What the 2026 RETTC/Newmark RF Technology Benchmarking Survey webinar revealed, and what it left unsaid
- Consolidation is the priority nobody ranks first. It took just 7 percent of first-place votes in the 2026 RETTC/Newmark RF survey but 27 percent of second picks, the strongest second-choice showing in the set. Bell Partners is running 70 applications and is in year two of cutting, with cost discipline and property NOI as the stated catalyst.
- Third-party management breaks the single-stack model. Operators are not always the final authority on what technology gets used, since owners bring their own platforms. The workable discipline is deciding which core tools are non-negotiable, where client flexibility is offered, and selecting front-end tools agnostic enough to plug into most PMS environments.
- AI is arriving on top of an unrationalized estate. Respondents reporting no AI fell from 92 percent to 6 percent in two years, and 85 percent expect it to be transformative within one to two more. The binding constraint is people and change management, not technology, which makes rationalizing the stack the prerequisite rather than a parallel project.
A note on sourcing
The full 2026 Technology Benchmarking Survey, described by Reeves as running 60 to 70 pages, is available only to RETTC members. Maravedis is not a RETTC member and has not reviewed the report. Everything below is drawn from the publicly presented webinar discussion and the charts shown on screen during the session. Speaker comments have been paraphrased or lightly condensed for readability. Organizations seeking the complete data set can find membership information at rettc.org/about/membership.
On August 12, 2026, the Real Estate Technology & Transformation Center hosted a FutureStack webinar titled The Intelligent, Connected Enterprise, offering a first look at the fourth biennial RETTC/Newmark RF Technology Benchmarking Survey. Lori Reeves of RETTC opened the session, joined by co-hosts Rick Haughey hey, Senior Advisor at RETTC, and Hope Dunleavy, Managing Director at Newmark RF, who moderated the panel.
The panel was a serious one. Andrew Orloff, Chief Strategy Officer at Morgan Properties. Art McCann, Senior Vice President of IT at Bell Partners Inc. Cindy Fisher (Ball), President at KETTLER . Shawaun Alexander, Senior Vice President of Operations, Software and Systems at Bozzuto. Between them, they run technology decisions across a meaningful share of institutional rental housing.
The sample carries weight. Reeves noted that half of the respondents were C-suite, 49 percent were IT executives, and 44 percent identified as the primary technology decision-maker at their organization, collectively covering more than 112,000 properties and 2.8 million units across owners, operators, developers, asset managers, and third-party managers.
Three themes framed the session: tech stack rationalization, data optimization, and the evolving role of AI. For anyone working the connectivity side of multifamily, a fourth theme sat quietly underneath all three.
AI took the entire strategic oxygen supply
The pace of change in the AI data was the headline of the hour. Haughey walked through it: one to two years ago, 92 percent of respondents reported no AI at all in their operations or enterprise tech stack. Today, that figure is 6 percent. Only 14 percent describe AI as currently transformative in their organization, but 85 percent expect it to be transformative within one to two years.
That expectation gap is the most consequential number in the survey. Fisher described the trajectory as a progression from automate to assist to augment, and placed her own organization firmly in the augmentation stage, with transformation close behind. She was blunt about what changed her roadmap: eighteen months ago, Kettler was mid-migration on a data warehouse focused on dashboards and Power BI. AI arrived, dashboard work stopped, and the team pivoted toward agentic pilots and what she calls AI for BI.
Orloff added the most useful piece of caution in the session. As change accelerates, he argued, the binding constraint stops being technology and becomes people, because every workflow you change is a role you change. He also rejected the headcount-reduction framing on economic grounds, pointing out that efficiency gains get absorbed by new demands from owners and residents. Nobody, he noted, gets the free lunch.
On the emerging trends question, AI took 52 percent of first-place votes. Data security and cybersecurity followed at 13 percent, and fee transparency at 10 percent. Consolidation of technology stacks took only 7 percent of first picks but 27 percent of second picks, the strongest second-choice showing in the set.
Surprisingly, managed Wi-Fi took 1 percent as a first pick and 1 percent as a second pick. It finished last.
The rationalization squeeze is real, and it has a third-party wrinkle
McCann gave the most concrete number of the session. Bell Partners currently manages roughly 70 applications across its properties and is in year two of a simplification program, with a target he described only as fewer than 70. His catalyst was cost discipline: buying power concentrated in one solution beats the same spend spread across four, and the savings show up in property NOI.
Alexander raised the structural problem that pure consolidation logic misses. For third-party operators, a single native stack is fundamentally at odds with the business because the operator is not always the final authority on what technology gets used. Owners bring their own platforms. The discipline, in his framing, becomes deciding which core tools are non-negotiable, where client flexibility is offered, and how to select front-end tools that are agnostic enough to plug into most core PMS environments.
Fisher extended the point in a direction that matters for anyone selling into this market. Much of the friction with third-party owners, she said, comes from asset managers and investors pushing operating platforms because they believe platform ownership gets them closer to the data. If the data and insights flow anyway, the platform fight becomes unnecessary noise.
The satisfaction data reinforces where the pressure sits. Business intelligence platforms and back-office solutions post the highest satisfaction, around 70 percent and 63 percent, respectively. Hardware and IoT solutions sit at 50 percent satisfied, with 37 percent neutral. Resident experience and CX technology sit at 47 percent satisfied, 36 percent neutral, and 17 percent dissatisfied. Haughey flagged the scale of dissatisfaction across several categories as a genuine surprise.
Data optimization is where the money actually went
Asked to allocate a hypothetical $ 100 across priorities for 2026 and 2027, respondents put $ 14 into data science, warehouses, and integration work, $ 12 into centralized operations and leasing, and $ 12 into prospect-facing technology. Resident experience and back-office automation took 11 each.
Resident-facing hardware and programs, the line item that explicitly includes managed Wi-Fi, smart home technology, and building IoT, took 8 dollars.
The BI adoption trend lines were the most striking movement in the deck. Operating metrics are near universal at 96 percent. Marketing BI jumped from 24 percent two years ago to 87 percent today. Maintenance BI went from 6 percent to 66 percent. Fisher was openly enthusiastic about the maintenance number, arguing that maintenance data already sitting in the system is rich enough to drive asset-level insight without walking the property daily. Alexander described the resulting architecture as a pyramid with the data foundation at the base and AI capabilities distributed across functions above it, with predictive modeling as the payoff.
The question nobody on the panel raised
Near the end, I asked how important managed connectivity is in transforming properties into smart entities on top of which all this PropTech and AI gets deployed.
Reeves confirmed the report contains two to three graphs covering bulk broadband, managed Wi-Fi, and IoT, then opened it to the panel. Only Fisher took it, and her answer was the most operationally honest moment of the webinar.
Kettler is doing significant work in managed Wi-Fi. It remains challenging in certain markets depending on the ISP landscape. And, in her words, it is a huge resident dissatisfier. Her illustration was memorable: you could turn a resident’s water off, and they would be less unhappy than when the internet goes down.
Kettler’s response has been to bring in strategic partners, both to inform development-stage design decisions and to give site teams a support layer when connectivity fails, because site staff are not network engineers.
That exchange is the entire thesis in miniature. Connectivity ranked at the bottom of strategic trends. It captured 8 dollars of a hypothetical 100. It sits in the hardware and IoT category, with half the respondents neutral or dissatisfied. And it is simultaneously the layer that determines whether smart access, IoT sensors, resident apps, AI maintenance triage, and every other PropTech investment on that spending chart actually functions.
The industry has quietly reclassified connectivity from strategy to plumbing. Plumbing is what you stop thinking about until it fails, and then think about nothing else.
The Maravedis read
Three implications follow for vendors, MSPs, and operators.
First, the data foundation everyone is now funding depends on device-level and building-level telemetry that only reliable managed networks produce. Selling connectivity as a data enablement layer rather than a resident amenity aligns it with where the budget is actually moving.
Second, Alexander’s point about agnostic, plug-and-play tools is a direct procurement signal. Managed connectivity platforms that integrate cleanly across multiple PMS environments will win third-party managed portfolios that a proprietary stack cannot.
Third, Fisher’s admission that operators are not tech companies and need strategic partners for both development-stage design and ongoing operational support describes a managed service opportunity, not a hardware sale. That distinction is where margin lives.
Maravedis-BWA covers this territory in depth in two current reports:
• Multifamily Rental Connectivity Market Analysis in the United States 2026-2031
• PropTech Evolution in U.S. Multifamily