Most multifamily operators are scrambling to get their data in order now that AI has made it valuable. Waterton spent the better part of a decade doing it anyway. The Chicago-based firm is a 30-year-old, value-add multifamily investment advisor running roughly 30,000 units as a vertically integrated owner-operator, and it has quietly assembled six to seven years of operational history into a single source of truth. Doug Pearce, who has run technology for the group for the past 12 years, calls the timing fortuitous. The payoff is real either way.
That head start on data shapes everything else: the property stack, the centralization push, and the discipline Pearce brings to every vendor conversation. We get into all of it below. The throughline is hard returns. If a tool doesn’t show up on the bottom line, it has a harder case to make.
Pearce will join us on stage at Blueprint, September 22-24 in Las Vegas, alongside hundreds of other speakers and the thousands of operators, founders, and investors who make up the built world’s biggest technology gathering. Anyone wrestling with the same centralization, AI, and vendor-selection questions Pearce works through below should join us in Las Vegas.
BH: To start, tell us a bit about Waterton and your role there.
DP: Waterton is a Chicago-based, 30-year-old firm. We’re a multifamily investment advisor focused on value-add. I’ve been with the company about 12 years, running technology for the group, so I’ve seen a lot of change over that time, all for the better. It’s a busy time.
BH: How about the portfolio and strategy?
DP: We’re at around 30,000 units. We’re a vertically integrated owner-operator, so everyone at the property is a Waterton employee. We do a little third-party management, and we’ll take advantage if the right opportunity comes along, but it’s not something we chase as our core business. Our hold period is generally in the four-to-six-year range.
BH: Walk me through your technology stack today.
DP: On the property side, we’re using the Yardi stack for the most part. We’ve layered in additional tools on top – vendor partner products with leasing and resident AI functionality, including maintenance components.
Internally, we’re a Microsoft shop with a data warehouse holding six to seven years of operational history. That was a bit fortuitous. AI is completely focused on data, and we’d already spent the last seven years building out a single source of truth for Waterton, so everyone reports off the same data internally. I’d like to say we planned it that way, but I’m not sure that’s entirely the case.
BH: Tell me about those add-ons.
DP: We recently layered in solutions for revenue management credit screening, and rewards, like a lot of our peers. We’re constantly evaluating potential technology solutions and testing providers to see if they make sense for Waterton. We are nimble enough that we can pilot these solutions in practical settings and then implement those that deliver measurable value to our residents and associates; right now we’re testing a lease-audit agent.
On the other side of things, we spend a lot of time on property infrastructure: smart building functionality, utility management that can lessen energy or water consumption, that kind of thing. We pilot or implement those where they make sense in the portfolio, sometimes based on region or weather. EV charging is another focus. It’s an amenity, and it lets us be a little greener at the same time.
BH: Any big strategic priorities on the technology side over the next year?
DP: Everything starts and ends with AI right now. On the community side, we’ve centralized our back office like a lot of our peers; bad debt and delinquency chasing, AP, and AR are all centralized, and we’ve removed a good chunk of the ACM role from the properties. Anything that reduces workload at the communities is a focus. We file it under centralization, but really it’s about taking non-value-add tasks off the site team so they can focus on resident support.
We’ll be kicking the tires on centralized leasing in the second half of this year, and we’ve just launched centralized screening at about five communities. A lot of our bigger peers have run hard down the centralization road; we’ve taken a more slow-and-steady approach. For us, centralized leasing is not about replacing in-person interaction; it’s about creating a hybrid model that meets prospects where they are, supports the way they prefer to tour and engage, and creates a strong career path for associates who thrive in the leasing function.
From an AI standpoint, the question is always where we can layer it on in a way that pays for itself and then some. Our current AI solutions have done that for us. We’ve avoided hiring centralization bodies because we layered on the AI functionality, which tells a nice story. At the corporate office, the focus now is automating workflows and taking repetitive, non-value-add tasks off people’s plates so they can spend more time on the business.
BH: Are there parts of the stack facing challenges right now, or pilots that haven’t gone as well?
DP: The area we haven’t really gotten to yet is maintenance. There’s a lot of opportunity there, but we’re fighting a resource crunch; you can only have so many irons in the fire at once. Maintenance clearly affects resident satisfaction, yet our industry doesn’t do much to measure it. I think AI can get out in front of that and support it. I’m not going to say you can centralize maintenance, because that’s a harder ask, but there’s a lot of room to do it better and smarter than we do today.
BH: What advice would you give technology vendors trying to pitch you?
DP: Focus on ROI, not on how cool the solution is. There are a lot of players in this space, and often you’ve got five vendors pitching what is essentially the same solution. The challenge for a firm like Waterton is telling them apart and working our way to the right one. Is the product scalable to 30,000 units or more? That’s a real question, because a lot of them fit a specific asset type but don’t work across the portfolio.
There’s a lot of noise out there. I think we’ll see consolidation in the coming years, which won’t be a bad thing. For us, it comes down to seeing through the noise to the diamonds.
BH: Beyond scalability, what actually separates a vendor from its competitors?
DP: Part of it is timing, which is hard to hand a vendor. There’s a right moment when something we’re already talking about internally lines up with the conversation. Beyond that, look at it from our shoes. If I’m going to spend X dollars with you, am I going to get the return? What we look for are hard returns, bottom-line returns: either we save money or we generate more revenue, and it shows up on the bottom line.
The one that’s always out there is “it’ll save people time.” That’s a hard one for us to gauge, because saving time doesn’t necessarily show up in NOI. So understand who we are, and pitch it that way.
BH: Last question. What are you excited about for Blueprint this year?
DP: Honestly, it’s just good for people like me to get out from behind the desk and the monitor and go talk to people. Instead of having twenty half-hour conversations a month, you get to do a lot in a consolidated timeframe. It’s nice to put faces to names, and to ask detailed questions and see the response face to face rather than giving someone time to plan. I work virtually, so I just like the chance to meet people, see people, and shake some hands.
