Maintenance is often the most overlooked line item in a multifamily budget. It’s also, according to Adrian Danila, one of the biggest levers operators have to control costs, and one of the least understood parts of the property technology stack. As founder of Multifamily X Consulting and a 20-year maintenance operations veteran with stints at Greystar, Balfour Beatty Communities, and Cortland, Adrian has spent his career on both sides of the equation. He has run maintenance operations at scale, and he now helps proptech companies build products that multifamily operators will actually use.
At this year’s Blueprint, September 22-24 in Las Vegas, Adrian will moderate “Maintenance Tech Stack Reset: Less Friction, More NOI,” a panel bringing together Rich Regitano (Managing Director, Property Management at Greystar), Erica White (SVP, Innovation & Technology, PeakMade Real Estate), and Peter Christensen (Director of Maintenance & Purchasing, Centerspace). These three multifamily executives span very different portfolio sizes and vantage points on how maintenance technology gets vetted, adopted, and, in some cases, abandoned.
Insights by Blueprint caught up with Adrian to talk about what separates good maintenance tech from tech built in a vacuum, the hidden cost of invoice padding in procurement systems, and why he thinks most conference panels play it too safe. Anyone curious about these topics, especially those looking to take a deeper dive into their maintenance tech stack, should join us in Las Vegas.
NP: Tell me about what you envision for your panel at Blueprint this year, and what’s the biggest takeaway you want to give attendees?
AD: I think the biggest takeaway is that proptech companies typically build their products in a vacuum, without end-user input. The best maintenance-related products I’ve seen are the ones created by operators, for operators. Through the questions I lead the panel with, participants will get a sense of the best questions to ask when they’re evaluating technology. I want them to walk away with valuable tools in their toolbox and understand how to vet maintenance-related technology, based on my personal expertise.
I have 20 years of operations experience in maintenance. I worked for very large companies, including Greystar, RPM, Cortland, and Bell Partners. So I’ve seen this from an operator’s standpoint. Three years ago, when I started working for myself, I flipped the page. I’m not just the end user anymore; I’m also the person who helps position products to drive better adoption. I push their mindset toward getting the end user involved, because you can’t build a great product from the outside looking in — just guessing how the end user thinks, what their needs are, what their behavior is.
NP: Tell me about the three executives who’ll be on the panel. Why do you think those three are particularly suited to dig into this?
AD: First, Rich Regitano. He’s the Managing Director of Property Management for Greystar. He came over from AvalonBay about two years ago. He has rich experience running the largest maintenance operation in multifamily — nearly a million units. I think that’s incredibly relevant experience for the scale. Nobody comes close to Greystar’s scale. Second, Erica White. She’s been a VP of Technology for a number of companies, so she’s very savvy at picking technology in general and can speak specifically to maintenance technology. She’s also very forward-thinking. She looks at what’s coming next.
Third, Peter Christensen. He works for Centerspace. Peter has a unique role; I’m not exactly sure of his title, but he’s essentially the gatekeeper. He’s the person who vets all the technology and decides yes or no before it gets in front of the VP of Maintenance. He’s the trusted person who filters which solutions are worth presenting to the VP.
NP: All three of those executives come from different portfolio sizes, structures, and backgrounds. What perspective do you think each of them brings that the others might not?
AD: Centerspace is a smaller-sized operator, so Peter will represent the middle-market type of company, which is actually the largest chunk of the industry when you think about it. Greystar has the unique perspective of being the world’s largest multifamily operator. And Erica has been heavily involved for years in successfully rolling out many tech programs across multiple companies, not just her current one.
Her current company is actually building its own technology and selling it to other operators in the space. Erica also brings unique experience in student housing, which is part of the same family as multifamily. But has its own specifics, such as the seasonality of leasing, which, in some ways, makes it more difficult to manage than regular multifamily properties.
NP: What’s a question you’re most looking forward to asking them that you don’t already know the answer to?
AD: I’m curious what their top three to five criteria are for vetting technology. Are they looking at maintenance tech as a standalone question, or part of a bigger question? Most companies look at the whole tech stack — PMS, leasing, automation, everything — as a single bucket and ask how much it costs. Others look specifically at maintenance-related technology.
But when maintenance tech competes in that broader bucket with the rest of the stack, it tends to get left behind. Just as maintenance in general has historically been overlooked in attention from ownership, asset management, and resource allocation.
NP: Is that because most people think of maintenance as a cost center rather than a profit center?
AD: Right on. They look at it as an expense line item in a budget, when in reality it’s way more than that. Maintenance is the number-one controllable expense on every multifamily property. So there’s a lot of opportunity to perform better, hire better people, make better decisions. To spend less or produce more.
NP: When it comes to maintenance tech tools, what’s the clearest sign that something in the tech stack has become more of a friction point than a fix?
AD: There are a few things. First, when a technology is presented to me, I ask how the end user is involved in the process. The most common answer is, “We work hand-in-hand with our clients, we’re very sensitive to feedback.” That tells me right away you don’t have anyone in your product department who actually understands maintenance. You’re relying on people who might or might not give you feedback. Most maintenance workers aren’t invested in giving feedback; their job is to fix things and go home. They won’t tell you something’s wrong. They’ll just find workarounds to bypass your technology. It won’t show up as complaints; it’ll show up in adoption numbers.
Second, I ask about adoption rates and onboarding time. How long does it take to explain the product? Can you do it in three to five minutes, or do you need a 60-minute presentation? If you can’t explain it quickly, either you don’t understand it well enough, or the product isn’t developed enough. The more I dig into maintenance technology, the more I find that some products take up to a year to be fully adopted. Which is unbelievable and, honestly, unacceptable.
Third, what resources does the operator need to provide? Do I need to dedicate a person or a whole team to project management for the implementation? And is it actually “free”? If a vendor offers a free six- or twelve-month pilot, it’s not really free. You’re using your own employees to implement it, find bugs, and essentially serve as the vendor’s testing ground. That’s a real time suck.
NP: Multifamily X Consulting is particularly focused on revenue leakage in maintenance operations. One thing you discuss on your website is vendor padding on invoices. Can you tell me more about what that actually looks like in practice and how operators can catch it?
AD: With AI, you can now upload a batch of invoices and have them analyzed in minutes. What’s happening more often than not is on the procurement side — maintenance procurement. MRO suppliers are set up so that if you order less than $50 in merchandise, a shipping charge is automatically added to the invoice. The way procurement systems work, you often don’t have a choice. I might submit a list of 30 items totaling $5,000–$6,000. But when I input everything into the platform, the system breaks my order into smaller sub-orders, without my control. Sometimes one of those sub-orders ends up costing less than $50, so it gets hit with an extra shipping charge, even though I never technically placed a small order.
I caught this by accident. My manager at the time — I was overseeing 800-plus units — asked me to explain a charge: a $20 order that came with a $25 fee. I said, wait, I never ordered that. But the system breaks orders down on its own. So I went back through every invoice for the roughly two-and-a-half to three years I’d been at that property and audited them all. I found about $5,000 in extra charges at one property.
At the time, Cortland had 100-plus properties. I presented the findings to corporate and said, this is what we discovered by accident; we should get this money back, and you should audit every other property. You’re talking about potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees over a two- to three-year period, if not more.
NP: Do you think that’s a pretty common issue across the board and people may not be paying close attention to it?
AD: I think it’s very common. People rely too heavily on the technology. There’s another way you can get shorted, too, and it’s kind of an unfair way of doing business. MRO companies upload their catalogs statically — once a month, they send platforms like Yardi Marketplace an Excel spreadsheet with all their products and prices. That becomes the pricing you shop against. But if that list was uploaded over the weekend, and I’m shopping today, prices may have already changed by the time I place the order. So I submit a PO based on the old price, but when the merchandise arrives, it’s billed at the current price. That means my manager or I have to go back and create a change order, sometimes over a difference as small as one cent.
Imagine going to Walmart, doing the math, and expecting to pay $100, and the cashier says, “No, it’s $107” because the price changed between when you left and when you got to the register. That wouldn’t fly with a regular customer. But in multifamily, we just accept it — “well, the system’s not perfect” — instead of pushing back. Imagine if the top five companies in the industry raised hell about the broken system. I bet something would get done.
NP: Other than the panel you’re moderating, what are you most excited about at Blueprint this year?
AD: A number of things. I’m hoping to join some roundtables. I did those the last two years. If Blueprint brings back the podcast you had a couple of years ago, I’d love a couple of spots to interview people. Last year there wasn’t budget for it, so I brought my own gear — I do a lot of podcasts — and just did ad hoc interviews in the hallway. Networking is also huge for me. I travel a lot, go to a lot of conferences, so I’m always excited to see old friends and make new ones.
And last but not least, new technology. If time allows, I’m hoping to sit in on more panels as a spectator rather than a moderator, and see conversations that actually go below the surface. I think “safe” panel conversations have the opposite of their intended effect. Instead of getting people excited to come back, it makes them think, “I don’t want to hear the same thing I’ve heard for years.” Nobody wants to touch on the real issues; everyone’s afraid of losing their job or something. So that’s something I’ll be looking forward to, and I’ll do my best to make this panel informative enough that people walk away wanting to hear more.
– Nick Pipitone
