Every year, MFI asks operators across the industry one simple question: what technology are you actually using?

Not what's on your roadmap or what you evaluated two years ago. We ask for data on what's live, what's running, and how your team operates today.

The 2026 Technology Adoption Report covers 118 companies, ranging from portfolios of under 1,000 units to enterprises managing over 200,000 units, across market-rate, affordable, senior, and student housing. The responses tell a story that's more complicated than "multifamily is behind on tech" and more honest than "adoption is accelerating across the board."

The truth is somewhere in the middle, and it depends entirely on which layer of the tech stack you're looking at.

The transactional layer is solid. Resident screening sits at 96% adoption industry-wide, and online payments, work order management, e-signature, online leasing, and property websites all exceed 87%. Operators have built out the infrastructure that keeps the business running, and that part of the conversation is largely settled.

What's not settled is everything that sits on top of it. The tools designed to improve how residents experience living in a community, how teams make decisions from data, and how operators understand what's working are where the gaps show up.

Resident wellness and fitness apps are at 21% adoption, parking management sits at 37%, resident rewards at 40%, and leasing contact centers at 42%. These aren't fringe categories because they're tools with real operational and experience implications, and many operators haven't made a firm decision on them yet.

Also, keep in mind that portfolio size shapes the picture significantly. Operators above 25,000 units show 100% adoption of payments, resident portals, online service requests, and several financial management tools, while business intelligence sits at 100% in the largest portfolios, compared to 74% industry-wide. The data infrastructure gap between large and small operators is real, and it's widening.

Scale doesn't solve everything, though. Even in the largest portfolio segment, leasing contact centers sit at 36%, self-guided tours at 57%, and incentive optimization at 64%. Bigger budgets create more capacity to evaluate technology, but they don't make the hard decisions any easier.

For smaller operators, the core leasing stack is largely in place, and the opportunity is in the layers that generate insight and differentiate the resident experience. For mid-market operators, the data show greater variance than in any other group, which usually signals that technology decisions are being made inconsistently across regions or properties rather than centrally. For enterprise operators, the question has shifted from adoption to utilization, because a 100% adoption rate of analytics tools means nothing if the output doesn't drive decisions.

Every segment has a different version of the same challenge: knowing what you have, understanding what you're missing, and deciding what moves the needle for your residents and your teams.

That's what this research is designed to help with.

The full 2026 Technology Adoption Report is available to members of Multifamily Insiders for free. If you'd like a copy, leave a note in the comments, and we'll send it your way.