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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.

Last week, a couple of important events unfolded in the ongoing story of multifamily revenue management (RM). On Tuesday, a US Senate bill was introduced, mostly restating the illegality of price-fixing. Although this bill has received considerable attention, it goes nowhere near as far as a Colorado state bill that was presented to a committee hearing at the Colorado Capitol one day later. 

There's been a lot of talk of multifamily pricing over the last year or so, with a slew of high-profile lawsuits alleging that software is forcing prices upwards across the USA. In a December 2023 newsletter,  NMHC did a thorough job of showing how record supply is placing downward pressure on rents. 

NMHC's extensive analysis makes it clear that it is supply and demand, not software, that drives pricing across multifamily markets. But that is not the subject of this article

It's a brand new year, and with it comes an opportunity for a fresh take on a familiar theme. Readers of this blog will be familiar with the view that multifamily technology vendors often approach their products incorrectly. Specifically, in their eagerness to identify the key selling points for their technology, they often overlook the main reasons why companies buy their products.