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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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: "
In my last blog, I talked about the often-overlooked role of insight in creating persuasive content. In particular, compa ...
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 ...
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 ...
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. ...
Payton is friends with Dom Beveridge
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. ...
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...