This Employee Appreciation Day, we are celebrating the people who make our company special — our wonderful team of 33Floors Yardi experts whose backgrounds span decades, industries, and continents. Our strength as a firm comes directly from their stories. Each team member’s journey with Yardi is unique, yet there’s a unifying theme: a deep-seated appreciation for Yardi products and a commitment to helping others harness their full potential.
Many of our consultants began their careers as Yardi users themselves. They sat on the other side of the table, as property managers, accountants, and IT managers, implementing Yardi within real estate organizations long before they joined 33Floors. This firsthand experience is a critical part of our DNA. For example, in the late 1990s, Patricia Walsh helped introduce Yardi to the UK market while at Cushman & Wakefield. Confronted with the vast differences between American and British lease structures, Patricia worked directly with Yardi’s development team (and even Anant Yardi himself) to ensure the software met UK requirements. Her insight and determination helped get Yardi operational in a new region. Stories like Patricia’s underscore why our team truly understands clients’ needs — we’ve been in their position, leading ground-breaking implementations under high stakes.
Other team members were “converted” into Yardi aficionados a bit later, only to become champions of the software. Take Reece Smith, who admits he was initially hesitant when a client decided to transition to Yardi after he had mastered another system. Today, after 11 years of working with Yardi (seven of them at 33Floors), Reece is grateful for that switch.” Looking back, I’m incredibly grateful for that decision by my client, as it opened doors I never even imagined,” he recalls. As a former accountant, Reece has leveraged Yardi to work across dozens of countries, tackling diverse accounting standards and regulatory challenges with gusto. His journey from skeptic to expert reflects a common pattern: Once our team members dive into Yardi, they tend to never look back. This enthusiasm becomes a driving force in the service they provide to clients.
The breadth of industry expertise on our team is vast. We have colleagues like Suzanne Sowden, who spent 15 years in commercial real estate roles before becoming a Yardi super-user and later a consultant. Having been on both sides — as a client implementing Yardi across Asia and now as a 33Floors consultant — Suzanne brings a 360-degree perspective that clients find invaluable. Similarly, Jennifer Michaels led a major Yardi conversion at a U.S. REIT and collaborated with 33Floors as a client for custom reporting. She was so skilled that we invited her to join our team three times before she finally said yes in 2018! Now she’s helped nearly 100 clients optimize their Yardi platforms, especially in commercial modules like Forecast Manager and Construction Management.
Lou Howard is another example of the expert-user-to-consultant pipeline. Coming from an accounting and accounts receivable background at CBRE, she experienced multiple property systems, including Qube and MRI, before returning to Yardi and joining 33Floors. Lou’s path from AR clerk to project manager means she knows intimately the operational and financial workflows that Yardi needs to support. These diverse experiences enrich our collective know-how and enable us to relate to a wide range of client scenarios. A decade ago, Shaine Chance was working with Qube when a new client brought Yardi into the picture. “That decision? It changed everything,” he explains. “What started as a step into the unfamiliar turned out to be the best career move I could have made.” Chris Wilkes’ journey with Yardi software has also taken her from platform user to working in consulting roles at both Yardi Systems and 33Floors.
Some of our team literally helped shape Yardi’s evolution through the years. We’re proud to count individuals like Donald Luna, David Burberry, and Bob Horn among our leadership. In their prior roles, they collaborated with Yardi’s own staff on product enhancements and massive implementations. But beyond our founders, we have senior experts like Darragh O’Keeffe, who has spent over a decade developing custom Yardi solutions for clients worldwide — over 5,000 reports and integrations by his count. We also have Christopher Boatfield-Bell, who was at the forefront of Yardi rollouts across Europe in the mid-2000s. Chris forged strong relationships with Yardi’s team, from developers to executives, and even relocated internationally as his career advanced alongside Yardi’s global expansion. He often says that working so closely with Yardi’s people, in a true partnership style, were some of the best professional experiences of his life. And Colleen Carey, who joined Yardi Systems when the firm counted just 50 employees, has been delivering expert Yardi consultancy to clients for the last 22 years. These veterans bring not only technical proficiency but also a rich context of Yardi’s history, having seen the software grow from basic versions to the sophisticated, cloud-based platform it is today.
On the other end of the spectrum, we embrace fresh perspectives and new energy. In recent years, we’ve welcomed professionals from data science, AI, and other tech-forward disciplines into the 33Floors family. Colm O’Keeffe, for instance, joined as a data scientist and quickly applied his expertise to Yardi’s suite of analytics tools. Even with just a year of Yardi experience, Colm’s impact is felt in how we leverage Yardi’s newest features, from business intelligence dashboards to upcoming AI-driven functionalities. He remarked after attending the London YASC event that he was “especially impressed by Yardi’s recent product enhancements” and the clear vision for the future that was on display. Likewise, Tariq Mihiar brought experience from another real estate software company and found Yardi’s ecosystem to be incredibly welcoming. After joining 33Floors, he noted that attending YASC gave him a deep appreciation for the community Yardi has built, something that resonates strongly with our entire team of 33Floors Yardi experts. New team members like Colm and Tariq ensure that our firm stays at the cutting edge. They ask new questions, explore novel approaches, and help us and our clients prepare for the future of Yardi, from Voyager 8 to AI integrations and beyond.
What does all this mean for our clients? When you work with 33Floors, you’re tapping into an unparalleled pool of Yardi expertise. Our consultants have a combined 600-plus years of Yardi experience and have successfully completed over 1,500 Yardi projects. But it’s not just about the numbers — it’s about perspective. We understand the challenges of a Yardi implementation in a way only insiders can, because nearly every person on our team was an insider at one point. Whether it was converting legacy data for a portfolio of 100 properties, training dozens of end-users across different countries, or brainstorming with Yardi developers to solve a localization issue, we’ve been there. This insight makes us proactive problem solvers and empathetic partners. We can anticipate obstacles and address them before they escalate. We tailor our approach to each client’s reality, because the chances are someone on our team has worked in a similar context or market.
One theme that shines through each of our 33Floors Yardi experts’ stories is passion. This isn’t just a job for most of us — it’s a professional calling. We genuinely enjoy unraveling complex challenges in Yardi, and we celebrate our clients’ successes as our own. The camaraderie we have with our clients often lasts beyond the project itself. Many of us stay in touch with client-side peers. Sometimes, they even join our team, as in Jennifer’s case!
We’re proud to celebrate the incredible team at 33Floors. Our consultants represent the very best that the Yardi ecosystem has nurtured: from early adopters and trailblazers to new innovators and leaders. The depth and breadth of our team’s expertise means 33Floors can tackle any Yardi project, big or small, with confidence and finesse. More importantly, we do all this with a client-centric mindset born from real-world experience. To put our 33Floors Yardi Experts to work for you, contact us today.
