The role of employees vs AI has the multifamily industry split into two competing strategies for implementation.
By Paul Bergeron
AI is now ubiquitous in multifamily operations. It can already answer prospect questions, manage follow-up, summarize conversations, and complete routine workflows. Those capabilities are improving and becoming less distinctive as adoption spreads.
The more consequential part of AI adoption comes from the property management companies making two different bets about the future of apartment operations. One is about whether AI should replace people or free them up to increase their impact. The other is who should control the technology ecosystem, and the value of long-term flexibility to operators.
The first bet: The battle over the role of people and AI in operations
The first bet is personal: Where should humans and multifamily AI fit within operations?
One camp is moving toward autonomous property management, betting that AI can manage much of the renter journey with less human involvement. The economic argument is easy to understand. Multifamily operators face persistent pressure to control expenses, and AI can absorb much of the work.
The trouble is an AI-only approach leaves little room for the nuance and trust housing requires. A failed move-in, an unusual application, or a resident considering renewal may require judgment, reassurance, or someone empowered to solve an exception.
The other school of thought acknowledges these shortcomings and conversely sees multifamily as fundamentally a people business. In this model, technology completes business-critical workflows and synthesizes data so human teams can focus on the interactions that influence conversion, retention, and resident trust.
In this paradigm, AI serves as a force multiplier, increasing the number of units a team can support and the value of the time employees spend with renters.
The second bet: consolidate or stay open
The second bet is architectural: whether to consolidate the technology stack under a single provider or keep it open so the operator can swap pieces as the market shifts.
For the first group, the appeal of a closed, all-in-one platform is straightforward, especially in an AI world where unified data is generally considered a strength. Yet closed systems require a significant leap of faith from multifamily operators to assume that one provider will continue offering the right technology as the market changes.
For example, data and workflows are tightly bound to one software provider; adopting new tools becomes harder, particularly when tied to accounting and ledgers, disrupting the larger system around it. What begins as consolidation because of convenience can gradually become a constraint, and operators can find their strategy limited by what their technology vendor is willing to build.
For the second group, operators who value long-term optionality, the calculation reverses, and the ability to replace a component becomes more valuable than the convenience of a single system.
What makes that tradeoff possible is the connective technology underneath it: Model Context Protocol (MCP) connectors, APIs, and webhooks that coordinate workflows across systems, teams, and AI while keeping each component independent enough to swap out.
“Technology shouldn’t force a property management company into a rigid box or try to remove the human connection from housing,” Tyler Christiansen, CEO of Funnel, a multifamily front-office-only AI platform, said in a release.
“When AI handles workflows, and humans focus on high-value interactions, three things happen: teams thrive, renters get a better experience, and the business results follow.”
A choice that will outlast today’s technology
The two bets are connected, because how open an operator’s platform is determines how freely it can decide where its teams belong in the renter journey. Closed platforms often come with prescribed workflows that limit optionality to insert human team involvement at key moments and can create a commoditized renter experience.
The AI tools will keep changing. The more lasting decision operators need to contend with is who controls the operating model, and whether operators or their vendors decide how a portfolio runs. Operators that preserve control will be better positioned to adopt new technology without surrendering the flexibility or human judgment that differentiates their businesses.
Some of the industry’s most advanced operators are already making that choice deliberately. UDR Inc., a REIT with an over 60,000-unit portfolio, often credited as an early leader in centralization and technology, is leaning into AI to support its teams and increase their impact. Its approach offers an early view of how one large operator is orchestrating workflows across AI, other technology, and employees.
“At UDR, we’ve spent years building a centralized, self-service operating model. This allows us to build on that foundation and simplify the experience for residents, empower our teams, and continually evolve how we operate at scale,” Josh Gampp, SVP of centralized operations and CTO, UDR, told GlobeSt.com.
UDR has committed to both an open technology stack and a model that keeps its teams in the renter journey. Orchestration is how the company puts that second commitment into practice.
Putting the bets into practice
As is often the case in bets pitted against one another, UDR’s approach points to a more nuanced future for property management, with AI redistributing work, expanding each team’s capacity, and bringing people into the moments where empathy and trust matter most.
In practice, for operators like UDR, that means two tools working together on Funnel’s front-office-only platform. The first, Fenix, is a unified AI for renters, residents, and property management teams. The second, Workflow Studio, is a builder that lets UDR’s own team decide what happens at each step of the renter journey and whether technology, AI, or a person handles it.
“What excites us about Fenix is the vision of one AI that can converse, delegate, and evaluate across the entire renter journey. It communicates with renters knowing the full context of their journey and sentiment, takes meaningful work off teams’ plates, and turns portfolio-level data into insights,” Gampp said.
“While Workflow Studio brings orchestration to life by giving us a way to intentionally coordinate how our human associates, AI, and other technology work together across the renter journey.”
The technology will keep improving, and eventually most operators will have access to similar AI capabilities, built off the same underlying LLMs. The operators who win this era will not be the ones with the most AI; they will be the ones who deliberately decide what to automate and where their people still matter most.
About the author:
Paul Bergeron is a free-lance writer who covers the multifamily industry
