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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.

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. 

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.

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. 

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." 

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 audience, delivered its usual thought-provoking blend of sessions and related conversations. 

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: "Rent Going Up? One Company's Algorithm Could Be Why," is the latest to inform us on how revenue management works.

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.