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Page 26 — Multifamily Properties Quarterly — August 2017
T echnology disruption occurs
when a new software, hard-
ware or method comes along
that changes the status quo,
making life better and more
efficient. Amazon disrupted retail-
ers, Netflix disrupted VHS, Airbnb
disrupted hospitability, Uber dis-
rupted the taxi industry and, of
course, Apple disrupted the music,
publishing and personal device
market. Why? Because these indus-
tries were all broken in some way.
Having watched multifamily tech
evolve and thrash for nearly 20
years, I’ve been surprised, disap-
pointed and motivated by the fact
that the number of meaningful
disruptions remains alarmingly
low. The most obvious change is
in the design and construction of
buildings themselves through soft-
ware and construction efficiencies.
Other disruptions include online
rent payment, revenue manage-
ment pricing, internet listing sites
and, recently, some resident-cen-
tric tech, such as package lockers,
which ultimately were a reaction to
another industry’s disruption, not
one stemming from multifamily.
Recently the industry has seen
innovation on the fringes of opera-
tions, resident services, and in
the marketing and leasing of
apartments, but we’re not seeing
anything that will truly disrupt
day-to-day leasing and operations
processes. Multifamily technology
generally trails other industries by
two to five years, locking operators
into inefficient and frustrating user
experiences. Examples of this are
rampant.
I can book a
hotel room using
Siri and open
my hotel door
with my iPhone,
but online rental
applications are
a gauntlet of
redundancy and
painfully frustrat-
ing. Thousands of
apartment web-
sites are designed
around how we in
the industry look
for apartments, not how renters
prefer to search for apartments.
And let’s be honest, the software
our management and leasing
teams use every day often requires
browsers that aren’t even sup-
ported by Microsoft anymore and
that have ancient interfaces sitting
on top of legacy software. There
are leasing agents working with
software that literally is older than
they are. I often encourage part-
ners and clients to watch a pros-
pect try to find and lease an apart-
ment online or to observe a leasing
agent try to navigate her property
management software while simul-
taneously talking to a prospect sit-
ting in front of her. Then it quickly
becomes clear where there are
opportunities.
How did this happen? Following
the same pattern as other indus-
tries prior to major disruption,
the largest multifamily technol-
ogy players have little incentive
to make life better for their users.
Revenue potential is directly tied
to the number of units in the mar-
ket, meaning incremental growth
is capped, and adding value is
easier by going after the per-unit
cents your competitor has than by
creating something new. Business
requires that the established com-
panies fight for market share, add
erroneous features to their already
overweight products and try to cre-
ate moats around data they don’t
even have a claim to. These behav-
iors are eerily similar to the taxi
industry’s fights against car-shar-
ing services and the music indus-
try’s efforts to hold onto the old
way of doing things until the iPod
was released and a shift became
inevitable.
The resulting race to the bottom
leaves users scrambling to under-
stand their options as they’re held
hostage to old systems because the
market hasn’t presented another
choice. The idea of focusing on core
competency has been stretched
and extended so far that provid-
Let us help you with your next project.
COLORADO | TEXAS
2785 Speer
Residence Inn
Park Regency Assisted Living
ONE PROJECT AT A TIME.
Technology
Brent Steiner
CEO, Engrain,
Greenwood Village
Engrain
New technologies are available to enhance the apartment shopping experience, such as
SightMap, which is an interactive app that can be added to any website to visually showcase
unit locations within a property.