Why Yardi Acquired DIY and 3 Other Cos. in 1 Year
DIY, which already has 200 to 300 clients, became available and Yardi was impressed with their product.
Santa Barbara, Calif.–Yardi Systems recently acquired residential property management software provider DIY Real Estate Solutions. The acquisition of DIY adds an integrated property management system designed for small companies managing 1,000 or fewer units. Genesis, Yardi’s seven-year old property management program for small companies, will continue to be offered.
Four-year old DIY will continue to run from its Cleveland office with existing employees. DIY co-founders Don Katt, Steve Lloyd, and Alison Cavano, who were major contributors to the success of MRI Software for the last 20 years, will also remain with the company.
Brad Setser, vice president of Yardi, tells MHN why Yardi acquired DIY and why the companies recent acquisitions don’t signal a change in its growth strategy.
MHN: Why did Yardi acquire DIY when it already has a program for small management companies?
Setser: Genesis has been around for seven years and has 3000 clients, but there is a growing demand among small property managers for a web-based product and Genesis is Windows-based. Property managers they like the notion of a hosted type of product. Windows-based products are hosted by our clients and are also more difficult to host. We wanted to serve the customers looking for the hosted type product. The choice for us was whether to build or buy. DIY, which already has 200 to 300 clients, became available and we were impressed with their product. So we decided to buy it.
MHN: Will the two products be merged?
Setser: There are no plans to merge the two products. Each will be offered separately. Genesis is successful because small companies really like the desktop model and it remains a viable model, particularly for small companies that like the desktop model. For those who prefer a web-based solution, we’ll offer the DIY product.
MHN: Yardi has acquired several companies lately. Has there been a change to the company’s growth strategy?
Setser: Yardi has acquired four companies in the past 12-18 months. But believe it or not, the acquisitions are not part of our growth strategy—in fact, they have been opportunistic—cases where a strong product became available and we had a niche or gap to fill. For example, RentGrow-resident screening is a particularly unique area of expertise and it made sense to acquire a company rather than develop our own product from scratch when there are so many viable competitors out there. Same thing with PropertShark.
In the bigger picture (for everything from mid-to large clients) our whole product development and solution strategy is to provide as much of a business-wide solution as possible in a single platform. We want to enable our client to take advantage of all these office solutions directly out of their voyager platform. It’s all part of our product development platform.
MHN: Will there be any changes to the DIY product?
Setser: We want to take Genesis and DIY and do a feature comparison to see where we might be able to leverage expertise in each product. So if we see that DOY does some thing well, we will emulate that for Genesis and similarly if we see something in Genesis that can be build into DIY, we’ll do it.
