This week I had the pleasure of attending RealWorld 2023, RealPage's annual user conference in Las Vegas. It was an enjoyable couple of days that at once offered a glimpse of the future of an evolving industry giant and a trip or two down memory lane. I will share my thoughts on both in this article.My last visit to RealWorld was in 2018, when I ran the event for RealPage. The changes to the event in the intervening years are instructive of the c ...

 Centralization, as we all know, is a hot topic in the multifamily industry. This conversation began a few years ago when a few public REITs began to talk about changes to their property staffing models. I, among others, initially believed that once centralization started, everyone else would follow. If a few companies were achieving superior returns, the rest would naturally want to emulate them.However, the last two years of 20 for 20 rese ...

NAA APARTMENTALIZE 2023 is in the books, and it was a week of high energy and excitement in Atlanta. The industry's biggest trade show seemed especially full of new and exciting innovations, particularly for those focused on technology. Once again, new applications of AI seemed to take center stage. We now seem to be in a cycle where each industry event will feature new companies and solutions that supplant the hot innovations of the previous sho ...

In the few weeks since this year's AIM conference in early May, I have been reflecting on AI, which was the dominant theme of this year's show. Like many people, I have been tinkering with generative AI since late 2022. Some ideas from the sessions at AIM have changed how I think about this technology, as I will describe in this article.I have previously expressed the view that many in our industry may be approaching AI the wrong way. The crucial ...

The 2023 Apartment Innovation and Marketing (AIM) conference is in the books, and it was another great one last week in Huntington Beach.As usual, the content was current, carefully curated, and prompted extensive conversation among this year's record audience. The application of AI took center stage, with numerous sessions considering how it may change multifamily operations. In reviewing my notes from this event, I started to notice a bifurcati ...

A couple of weeks ago, NMHC released its annual lists of the top 50 multifamily owners and developers. As usual, the lists provide an excellent touchpoint on the state of our industry. This year's lists disclose something interesting about a changing industry structure.Conveniently, this observation provides excellent context for a panel I am helping to prepare for next week's AIM conference: "Design, Collaboration and BizDev: The New PropTech Ve ...

I was recently facilitating an executive roundtable about a subject that's near and dear to my heart: centralization.The session, which took place at RETCON 2023 in Brooklyn, was hosted by payments company, Domuso and was entitled "The Future of Work, Rent, Admin and Back Office Centralization." It included a diverse group of about 12 multifamily leaders representing fee management, small and large owner-operators and some investors. Together we ...

This week, ProPublica released another article in its series about multifamily revenue management (RM). Normally this would be unremarkable; after all, since the original article last October, there has been a steady flow of articles from myriad outlets, mostly restating the points of that original piece. But what is interesting about this most recent article is that it exposes just how poorly ProPublica understands the practices of RM and how li ...

This week I am excited to launch the fifth annual edition of 20 for 20. For those unfamiliar, the white paper summarizes 20 in-depth interviews with ten heads of technology and ten COOs from multifamily organizations, which took place at the end of 2022. This year, the format of the questions changed somewhat because I wanted to get to the bottom of centralization. The new edition prioritizes process and property roles to understand the impli ...

Since ChatGPT was released, there has been a great deal of discussion about how it and other Open AI applications will impact marketing. The conversation touches on several ideas I have shared in recent blogs—especially how abundant content does not necessarily mean persuasive content. To sum up the main points of the last few blogs in one sentence: markets will reward companies that can teach the most unique, relevant and hel ...

  In the last few months, I published a couple of articles about some of the shortcomings in how companies tackle content marketing, specifically content written to persuade people to buy certain products.  The first article was about the realities of marketing through digital platforms and how they create a natural pressure for everybody's content to be too similar. As the article argued, the antidote is to focus on "non-obvious" content. A su ...