S5 E07: MARC - How AI Finally Solves Contract Management

What happens when a multifamily technology company partners with one of the world's leading AI platforms? In this episode of Multifamily Tech Talk, Dom Beveridge and Jonathan discuss the evolution of AI in multifamily with Tyler Christiansen (Funnel), Kristy Simonette (Camden Property Trust) and Zack Reneau-Wedeen (Sierra), exploring how partnerships, rather than proprietary development alone, are changing the way AI is built and deployed.The panel explores:Build, buy or partner: Funnel's journey from developing its own AI to acquiring LeaseHawk and partnering with Sierra—and why the pace of AI development is changing technology strategy.Horizontal vs. vertical AI: How combining Sierra's conversational AI capabilities with Funnel's multifamily expertise creates a different model for delivering industry-specific technology.Outcomes over technology: Why conversational quality, call handling and leasing performance matter more than the underlying technology—and how outcome-based pricing can align incentives.Agents, journeys and guardrails: How AI agents are designed to handle complex conversations, move between workflows and operate within defined controls.The human in the loop: Why AI is changing, rather than eliminating, the role of leasing teams and contact centers—and how operators decide where human involvement adds value.To get access to the latest 20for20 articles, papers and news about forthcoming events, subscribe to our blog at 20for20.com.Jonathan Buckelew (Co-Host) is the co-founder of the CRE AI Studio, a resource for real estate owners and operators adopting AI. Learn more at: creaistudio.com.Connect with Dom Beveridge (Principal, 20for20) via LinkedIn, or email to [email protected] theme, “Beautiful Geometry” by Phish Funk is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.

Contract management has long been a blind spot in multifamily asset management. In this episode of Multifamily Tech Talk, Dom Beveridge and Jonathan Buckelew are joined by Aaron Devitt, founder and CEO of MARC, and Aaron Ross, president of Birge & Held, to discuss how AI is making it possible to understand and control contracts at a scale that was previously impossible.The panel explores:The contract management problem: Why procurement, contract management and accounts payable have traditionally operated separately, leaving owners with limited visibility into vendor commitments and spending.Why AI-first matters: How the technology finds, interprets and organizes contracts and invoices without relying on employees to upload and maintain records.From contracts to capital strategy: How portfolio-wide benchmarking reveals spending differences, opportunities to standardize contracts and potential savings.Invoice reconciliation: Why comparing invoices against the underlying terms of contracts, rather than purchase orders, can uncover overcharges that conventional processes miss.Vertical AI vs. general-purpose LLMs: Why processing millions of documents requires more than connecting Claude to a system of record, and how model selection, quality assurance and human feedback improve reliability.To get access to the latest 20for20 articles, papers and news about forthcoming events, subscribe to our blog at 20for20.com.Jonathan Buckelew (Co-Host) is the co-founder of the CRE AI Studio, a resource for real estate owners and operators adopting AI. Learn more at: creaistudio.com.Connect with Dom Beveridge (Principal, 20for20) via LinkedIn, or email to [email protected] theme, “Beautiful Geometry” by Phish Funk is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.

Renewals account for more than half of a typical multifamily community's revenue, yet they receive a fraction of the attention devoted to new leases. In this bonus episode of Multifamily Tech Talk, Dom Beveridge is joined by Rob Hayden (Founder and CEO, Renew), Tyler Lucas (VP of Advanced Systems and Technology, Gates Hudson), and Diana Norbury (SVP of Operations, Pillar Properties) to discuss the findings of 20for20's new research paper, What Renewals Can Be.The panel explores:The renewal gap: Why renewals have historically lacked the systems, accountability, and operational attention devoted to new leasing.The cost of delays: How slow decisions and inconsistent follow-up increase vacancy risk, marketing costs, and operational uncertainty.Pricing as a behavioral tool: How time-based renewal incentives encourage earlier decisions, improving predictability and retention without simply discounting rents.Portfolio-wide visibility: How a systematic approach to renewals helps operators identify performance problems, improve execution, and manage compliance.Centralization and automation: How purpose-built technology and AI reduce administrative work while allowing teams to focus on the residents whose decisions they can influence.Understanding resident behavior: How engagement data and better digital experiences reveal why residents make renewal decisions and enable more personalized conversations.Beyond retention: How operators can turn non-renewals into opportunities to retain residents elsewhere in their portfolios.Download the white paper, "What Renewals Can Be" at 20for20.com/publicationsTo get access to the latest 20for20 articles, papers and news about forthcoming events, subscribe to our blog at 20for20.com.Connect with Dom Beveridge (Principal, 20for20) via LinkedIn, or email to [email protected] theme, “Beautiful Geometry” by Phish Funk is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.

In this episode of Multifamily Tech Talk, Dom Beveridge and Jon Buckelew are joined by Arjun Kannan of ResiDesk and Zach Menzer of White Oak Partners to talk about how AI can improve resident intelligence, and how that improves property performance.The panel explores:The missing resident journey: The structural reasons why multifamily companies know less than online retailers about their customers, and how AI changes that.Beyond surveys: AI supports continuous, open-ended conversations that capture more context and nuance than scores or event-based surveys.From sentiment to action: Resident feedback becomes more valuable when operators can identify which issues affect renewals, highlight the issues worth pursuing and eliminate those that lead nowhere.Designing AI with human endpoints: How ResiDesk uses AI to scale communication, while preserving human judgment where trust and sensitivity matter.The economics of LLMs: How many operators To get access to the latest 20for20 articles, papers and news about forthcoming events, subscribe to our blog at 20for20.com.Jonathan Buckelew (Co-Host) is the co-founder of the CRE AI Studio, a resource for real estate owners and operators adopting AI. Learn more at: creaistudio.com.Connect with Dom Beveridge (Principal, 20for20) via LinkedIn, or email to [email protected] theme, “Beautiful Geometry” by Phish Funk is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.

In this episode of Multifamily Tech Talk, Dom Beveridge and Jon Buckelew are joined by TailorBird co-founders Tim Cantwell and Ashish Jain to discuss how an AI-first technology is changing capital planning in multifamily.The panel explores:How AI uses existing visual data (like social media images) to build accurate 3D property models, reducing the need to rediscover information each time work is planned.How combining property models with financial and operational data can improve how we allocate capital to multifamily communities.The role of vertical AI: While general-purpose models provide powerful inference, industry-specific technology makes their output predictable, repeatable and appropriate for high-stakes decisions.Where vibe coding belongs: LLMs work well for one-off tasks, but recurring processes require trusted data and systems that somebody is prepared to maintain.AI and human judgment: Experienced professionals can achieve substantial gains from AI because they know which questions to ask and how to assess the answers.  To get access to the latest 20for20 articles, papers and news about forthcoming events, subscribe to our blog at 20for20.com.Jonathan Buckelew (Co-Host) is the co-founder of the CRE AI Studio, a resource for real estate owners and operators adopting AI. Learn more at: creaistudio.com.Connect with Dom Beveridge (Principal, 20for20) via LinkedIn, or email to [email protected] theme, “Beautiful Geometry” by Phish Funk is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.

In this episode of Multifamily Tech Talk, Dom Beveridge and Jonathan Buckelew are joined by Minna Song, CEO and Sarab Bhasin, Senior Data Engineer with EliseAI to discuss the company’s evolution, the architecture behind its technology and the launch of Apollo, the new prompt-based property management interface.The panel explores:From leasing to the resident journey: EliseAI’s development from lead response into delinquency, resident communication and other property management workflows.One agent rather than many products: AI can work across functions that traditional software treats as separate categories, creating a more continuous experience.Apollo: EliseAI’s new embedded agent lets users request actions, retrieve insights and create reports through a single natural-language interface.Proactive intelligence: As AI gains access to more operating context, it can surface problems and opportunities without waiting for users to ask the right question.A different view of tech consolidation: The objective is not simply to reduce the number of vendors, but to reconsider which tasks people need to perform at all.Purpose-built AI and general LLMs: The panel contrasts frontier models with systems that contain property-specific context, operating rules and the ability to take action.To get access to the latest 20for20 articles, papers and news about forthcoming events, subscribe to our blog at 20for20.com.Jonathan Buckelew (Co-Host) is the co-founder of the CRE AI Studio, a resource for real estate owners and operators adopting AI. Learn more at: creaistudio.com.Connect with Dom Beveridge (Principal, 20for20) via LinkedIn, or email to [email protected] theme, “Beautiful Geometry” by Phish Funk is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.

In this episode of Multifamily Tech Talk with 20for20, Dom Beveridge and Jon Buckelew are joined by Donald Davidoff and Jason Whittington of Real Estate Business Analytics (REBA) to explore what it means for an analytics platform to become AI-first.The panel explores:How AI allows users to converse with their data, adding a new way to access insights, and where that belongs relative to dashboards and other established tools.How new capabilities increase the need for clean, governed and consistently defined data remains the foundation for trustworthy analysis.The role of the semantic model: Normalizing data from different systems ensures that users and AI agents work from the same business definitions.Where not to use AI: Rules and conventional statistics remain better suited to decisions that must be reproducible, defensible and consistent.Where multifamily operators should build their competitive advantage, and the role of trusted technology in an LLM-driven world.To get access to the latest 20for20 articles, papers and news about forthcoming events, subscribe to our blog at 20for20.com.Jonathan Buckelew (Co-Host) is the co-founder of the CRE AI Studio, a resource for real estate owners and operators adopting AI. Learn more at: creaistudio.com.Connect with Dom Beveridge (Principal, 20for20) via LinkedIn, or email to [email protected] theme, “Beautiful Geometry” by Phish Funk is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.

In this episode of Multifamily Tech Talk, Dom Beveridge and Jonathan Bucklew are joined by AppFolio’s Matthew Baird, CTO and Teddy Ho, Director of Product, AI. AppFolio was built long before generative AI, but began rethinking its platform soon after the arrival of ChatGPT. The resulting journey from a traditional system of record toward an AI-first platform is the subject of this episode.The panel explores:The recent history of AppFolio’s technology, and its early response to generative AI and its decision to let users interact with property management software through natural language.How customers’ embrace of AppFolio’s natural language interface breaks down conventional feature boundaries in property management software, How repeatable processes and operational knowledge can be encoded into workflows rather than remaining in spreadsheets, employees’ heads.How AppFolio combines the language model with property management context, permissions and rules governing how work should be performed, and how it incorporates external LLMs.What AppFolio learns from customers’ prompts and how it provides a clearer view of what customers expect the platform to do than conventional clickstream data.What’s coming next: How AI may raise expectations, reduce manual data assembly and change how we interact with software.To get access to the latest 20for20 articles, papers and news about forthcoming events, subscribe to our blog at 20for20.com.Jonathan Buckelew (Co-Host) is the co-founder of the CRE AI Studio, a resource for real estate owners and operators adopting AI. Learn more at: creaistudio.com.Connect with Dom Beveridge (Principal, 20for20) via LinkedIn, or email to [email protected] theme, “Beautiful Geometry” by Phish Funk is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.

In this first episode of the new season of Multifamily Tech Talk, Dom Beveridge and Jonathan Buckelew are joined by two seasoned CTOs: Greg Carey of The RMR Group and Doug Pearce of Waterton to discuss how their organizations are adopting AI and what they are learning along the way. The panel explores:Three levels of AI adoption: Personal productivity, workflow automation and proprietary platforms each offer different sources of value.How the biggest opportunity lies not in accelerating existing processes, but in redesigning them around the outcomes companies want to achieve.What AI automation has to do with centralization and automationHow build-versus-buy decisions are changing as AI-generated code makes internal development more practical, while increasing the value of vendors with proprietary data, scale and genuine integration capabilities.A new “front door” for technology: Core systems will remain the trusted source of record, but AI may become the interface through which users direct work across multiple platforms.To get access to the latest 20for20 articles, papers and news about forthcoming events, subscribe to our blog at 20for20.com.Jonathan Buckelew (Co-Host) is the co-founder of the CRE AI Studio, a resource for real estate owners and operators adopting AI. Learn more at: creaistudio.com.Connect with Dom Beveridge (Principal, 20for20) via LinkedIn, or email to [email protected] theme, “Beautiful Geometry” by Phish Funk is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.

Maintenance improvement is often framed as a route to lower staffing costs. In this episode of Tech Talk with 20for20, a panel accompanying the release of The New Economics of Maintenance Improvements explores a much broader source of value: better operations, happier residents and stronger NOI.Dom Beveridge is joined by Josh Gampp of UDR, Gregory Stobart of MG Properties and Sorin Michnea of SuiteSpot to discuss:The real sources of ROI in maintenance, and how time savings translate into faster turns, better service and stronger retention not necessarily direct labor savings.A single source of truth: Bringing maintenance, resident and operational data together gives teams the context to identify problems and make better decisions.Workflow-driven operations: Consistent playbooks improve planning and execution while preserving the flexibility required by different properties and markets.Communication built into the workflow: Automated updates keep residents informed and reduce the delays and administrative work caused by manual handoffs.KPIs as diagnostic tools: Metrics should reveal where workflows need attention, rather than becoming narrow targets that teams learn to manage around.Download your FREE copy of the new 20for20 White Paper “The New Economics of Maintenance Improvement” here.Special thanks to our sponsor for this research project, SuiteSpot.To get access to the latest 20for20 articles, papers and news about forthcoming events, subscribe to our blog at 20for20.com.Connect with Dom Beveridge (Principal, 20for20) via LinkedIn, or email to [email protected] theme, “Beautiful Geometry” by Phish Funk is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.