders, and creating a scalable foundation for growth and innovation.
A recent example comes from JBG SMITH, a major mixed-use owner and developer in the Washington, DC metro area. Following a transformational merger, the company faced a familiar challenge: reliance on a patchwork of custom-built applications and point solutions that produced inconsistent data, slowed delivery and created ongoing maintenance burdens. These challenges are increasingly common as CRE firms scale portfolios and expand into new asset classes.
For JBG SMITH, the solution was a shift to the Yardi Commercial Suite, a fully integrated enterprise platform purpose-built for real estate. A unified database and shared operational stack replaced brittle integrations, giving teams a single source of truth across financials, leasing, asset management and customer records. The result was reduced vendor sprawl, simpler reporting and a clear, real-time view of portfolio performance for leadership.
Aligning teams and supporting innovation
Beyond operational clarity, a connected platform enables true cross-functional alignment. When accounting, asset management, leasing and customer service operate within the same system, workflows move seamlessly from one department to the next. Decisions that once required manual reconciliation become part of an integrated, end-to-end process.
For JBG SMITH, this foundation also enabled the disciplined adoption of emerging capabilities, including embedded AI, without the need to build and maintain separate tools. With consistent, connected data, innovation could be layered into the platform rather than bolted on.
Equally instructive was the partnership between technology provider and operator. Rather than simply implementing software, JBG SMITH collaborated on product direction, influencing capabilities such as customer-centric CRM models that tie activity and engagement to a single customer record. This type of collaboration improves outcomes for individual firms while helping advance technology that reflects the real-world complexity of CRE operations.
In the words of JBG SMITH CIO and CTO Jeremy Poteet, “Yardi is my easy button – this partnership lets us scale, stay efficient and support our customers without needing a large IT team.”
Connecting the path forward
The broader lesson for CRE leaders is clear: as portfolios grow and asset types diversify, the hidden costs of disconnected systems increase. Investing in a single, connected technology platform turns complexity into clarity. With consistent data, reliable workflows and actionable insight, firms can respond to market change faster and focus time and capital on value creation rather than stitching software systems together.
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Brian Sutherland, VP, Commercial, Yardi
Brian Sutherland is vice president of commercial real estate at Yardi, where he leads U.S. commercial sales and marketing and drives go-to-market strategy for Yardi Virtuoso, the company’s AI platform. His work focuses on helping owners and operators modernize through connected platforms, data and embedded intelligence. He brings more than 25 years of experience in real estate technology and entrepreneurship. |
This Week’s Sponsor
Yardi® develops and supports industry-leading investment and property management software for all types and sizes of real estate companies. Established in 1984, Yardi is based in Santa Barbara, Calif., and serves clients worldwide. For more information on how Yardi is Energized for Tomorrow, visit yardi.com.
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