Rob Teel Named Yardi’s New CEO  

Rob Teel will serve as the new CEO of Yardi Systems starting in January 2026. The company’s founder & CEO, Anant Yardi, announced the appointment last week during the Yardi Advanced Solutions Conference in San Diego.  

Teel, a 22-year veteran at the firm, originally worked with multifamily clients and has led its global solutions business for the past 15 years. In that position, he has overseen the firm’s products for investment management, international and commercial property owners.  

In an email to company employees, Anant Yardi noted that Teel has played a central role in guiding the company through multiple transitions during his tenure. Prior to joining Yardi Systems, Teel was a consulting manager at Accenture, where he led global systems projects for Fortune 100 organizations. 

Speaking to an audience of 5,000 YASC attendees at the San Diego Convention Center, Yardi said that he will step into the role of chairman, remain actively engaged on special projects and advise the company’s leadership team. “I will continue to participate in the technology movement,” he added. 

What’s ahead for CRE technology 

Technology has reshaped the industry since Yardi launched the company in 1984, and he continues to look forward. “The next decade is going to be just as exciting, just as interesting, as any one of the previous decades,” he predicted.  

He also pointed to other major trends shaping the industry. “AI will change the way we do business, but one step at a time, in an incremental mode,” he said. Also on the horizon: “My belief, in the course of time, is that every major commercial building will have flex space and coworking space.” 

Among other recent high-profile moves, last year Yardi Systems took a majority ownership stake in WeWork and facilitated its exit from bankruptcy after a successful restructuring.   

Commenting on the trends shaping commercial real estate technology, Teel noted a telling aspect of artificial intelligence’s impact. He told CPE that the office, retail and industrial stacks have been slower to generate ROI than the multifamily sector’s AI-powered residential prospect flows.   

“However, the pace of AI adoption is changing rapidly in the commercial real estate sector. The complexity of commercial leasing requires more complex AI solutions, but we are seeing evidence of use cases that could make a material difference in decision-making and efficiency for the industry.”   

“Lease abstraction and insights, deal approval guidance, and AI agents to help reduce back-office recurring tasks — it seems that our team and clients are identifying use cases daily that have the potential to increase the value of their portfolios,” Teel said.  

Tomorrow’s agentic AI “will have profound returns on decision-making and effort,” he predicted. To help foster the AI movement, Yardi is extending its agent development to clients and consulting partners through a new self-service toolkit for agent creation. The company provides the framework for prompt engineering, data access and agent creation fundamentals. That, Teel said, opens the door to “a marketplace of agents and applications, potentially shared among clients.”  

To adapt to the office sector’s watershed changes, Yardi is readying an app aimed at office owners, and specifically the occupiers and employees that use their space. The new app will accommodate the needs of a hybrid workforce by connecting workers to a global network of offices and conference rooms, Teel reported.  

Since its founding in 1984, Yardi Systems has become a global service provider and adviser to the commercial and multifamily real estate sectors. The company’s dozens of product lines range from property management, investment and coworking to leasing and energy management.  

Yardi Systems is the parent company of CPE.