In the weeks following the recent launch of this year's 20for20 Annual Survey, some of the most interesting briefing calls have focused on one central observation: There's a lot of tech.
A few data points in this year's research suggest that tech is a bigger preoccupation than usual. First, when asked, "What were the highlights of 2024" almost half of the responses were about either a specific technology or about the tech stack more broadly (usually some initiative to counter the growing problem of tech bloat).
That is unusual: business performance, process improvements and people initiatives have topped the highlights list in the previous six editions. The 20 leaders' priorities for 2025 tell a similar story, with tech initiatives dominating a list that more normally encompasses the breadth of business activities.
There are external factors that may explain this trend. First, a slowdown in the deal pipeline has meant many operators have been spending substantially less time onboarding and offboarding communities. With a relatively steady state, there is more bandwidth to devote to tech projects and fewer other things for leaders to call either a highlight or a priority when asked by interviewers!
The industry's continued progress toward centralization (also covered extensively in this year's edition) may also be a factor. As companies move property admin to shared services and make leasing increasingly self-serve and centrally supported, some new technologies are necessary to support revamped processes. Another explanation lies outside of operations altogether: property management companies (PMCs) are increasingly in the tech investment game.
Wearing multiple hats
For the last few years, an increasing number of startups have been getting funded, many by funds whose limited partners (LPs) are real estate companies that are also target customers for the technology.
There are good reasons to like that model. The LPs' expertise should guide investment dollars toward high-priority problems. PMCs' domain expertise and natural focus on deal-making also make tech investing a natural extension. But it is not without cost: as this year's 20for20 interviews show, the incentives for tech adoption have changed.
It is no longer entirely true that companies seek out the software that best solves their most pressing problems. Purchasing decisions must also reflect the vested interest of LPs in supporting technologies in which they hold a financial stake. That inevitably carries the risk that companies lower the bar for software evaluation. It also makes it harder for operators to maintain, let alone optimize, their tech stacks.
The forgotten customer journey
This year's interviews featured enlightening conversations about the state of the "Customer Journey." The TL;DR of the research is that PMCs have adopted so many pieces of tech in the post-COVID period that most do not even know what their customer journey is, less still whether or not it works.
Customer-facing processes should be simple enough to support customer experiences on par with experiences in other industries (Amazon is a perennial bell-weather of customer experience). But as PMCs accumulate services and functionality that were not designed to work together, that becomes harder to do.
The problem is particularly daunting in third-party management, where tech companies have learned to sell directly to ownership groups. Their operators, ever keen not to lose management contracts, admit an increasingly incoherent range of technologies into their stacks. It is not an asset manager's job to engineer their operator's customer journey. In this scenario, it is nobody's job to make technology make sense to prospects and residents.
What to do
A few months ago, a senior operator asked for my advice on a decision his team was trying to make. The decision concerned two (excellent) best-of-breed providers that delivered parts of this company's application process. The decision was whether to keep both apps or eliminate one in favor of using an equivalent, less functionally rich module provided by the other vendor. That is a common dilemma in multifamily, where there is unusually high overlap between technologies.
Knowing I understood both technologies well, this leader's question was, "What do I lose if we change apps?"
It was an interesting framing because the decision was not about which vendor has the better mousetrap (the flawed approach many use to evaluate proptech). It was about the trade-off between competing benefits: additional functionality and simplicity. It's a trade-off few operators seriously consider, made harder by the noise of conflicting incentives between tech investment and operations.
It was a refreshing way to frame the question—not as a search for the better mousetrap (the flawed lens through which many evaluate proptech), but as a choice between competing benefits: added functionality versus simplicity. It's a choice that few consider deeply, especially where incentives conflict between tech investment and operational improvement.
Discussions with multifamily leaders about technology increasingly leave one reaching for Thomas Sowell's famous aphorism: "There are no solutions, only trade-offs." Either the customer journey is important, or it isn't. If it is, then we should evaluate each technology not just in terms of its bells and whistles but on the broader impact it will have on the processes of which it is part.
As this article has described, it is a hard discipline to maintain, and relatively few companies account for the cost of bloat in the all-you-can-eat world of proptech. But simpler is usually better, and other forces seem likely to change how we think about technology.
Centralization may industrialize processes as they move off property, making the technology exceptions much costlier. Siloed systems may constrain the power of AI by reducing data visibility and, hence, functional scope. A more "enterprise" perspective on technology may be on the horizon, but until then, we should remember that every new technology is a trade-off rather than a solution.
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