Few operators have a clearer vantage point on the future of rental housing than Alex O’Brien. As CEO of Cardinal Group Companies, O’Brien oversees one of the largest and most diversified operating platforms in residential real estate, a vertically integrated business spanning investment, development, and third-party management across both student housing and conventional multifamily.
Cardinal’s management platform now oversees more than 115,000 student housing beds and roughly 14,000 conventional units nationwide, and by the company’s own projection it will close the year as the largest student housing operator in the country. Two decades after its founding, Cardinal has built that scale on a simple premise: understanding today’s renters — student renters in particular — is the clearest available window into where the broader rental market is heading.
O’Brien will join us at Blueprint this year, where he’ll dig into the operational questions Cardinal is wrestling with in real time: how centralization and AI are reshaping the on-site experience, why resistance to technology adoption looks so different depending on whose job it threatens, and whether platforms of Cardinal’s scale will soon build the software they once bought. The conversation below is a preview of that discussion, lightly edited for length and clarity.
BH: Cardinal does a number of different things — student housing, conventional multifamily, investment, development, third-party management. What are the unifying factors that tie it all together?
AO: Some of it is just the entrepreneurial spirit of asking how we can use the platform to have the greatest impact. But the unifying piece of our DNA is the idea of being an industry employer of choice. If you take the high ground on employee engagement, culture, and values, your opportunity set expands dramatically, because you attract a deeper talent pool.
More recently, we’ve tried to really zero in. Student housing is still our core business — by the end of this year we’ll be the largest student operator in the country. What that gives us is an unmatched view into the renters of tomorrow. Nearly all of Cardinal’s expansion has come from the fact that we understand today’s renters, and because we serve them at the very front end of the renter journey, we have a good sense of where the puck is going.
The focus right now is what I’d call hospitality in the age of centralization. The industry has talked for years about hiring from the hotel world and putting customer service first, but there have always been structural barriers to delivering that kind of experience — staffing ratios, the decentralization of work, training, the generalization of tasks. We firmly believe the combination of centralization and AI-enabled workflows is the tipping point that finally lets us treat customer service as the first line item rather than the ninth. All of our work right now — new job descriptions, new training, new hiring practices, new technology — is built around the resident experience and the kind of people who will now call property management home.
BH: Coming from the student housing world, do you see an advantage in serving such a tech-savvy resident base — especially relative to the point solutions that are built for conventional multifamily first?
AO: I do. What today’s student renters are comfortable with — across amenities, communication, community building, the whole operational workflow — is very well correlated with what the broader market will expect tomorrow. The idea that there’s a distinct segment of renters who are more tech-savvy is real, but that wave is going to move through the entire market quickly. Our residents today are 21 years old, and they’re going to fill up every apartment building in Chicago over the next few years. The assumption that renters aren’t comfortable with technology is changing fast. It’s a bit like watching a 13-year-old do their homework with AI and then wondering whether AI will be in the workplace in five years.
That gives us a unique petri dish for studying resident expectations and communication, from the prospect journey through the resident experience. Most operators would love to have a read on tomorrow’s renters today so they can plan accordingly, and I think we have that. Some of it is technological, but a lot of it is socioeconomic — what actually matters to people. We’ve talked about efficiency and sustainability and energy for years, but the way a 21-year-old talks about energy, conservation, and AI is genuinely different, and that perspective is going to work its way through the industry.
BH: Having that large pool of 18-to-22-year-olds who will be tomorrow’s renters, are there things you’ve learned that surprised you?
AO: The comfort with technology is there, but the demand for perfection is extraordinary. Every software product we’ve ever rolled out has been a little clunky at first. But the moment an AI tool produces a garbled or hallucinated response, the pitchforks come out. I’m not sure that’s unique to residents — it’s certainly true of team members and employees across our industry — but the resistance to technology adoption feels qualitatively different now.
A lot of that comes down to how the tool is framed. When a product is seen as helping the on-site team, people will work through the rough edges. When it’s seen as something that will change job descriptions and future employment, it’s met with a completely different mindset. The resistance to change has been the biggest factor, and I don’t think we should pretend otherwise.
The other surprise is how much young renters talk about the energy cost of AI. People are completely comfortable using these tools in their personal lives — asking an assistant to plan a vacation — but the moment AI shows up in a workflow, the conversation shifts to environmental impact. I don’t want to call it a surprise so much as human psychology, but it’s been fascinating to watch.
BH: What share of your portfolio is third-party managed, and what challenges does that create when it comes to rolling out technology?
AO: About 90% is third-party managed. We still have the investment business, but the bulk of our focus has been on growing the operating platform. At the base layer, the property management systems are mostly Entrata, with some Yardi and some RealPage.
One of the most interesting shifts I’ve seen is ownership groups and asset managers who want to use a third-party manager but still want a heavy say in the technology stack. Some of that is genuine curiosity, and some of it is a change in how technology gets sold — a lot of vendors now go around the property manager and straight to the ownership group. The challenge for us is that we run a deep evaluation process: multiple rounds of national partnership and technology reviews covering security, APIs, and cost. We’ll come back with a recommendation, and a group will say they’ve talked to another AI company that sounds great, so they’re going to use that instead.
We try to meet third-party clients where they are, but the value of a platform is the consistency of the workflows it produces. When a group insists on a specific tool and it doesn’t perform as promised, the question becomes what we’re going to do about it — and the honest answer is that we don’t have the training or support infrastructure for a tool we didn’t select. There’s so much curiosity around new solutions that it gets very noisy, and a lot of the time the alternative is different without being better. You end up with the same performance and worse training, worse implementation, and worse support.
BH: You’ve raised concerns about vendor survivability and the shift away from long-term contracts. Where do you land on both?
AO: Survivability has to be part of the conversation. There might be fifteen solutions in a given category, and I genuinely don’t know whether some of them are ongoing businesses — whether they’ll get rolled up, priced out, or simply disappear. You can spend an enormous amount of time adopting a product and then find the company isn’t around a year or two later. That’s a real concern, and it factors into how much time we’re willing to invest in implementing any one tool.
I also believe long-term contracts are a thing of the past. I can’t imagine signing a five-year agreement with a technology provider anymore, including the property management systems. That was the old model — high switching costs locked you in — but I think everything is moving toward much shorter terms. That’s a difficult shift for vendors, because long-term contracts were how they raised capital and funded further investment in the product.
BH: There’s a growing build-versus-buy question in the industry. Do you think platforms of real scale start building their own technology?
The industry’s rubric has always been buy, build, or partner, and those decisions were driven by the cost of development, technical debt, and ongoing maintenance. But two things have changed at once. The first is consolidation — the top of the industry is as large as it’s ever been. If you add up the NMHC top 10, 20, or 50, the total units under management dwarf where they were a decade ago. The second is that the cost of development has fallen dramatically.
It’s easy to say a 10,000-unit operator isn’t going to build these solutions itself. But a 200,000-unit platform has real resources, and now that development costs have come down so far, there’s a legitimate question about what stops a group from building its own tools with a small, capable team. I think you could, and you might do it better, faster, and cheaper. The interesting question is whether the property management companies with true scale start turning into custom technology builders themselves.
The deeper point is that property management systems were designed for humans to work inside them. If you were building one today, you wouldn’t design it that way — you’d design it for AI to operate it directly. All the resistance to integration may ultimately push the industry to rethink the model entirely rather than stitching systems together. That has implications well beyond startups; it raises real questions for the large incumbents whose businesses were built on systems that humans manually feed information into.
