Smart technology is transforming the multifamily industry, opening new doors for property owners to enhance their communities and strengthen their bottom line. As resident expectations evolve and the market landscape shifts, forward-thinking owners are discovering innovative ways to elevate their properties through data-driven solutions.
Ready to unlock your community's full potential? Here are four common situations multifamily owners face—and how embracing smart technology can turn them into opportunities for growth.
1. Maintaining high occupancy rates
While vacancies are an expected expense, every day a unit sits on the market is a day you’re not achieving your full revenue potential. The faster you can fill those vacancies, the better. However, attracting new residents takes effort and money. You need to advertise, give tours and vet applications. And the more residents you can retain, the better.
Because rent prices and vacancies have an inverse relationship, owners often lower the rent to attract and retain residents. But to maintain rent growth and achieve high occupancy rates, you need to improve the resident experience, streamline the rental process and optimize your market strategy. Smart technology can help.
Improve the resident experience
More modern, convenient living keeps residents renewing their leases because they feel more at home and can’t imagine living anywhere else. Keyless entry and the ability to remotely give guests access are top benefits of smart locks, for example. Smart thermostats allow residents to keep their homes comfortable while lowering their energy bills, and integrated security systems give them peace of mind while away.
Streamline your rental process
Helping prospects get to know your community online piques their interest, while self-guided tours let them visit on their own schedule. Finally, online applications powered by automated background checks help speed up approvals and turn prospects into residents with minimal effort from your staff.
Optimize your market strategy
Analyzing market trends is critical for maximizing rental rates, but studying market data can be a full-time job all on its own. Now, software can do the heavy lifting for you. Use your own data to study how rental rates affect your vacancies, and let AI analyze overall market trends to predict future changes.
2. Managing operating expenses
Smart technology offers powerful ways to optimize operating expenses, which is especially valuable as costs evolve across labor, marketing and maintenance. While the industry has seen operating costs increase up to 9.3% per unit, innovative property owners are finding ways to protect their NOI through strategic technology investments. Here's how smart solutions can help reduce costs and improve efficiency.
Reduce energy costs
Smart thermostats and lighting can help you keep vacant and model units at ideal conditions for tours and maintenance while lowering utility costs. Meanwhile, leak detection systems can reduce wasted water from undetected leaks.
Increase predictive maintenance
Leak detectors, contact sensors, humidity sensors and thermostats can also alert you to potential issues with HVAC and plumbing. When your maintenance teams have early warnings, they can often repair existing equipment before it needs to be replaced or causes additional damage. You can reduce reactive maintenance while protecting your assets.
Automate workflows
Minimizing low-value or repetitive tasks can create more efficient processes, freeing up your staff for more important work while keeping staffing costs low. Consider automating maintenance requests, rent collection and resident communication.
3. Ensuring resident peace of mind and satisfaction
Residents' peace of mind and satisfaction are critical for keeping occupancy rates high, but they deserve their own callout because they benefit your community in other ways, too. Happy residents leave positive reviews and recommend your community to others, which makes attracting new residents easier. Keeping community members happy also reduces the burden on your team. When residents feel at home, staff members field fewer complaints.
To stay happy, residents need to feel safe and comfortable in their homes, and smart technology can help here, too. Our research, in partnership with Parks Associates, shows that neighborhood safety is nearly as important as monthly rent when choosing a place to live. Meanwhile, community appearance and maintenance are some of the most challenging hurdles for property managers—but they can make a huge difference in helping residents feel at home.
In short, residents need greater peace of mind, better communication and more proactive maintenance.
Enhance peace of mind
Smart locks, security cameras and access control systems help people feel safer at home. That’s because they have more control over who can access their homes, and you have more control over who enters your community. Remote monitoring and event logs can also give residents and staff more peace of mind.
Improve communication
These days, residents expect more self-help options and more convenient ways to communicate with your staff. Some prefer face-to-face interaction, but most often, they want to quickly ask a question, resolve an issue, or submit a maintenance request without a lot of back-and-forth. A solid resident app, answer automation and website FAQs can all help.
Boost proactive maintenance
Maintenance issues and repairs interrupt a resident’s daily routine, but you can minimize the inconvenience by automating more of your maintenance workflows. Mobile maintenance management ensures technicians are more efficient when responding to maintenance requests, while predictive maintenance helps solve issues before they affect residents at all. And both empower your technicians to spend more time beautifying your community.
4. Adapting to change
The multifamily industry is constantly evolving. From new regulations to market fluctuations to expanding technologies to trending resident expectations, it’s enough to keep any owner on their toes. While you can’t stop progress, you can stay poised to roll with the punches. Technology can help by delivering data-driven insights, maintaining a resident-centric approach and future-proofing your communities.
Get better insights
The more smart technology in your communities, the more data you can collect and analyze. You can track key performance indicators, analyze market trends and adapt your strategy accordingly. Ensure your smart technology integrates with your PMS, CMS and other systems so you can take advantage of all that data to make better decisions.
Focus on residents
Prioritizing resident satisfaction helps you stay ahead of evolving resident expectations and reviews. It also keeps your community’s reputation strong while ensuring high renewal rates and minimal vacancies.
Future-proof your communities
Proptech is constantly evolving, but you can stay ahead of the curve by choosing the right technology vendors. Focus on scalable technology with deep integrations to avoid locking yourself into any one solution. Look for cutting-edge vendors that keep adapting to change and learning from the communities they work with.
Leap forward with smart proptech
The future of multifamily property management is bright with possibility. Smart technology isn't just solving today's challenges—it's creating tomorrow's opportunities. From maximizing occupancy and streamlining operations to enhancing resident satisfaction and future-proofing your communities, each technological investment builds on the last. Start with solutions that will immediately improve your community's financial performance, then reinvest those gains into additional smart technology. This creates a powerful cycle of innovation and growth that keeps your properties ahead of the curve.
Learn more about budgeting in your multifamily community, then check out our guide to Smart Apartments.