Ian Bingham joined Daniel Management Group as a partner in early 2026. With 27-plus years in multifamily and now helping lead growth at a 5,000+ unit firm, Ian sat down with Blueprint to talk acquisitions, the real role of AI in operations, what the industry is getting wrong about consumer adoption, and the advice he’d give every vendor pitching multifamily today.
Ian will be speaking at Blueprint this fall, where multifamily’s leading operators, technologists, and capital allocators gather to debate where the business is headed — and where AI, capital, and operating models are actually moving the needle. We caught up with him ahead of the conference.
You joined Daniel Management Group about four months ago. Tell us about the role.
I joined right before NMHC — second week of January. We’re a smaller firm at around 5,000 units, which in my 27-plus years in the industry is the smallest I’ve ever been with.
I’m wearing three hats. The first I’ve worn for a while: helping grow our third-party property management business. The second is acquisitions — I just spent the last 36 hours on the road looking at four different deals. The third is assessing and tweaking the overall management platform so the growth we’re attempting can be executed seamlessly. We’re scaling the company in a lot of different ways, including retooling operations.
What role does technology play in all that?
A central one. I just spent three days at AIM in Huntington Beach and spoke on a few panels — one on renewal automation, another on the broader, multifaceted role of AI in our business beyond leasing. That panel probably left us asking more questions than we answered.
There are going to be 30 panels on AI at every conference now. It’s the elephant in the room — the centralization conversation of five years ago. Immediately post-COVID, all we could talk about was centralization and its effect on headcount. We didn’t reduce headcount, but we added efficiency. Now the question is how to layer predictive analytics and AI on top of that.
I’m using it everywhere. Even on the underwriting side, I’m leaning on Claude to gut-check my modeling. When I look at our existing operations, renewals were already automated. Delinquency is automated until a legal or resident requirement forces a human into the loop. There’s a lot of automation in maintenance now. But that raises a fair question: how do you automate something that needs a wrench and a hammer?
I think there’s an opportunity to get AI good enough to walk a resident through DIY fixes without frustrating them. If they say, “No, I want a human,” then through your property management software or a bolt-on, you give them immediate, monitored, face-to-face access — like you and I are talking right now. The tech can see the problem, mitigate damage if it’s a leak, and be prepared to fix it when they arrive.
Instead of an after-hours call turning into a three-hour call because the technician has to drive back to the shop for parts, they grab what they need on the way out. That’s where we can lean on tech to be more efficient.
You’re out on acquisition visits this week. Has technology changed how you’re underwriting deals — or your appetite for growth?
Appetite is unchanged. AI isn’t going to influence the lending environment, and it’s not going to change equity’s threshold for returns. So what can it do?
What I’m finding is that AI is starting to do a really good job sourcing information. A lot of how we source loan information or figure out what might make a deal work is public data, and AI is scraping it at a pretty good pace. I can pull sales histories of like assets in a market and underwrite to what seems to be a more accurate, modern cap rate. The exit cap is always a wish or a guess — hopefully an educated one — but understanding where things are trading when it’s not easy to figure out, AI has genuinely helped. And it’ll only get better with time.
It won’t take the human element out of it. At the end of the day, you still have to get a lender to lend and equity to invest. Those are still partially a story. AI just lets you tell a better one — or kill a deal faster with better intelligence.
Do you see real NOI savings from AI, or will it follow the centralization pattern — efficiencies gained without headcount cuts?
I think there will be real NOI savings. What we have to figure out as an industry is how to make them quantifiable.
Take the renewal process. If AI can help us summarize whether a resident is more or less likely to renew — based on work order volume, how we responded, how we reacted — then you’re better forecasting renewal retention. That lets you better forecast which months your lease expirations need to fall in, and from there your marketing spend and your turnover expense. Those last two are very quantifiable.
How you tie all that out to the rest of the technology you’ve rolled onto the property is where we’re still struggling. There are a lot of great tools, but especially on the supplier side at AIM this week, when I asked, “Do you have case studies where this has driven return?” I got a lot of “yes, but…” or “conceptually.” I don’t know that anyone has it in black and white yet, because AI is evolving so fast. It’s hard to hit a moving helicopter.
Where is the industry underestimating AI?
Cynicism is probably a better word than underestimation, especially on the asset manager and deal side. Until it’s quantifiable, a lot of the people making spend decisions treat it as white noise until it isn’t. And right now, conceptually, it’s still a lot of noise. The underestimation is in the lack of evidence today of the efficiencies AI can bring.
When I look at the successful centralization efforts — there were plenty of failures, too — what AI has done is amplify them. Where it didn’t result in headcount reduction, it resulted in better customer service. I’ve seen it in proof of concept. We freed up people we hired to be dynamic personalities. Instead of gluing them to a desk to chase down renewals, delinquent money, or work order follow-up, we got them out in front of our teams. I’d hope as an industry we’re embracing that opportunity — to be more forward-facing, host more events, be a better customer service voice for the property.
And where are we overestimating it?
Consumer adoption.
I tell this story on stage. I have a 25-year-old and an almost-27-year-old. They live on their own and they’re successful in their own right. But when they were teenagers and I’d say, “Order pizzas for dinner — just use my credit card,” they’d say, “I don’t want to call.” We raised our kids in Chicago — Lou Malnati’s, Rosati’s, some good Chicago staples — but at the time, Lou Malnati’s didn’t have a great app. So you had to call. My kids would opt for a big chain, lower-quality pizza, because it was easier. They preferred less human interaction.
That cohort is now the renter pool — late 20s, early 30s, grown up with iPads. Conversely, boomers and Gen Xers like myself didn’t grow up with that. I’m a mix. There are things like a work order — unless it’s urgent, I’m fine hammering that into an app and getting a push notification when the tech is on the way. But when I’m renewing my lease, and it’s a third of my income annually, that’s a big decision. I want to talk to someone.
What we need to figure out is how to meet the renter where they are. It’s not going to be a one-size-fits-all approach. We can’t anticipate 100% adoption on high-touchpoint areas like renewals — and based on renter preference, I don’t think we’ll be there in the foreseeable future.
Any specific examples of where that adoption gap is showing up on-site?
You get one of these higher-end, sophisticated leasing assistants — I was told, under penalty of friendship, to stop calling them bots — and they’re doing a lot. They’re pretty good. But sometimes, through lack of acknowledgment or because we don’t make it clear up front in the conversation, prospects come into the office and ask for that “person” by name. The leasing assistant did such a fantastic job that the prospect thinks they’re meeting that person today. And worse, if our on-site staff isn’t trained well on what to say, they respond, “Oh, that person doesn’t work here — are you sure your appointment’s at this property?” You can go from what starts as a great experience to stubbing your toe in a missed opportunity because A and B aren’t communicating.
Many in the Blueprint community are vendors. What advice would you give them?
Three things.
First, when you talk about your roadmap, talk about where it ends. “Roadmap” has become buzzword bingo — a way to say “we’re working on it but we don’t have a solution.” Some use it well; some use it as a crutch.
Second, be up front. Tell me what you can do and what you can’t do. The technology is moving so fast that there’s a lot of unfulfilled promising going on. I’ve experienced it firsthand: “Wait — in our demo, this was something that was done well.” “Well, it will be.”
Third, integrations are key. I understand what the PMSes charge for them — I have my own opinions on that — but that’s the world we live in. If you don’t have those integrations, you’re contributing to the tech fatigue we’re putting on our associates. When I walk up to a property and the manager has 20 tabs open on their screen — not functional tabs the way you’d have them on Amazon, but 20 separate tabs for different functions at the same property — that’s broken. We have to get better at that.
I’d also caution my supplier and vendor friends: “proprietary” isn’t the cool word you think it is. When someone says “proprietary,” my hair stands up. Because what’s my solution if you exit, or you sell to a PMS that isn’t mine, and the two no longer play nice with each other? You can get burned. I’ve been burned. I’ve seen it.
