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There has been a great deal of talk about multifamily revenue management over the last few days. Last Friday, the Department of Justice's (DoJ) long-anticipated "algorithmic pricing" lawsuit affecting multifamily revenue management dropped.

Since then, I have been involved in many discussions about this news, particularly the central problem I see with these lawsuits: the allegations are simply false. What has surprised me somewhat through conversations over the last few days is that good-faith actors in the industry do not understand the gap between the allegations and the reality of how the technology works.

It's been some time since I wrote about the ongoing drama facing multifamily revenue management. The last few months have seen a few developments, attracting what might generouslybe described as a mixed bag of industry commentary. It's getting harder to cut through the (ahem) noise. 

Followers of my writings on multifamily property management have probably noticed that I am in my "multifamily maintenance should work more like single-family" era. The two may be showing signs of converging, as this article will attempt to explain.

The City of Brotherly Love provided a backdrop for this year's NAA APARTMENTALIZE that was fresh in novelty, if not in weather. An energy-packed conference offered new insights into some of our industry's most rapidly changing areas. There's lots to talk about, and it is with some trepidation that I share a recap focused on two of the most buzzwordy topics: centralization and AI. However, these were the biggest stories that caught my eye at NAA this year.

Regular readers of this blog are probably familiar with my views on what motivates people to buy software.  Sellers tend to characterize value propositions in terms of numbers ("Roll out this software and increase your x by y%!"). Buyers of technology, on the other hand, are seldom impressed with these projections, at least during the phase of a sales cycle when they are most persuadable.

There's been a lot of coverage of centralization on this website over the last few years. As this year's 20for20 white paper explained, maintenance differs profoundly from either admin or leasing centralization. Leasing and admin tasks can be automated away or, in the case of leasing, made self-serve. We can offer residents some self-serve maintenance options, but most of the time we need a team member to deliver the service.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the experience of participating in a Colorado state congressional hearing on a proposed law to outlaw revenue management. One of several points in that article was about the potential gap in our industry's advocacy that appears when state legislatures create national problems. 

It's that time of year again when NMHC publishes its lists of the top 50 owners, operators, and various other categories of multifamily companies. It's invaluable information: multifamily companies are notoriously difficult to track, so we should all appreciate the fine work the NMHC research team does to compile and publish the lists each year. 

2024 seems likely to be a year of rapid acceleration in the adoption of AI in multifamily. The question is how rapid and what kinds of tasks will it be doing for us? During this year's 20for20 interviews, the 20 leaders were asked to speculate a little on the direction AI is likely to take. What the conversations revealed is that most leaders view AI as something you buy from third-party vendors specializing in this area. 

What is a trend? A couple of months into 2024, there's been a lot of talk about the prevailing trends for the year ahead, as there always is. Our brains are hardwired to look for patterns in everything that we see. As a species, we like to read the tea leaves.