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We all love leads, don't we? Anyone engaged in the marketing and selling of any product cherishes that confirmation: someone is interested in your product and ready to be sold to. Leads are the lifeblood that keeps sales pipelines full. However, some recent in-depth conversations with individuals I consider to be true thought leaders in our industry have changed my perspective on this prized commodity. These conversations have led me to think that, as one put it, leads may be for losers.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

The 2023 Apartment Innovation and Marketing (AIM) conference is in the books, and it was another great one last week in Huntington Beach.

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.

I was recently facilitating an executive roundtable about a subject that's near and dear to my heart: centralization.

Today is the final day of a highly successful RETCON 2023 conference. Yesterday I attended an engaging session about analytics featuring some senior leaders from the multifamily industry. It was one of the more insightful BI panels I've seen in recent years, touching on familiar themes: How data flows between different systems, how to maintain and use metrics and how to get users to leverage the BI capabilities that companies create. 

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 little work they appear to have done to verify the claims upon which its original allegations were based.