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The last major multifamily technology event of the year took place last week in San Diego. And with it, AppFolio FURURE appears to have established itself as a major fixture on the industry's event calendar.

A couple of things stood out: with double the attendance of last year's event, this show is now on par—for attendance and content—with the largest user conferences in our industry. More impressively, FUTURE presented the broadest and most cohesive vision I have seen of how AI may change property management.  

NMHC OPTECH 2024 is in the books, and what an event it was. As we noted last week, this year's was another record-setting crowd. As always, the event seemed to fly by. There is much to unpack, so this article will share thoughts on the launch of RETTC (pronounced "ret-see"), key technology themes that stood out, and finally, some reflections on the future of this excellent event.

There's nothing new about the saying "a picture is worth a thousand words," but lately, it feels more relevant to technology than ever before. It seems intuitive that the world of software is becoming more visual, but there's a lot more to it than that.

There seems to be a great deal of new content hitting the wires in multifamily right now. Conference season is in full swing, bringing a surge of new ideas and perspectives. There are several topics that are top if mind that will be appearing in these pages this fall. But I'm particularly excited about a series of new podcast interviews will be released over the next few weeks.

Every once in a while, you come across an idea that's much bigger than you initially realize. About a year ago, I published a paper on how unit-level search is redefining multifamily websites. It's a simple concept: Humans tend to search for things visually, and that increasingly applies to technology experiences: think Uber, travel or restaurant booking sites or apps, and so on. Multifamily assets are physical, so to meet the expectations of prospects and residents, maps need to be central to apartment search.

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.

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.

Spring conference season this year is a bit more interesting than usual. It's mostly thanks to a couple of new conferences on the circuit that I think will further important industry conversations. A few weeks ago, the inaugural "Forum," Hosted by Funnel Leasing, established a new place to discuss the increasingly popular topic of centralization. Last week saw the inaugural REBA Insights conference in Vail, CO. There were parallels between the two events that I will discuss in this post. 

The inaugural Forum—the User Conference of Funnel Leasing—is in the books. I was privileged to take part in a hugely successful event that boasted an impressive attendee list last week at the stunningly beautiful Terranea Resort near Los Angeles.