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It's that time of year again when the 20for20 Annual Survey is officially launched. The conversations with 20 senior executives that took place at the end of 2024 have been reviewed extensively, synthesized, and turned into the seventh annual summary of all things top of mind in multifamily operations and technology. As usual, this year contains a mixture of new insights on new topics and progress on trends that had been central to previous editions.

The year has started with a lot of fresh insight into centralization. First, there was the recent release of the new white paper about how third-party managers are progressing toward a centralized operating model. This week, the focus switches to another big centralization topic: maintenance.

Readers of this blog will know that I frequently study and write about centralization. It has featured heavily in the last four editions of the 20for20 annual survey, and—SPOILER ALERT—it will get more coverage next month when the 2025 edition drops.

A new year is upon us - I hope my readers had the chance to relax a bit over the holiday period. As usual, the holidays provided some breathing space for reading, and one of my favorite holiday reads this year has been "How to Win the Premier League."It's a fascinating book about statistical analysis (stay with me) by Ian Graham that holds a couple of important lessons for multifamily.

Readers of this blog will not be surprised to have learned that, just before the weekend, the DOJ dropped its criminal investigation into RealPage revenue management (RM). The 5 p.m. Friday media slot traditionally reserved for announcements of government policy failure saw one of the more bizarre twists in this tale go out with a richly deserved whimper.

The last major multifamily technology event of the year took place last week in San Diego. And with it, AppFolio FURURE appears to have established itself as a major fixture on the industry's event calendar.

A couple of things stood out: with double the attendance of last year's event, this show is now on par—for attendance and content—with the largest user conferences in our industry. More impressively, FUTURE presented the broadest and most cohesive vision I have seen of how AI may change property management.  

NMHC OPTECH 2024 is in the books, and what an event it was. As we noted last week, this year's was another record-setting crowd. As always, the event seemed to fly by. There is much to unpack, so this article will share thoughts on the launch of RETTC (pronounced "ret-see"), key technology themes that stood out, and finally, some reflections on the future of this excellent event.

Fall is well and truly upon us, and once again, it's that time of year when those who follow multifamily operations and technology gather for the last industry-wide event in the multifamily calendar: NMHC OPTECH. This year's show (taking place next week at National Harbor, MD) represents a mix of continuity and change, as this post will explain.

There's nothing new about the saying "a picture is worth a thousand words," but lately, it feels more relevant to technology than ever before. It seems intuitive that the world of software is becoming more visual, but there's a lot more to it than that.

There seems to be a great deal of new content hitting the wires in multifamily right now. Conference season is in full swing, bringing a surge of new ideas and perspectives. There are several topics that are top if mind that will be appearing in these pages this fall. But I'm particularly excited about a series of new podcast interviews will be released over the next few weeks.