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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 ...

Brent Williams It seems to me that the power balance between the independent owners who are not also operators and their 3rd party managers is going to tip towards the managers over time. I could be wrong, but in order to stay competitive with centralization, a streamlined integration across entire 3rd party portfolios is going to become even more important. As for owner-operators, it wouldn't surprise me to see that trend reversed and them to increase consolidation in this space. Centralization just has the inevitability of consolidations in one way or another, and I think the days of massive fragmentation of our industry are dwindling.
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Guest Insider I think the lending conditions have mostly determined how the industry has changed. Over the last decade, the supply of cheap money has brought many more and smaller companies into the industry, which is a great thing!

Third party managers aren't really a force for standardization. They will not usually risk a management contract based on tech preferences. Remember also that so much tech involves connectivity in specific properties. Third party managers don't control that. So I think fragmentation will probably be with us for the foreseeable...
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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 ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

Ellen Thompson To oversimplify it, AI uses statistic models to determine what words should belong together. By definition, it's not creating new and original ideas. And as we saw in Stacey Feeney's post, the text it creates lacks the depth and finesse of engaging writing. I agree with your assessment that's going to be game changing because it will speed up the creation of original content. It will help us get past writer's block, make it easier to get going, and free up time for us to think of more great insights to include in those pieces. I'm all for this. But keep in mind if you are using Open AI to churn out blog posts to boost SEO, don't bother. While Google acknowledges we've been using language generation tools forever, it's against its spam policies to use it to manipulate rankings. Long story short, use it as a writing assistant, not a substitute. You'll find Google's guidance on AI content here: developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/02/google-s…
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Dom Beveridge Really good points Ellen - that last one especially. It's an assistant not a replacement - as I said it does the *verb,* writing (ie the mechanical thing where you turn ideas into final copy), but the *noun,* writing is a collaboration between human and machine.

Here's another thing that I'm getting increasingly skeptical about: A lot of marketing blogs, etc are talking about how OpenAI can research topics and speed up eg the research that a marketer might do when they're trying to understand a topic for a blog that they want to write. It's true that the AI can do that, but it seems to me that if you can ask the AI to summarize knowledge on a given topic and it can do so immediately, I don't see what value there will be in creating blogs like that. If it's as easy to ask the AI to write a 700 word precis of eg the best book on a topic, why would you want to search for an article written by somebody else who doesn't understand the subject anything like as well? Today people churn out...
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  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 ...

Brent Williams Dom, your ears are probably burning because I was talking about this with someone recently, and then saw it pop up on Facebook. Definitely making an impact.
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Dom Beveridge Ha! As Oscar Wilde said, "there's only one thing worse than being talked about...!"

Glad it's generating some discussion - the last piece in this series (about ChatGPT) is coming out next week, along with a new white paper on the subject - stay tuned...
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Why Regionals Know Best

I was recently discussing property management, operations, and technology with a senior asset manager, who made a comment that stuck in my mind: "Great regionals can overcome an average operating platform, but a great operating platform can't overcome average regionals."  The comment struck a chord with ...

Brent Williams Great blog, Dom, and we were discussing the same "REIT bias" on a process level - the question of how much centralization can be applied across 3rd party operators. While it is definitely doable, there are a lot more kinks to work out and will likely take a lot longer to roll out across the industry.
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Foresight in Focus - NMHC OPTECH 2022 in Review

Like many people in the industry, I just returned from a few days with about 2,500 of my closest friends in multifamily ops and technology. NMHC OPTECH, which took place in front of a record ...

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Multifamily Revenue Management in the Dock (Again)

If, like me, you've spent a lot of years working in revenue management, you will be familiar with the reality that from time to time, you have to defend what you do for a living. We find ourselves in just such a situation, as a recent article published by ProPublica: "

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A Common Disconnect: Multifamily Technology Solutions and Their Value

In my last blog, I talked about the often-overlooked role of insight in creating persuasive content. In particular, compa ...

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Why I Want to Know More About ESG in Multifamily

When I conducted the interviews for this year's 20 for 20 White Paper, ESG (Environment, Social and Governance) was an unsurprisingly common theme. Based on the 20 conversations with senior executives, it seemed that ESG was becoming a driver in many decisions, including technology implementations. At the time, I ...

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In Praise of Non-Obvious Content

Occasionally it happens that somebody else’s writing ties together a few ideas that have been on your mind for some time. A week ago, it happened while I was reading the excellent Justin Welsh’s Saturday Solopreneur, one of the most insightful newsletters about marketing and related topics.  The blog entitled “Your ...

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Back to Normal in San Diego: NAA Apartmentalize in Review

Like much of the multifamily industry, I’m spending this week catching up after a great week in San Diego, enjoying what feels like the first proper NAA Apartmentalize since before the pandemic. In this blog, I’ll identify some things that caught my eye during the show.  Regionals Know Best. During NAA, it was my pleasure to interview some regional managers about the technologies they have been implementing at their properties. ...

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Payton is friends with Dom Beveridge

AIM 2022: Seats at the Table and the Uberization of Residents

Spring is in the air, and for the multifamily industry, that means time for the annual migration to Huntington Beach, CA, for the Apartment Innovation and Marketing (AIM) conference. As usual, the organizers delivered a feast of thought-provoking ideas for a record audience. AIM casts the net wide to find new content, defining "marketing' in the broadest possible terms. But a few themes emerged through the first couple of days of sessions. ...

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