Transcript
You can A. I. my face so it's more protected, you know? How does Brad Pitt talk about A. I. so well? Hey, my name's Dave Stifter, so I'm a Managing Director at, uh, DigitalBridge, which was Colony Capital previously. Colony's been around since 95, and has, has, uh, focused on all types of real estate, office, industrial, multifamily, hotels, and, uh, most recently has, has changed focus to digital, uh, infrastructure. DigitalBridge now has about 70 billion of asset management, uh, globally, and has successfully run, uh, uh, about a dozen private equity funds and a number of public companies. About ten years ago, Colony made a digital breakthrough and a really big investment into technology. We had used Yardi at the property level and a number of other systems above that. And really looking to automate all aspects that we could within the company to give our staff good tools. And so, uh, everything from leases, um, accounts payable, uh, actual payments, uh, all of that we're looking, uh, to get done within one system and that's where Yardi's really been helpful with us being able to get all that accomplished on a single stack. The biggest benefits, I think, are speed and again, the ability to scale without, without having a lot of, um, additional head count. So for us, as a, as an owner operator and investment manager, um, how quickly we can transact and do deals and close the books is really, is really critical. For example, Yardi Investment Management, we made a big investment into getting that set up correctly, operational, and when a deal closed, we were able to move money to our investors within a day. But really that technology was impactful, letting us do that quickly and allowed us to do a lot more with the resources we had. Where we have gotten a lot of value as a business is talking through our fundamental problems with Yardi, and they work with us, right? And so something like data centers, which may seem very, very different than an industrial lease, actually could be very similar. That fundamental, single source of truth is what connects all the aspects and all the modules in Yardi. That's something I've really come to appreciate a lot more as I've gotten exposure to different systems. We've had great experiences over the years working with Yardi as our business changed, as we launched into single family homes, as we launched into digital infrastructure, working with Yardi to meet those needs, um, and, and we've successfully done it year over year.