Few investors have a clearer read on what technology large apartment portfolios are actually buying than RET Ventures. The firm’s strategic investors are the owner-operators themselves, a group of more than 50 large institutional apartment and single-family rental platforms that recently met in person for RET’s Annual Summit.
This year RET is anchoring a number of discussions at Blueprint on the rental housing sector. The firm is running a Multifamily and Single-Family Rental Kickoff Summit with two panels on operational ROI and applied AI, a fifteen-minute founder showcase on what AI-native startups can build that legacy and embedded tools cannot, and a fireside with Progress Residential CEO Dave Feldman on operating nearly 100,000 homes with no leasing offices and no on-site staff. The next day brings an AI leasing panel moderated by RET principal Aaron Ru and a main-stage fireside between RET partner Christopher Yip and Cortland founder and CEO Steven DeFrancis.
Two weeks after RET’s Summit wrapped, I sat down with Yip to talk through what he is hearing from that group: rising technology budgets in a year of flat rent growth, the two-thirds of his investors who have built a data warehouse and are now trying to figure out what to do with it, the hardening of the PMS layer around first-party agents, and why the operators pulling ahead in leasing are the ones deliberately putting humans back in.
Blueprint runs September 22–24 in Las Vegas. Registration is open at blueprintvegas.com, and the multifamily programming described below is only a slice of what is on the agenda.
BH: Blueprint is making a real push on multifamily this year, and RET is carrying a lot of that programming. Why is this the year for it?
CY: Because the stack is genuinely in motion. We are seeing real experimentation and real deployment of AI at scale. But there is still active debate about what the infrastructure to enable that needs to look like, and about the right model for delivery — in-house developed agents, partnering with startups for deployed engineers, some combination. And underneath all of it there is a real debate about ROI. You can look around and say there are agents everywhere now, but are people actually seeing the savings? That question ties our whole arc of programming together.
BH: You just came out of your annual summit. What are the owner-operators in that room actually worried about heading into budget season?
CY: We got together more than 100 owner-operator executives, a very senior group — probably half carry C-level titles — and we ran a technology survey across them. It is a difficult time in the industry. Rent growth is challenging and there continues to be cost pressure on the operating side. So to our surprise, the majority were actually increasing technology budgets year over year, and clearly the area everyone is most focused on experimenting with is AI and finding the right role for it inside their organizations.
Priorities do split by segment. The larger, more sophisticated owner-operators are focused on infrastructure and scalability — the data architecture and the data governance to enable future AI use cases. The mid-market looks different from both a resourcing and a use case perspective — we are seeing smaller portfolios lean into more in house agentic development and consider taking more technology risk.
BH: You have described this as a second era of AI deployment. What separates it from the first?
CY: If you look back over the last few years, most of what got deployed was pre-agentic — chatbots, customer interactions, leasing, resident engagement — and all of it pointed outward at the prospect or the resident. This next phase, and it is early days, is people turning AI onto their own organizations and asking which workflows they can bring AI into to drive outcomes and productivity. Real measurable outcomes. The moment you frame it that way, you surface the ROI question in a way the first era never had to answer.
BH: The first kickoff panel is built around turning operational data into value. What is the tension you want that group to work through?
CY: The industry has been rightfully focused on aggregating data, and to our surprise two-thirds of our group have built out a data warehouse. The focus has been on data as an asset — having the repository. The panel looks forward from there: you have all this data now, how are you actually turning it into value, what are the use cases, and where is the measurable ROI.
The honest challenge is that ROI is hard to book on the operations side. If you get 30 percent more productivity out of an FTE, you still need the FTE. Unless you are growing as a portfolio and getting operating leverage on fixed headcount — and in an industry where portfolios are not really growing outside of M&A — that is very hard to realize. Everybody likes leasing on the front end, because if you believe you can bring more prospects into the funnel and improve occupancy, the revenue line flows through. Operations is more challenging.
BH: If the savings do not come out of headcount, where do they come from?
CY: We see mid-market operators going around looking for ROI against their point solution spend, more on the back office and corporate side — deal underwriting, whatever it is where they can literally reduce or turn off SaaS spend. Larger operators are not so much in that mindset, because they are focused on who is going to maintain this infrastructure and who is going to build the integrations. So if it is not headcount, maybe it is vendor consolidation. That is a real part of the discussion.
BH: The second panel goes at the infrastructure question directly. What has changed there?
CY: All of the PMSs have launched branded first-party AI agents now, and none of them except somewhat AppFolio appear to have write / execution access back for third-party agents. So people are realizing they need a point of view on what the right infrastructure is to deploy AI agents going forward and actually drive ROI — what both the data layer and the integration layer need to look like. I also want that group to get concrete: here is where we have deployed agents in the business, here is how we pulled the data together, here are the measurable outcomes. Related to the first panel, but a separate conversation.
BH: If the platforms are closing up, that raises the obvious question for startups. You have a session built entirely around that — two founders talking about what they can build that the incumbents cannot.
CY: That one is really about the role of startups and the build-versus-buy decision. Owners are asking a legitimate question right now — develop agents in-house, or partner with a startup that will put deployed engineers on the problem. Startups face the mirror image of it: where do you partner with the incumbent platform, and where do you go around it. There are real opportunities to outperform an embedded AI tool, but you have to be honest about which ones those are. The other piece I find interesting is how much AI has changed the way startups themselves build and ship. What a small team can put in front of an operator in a quarter looks very different than it did two years ago, and that shifts the buy calculus as much as anything happening on the operator side.
BH: A lot of people treat leasing as the solved part of the funnel. AI has been working that top of funnel for a decade. Is leasing solved?
CY: No. There is a tension between automation on one side and differentiation and personalization on the other, and leasing centralization has too often been equated with running everything through the AI. You have a growing group of sophisticated operators saying there is still a human touch that has to be preserved, because otherwise we commoditize the whole process and the relationship with the renter and the prospect gets lost. On the Wednesday panel, my colleague Aaron is going to delve into this idea with our portfolio company Funnel and two major operators, Continental and QuadReal.
The top of the funnel is also fragmenting. Prospects increasingly come in from AI search, from the LLMs, from upstream agents — Zillow introduces its own agent, and so on. People are having long conversations with an LLM the way we all now do on any consumer decision, and in the existing workflow all of that gets lost the moment the lead is reacquired at the property website and pushed back into a chatbot. That relationship is being built upstream and it needs to make its way into the leasing and application journey. The infrastructure and process for that are still evolving — new solutions, integration, the role of the VLA versus the CRM. That history is yet to be written.
BH: There has been a wave of leasing training and conversation-intelligence tools over the past six months. How do you read that space?
CY: There is an opportunity around training, and a second one around capturing intent earlier in the funnel, within reasonable consent and approval by the prospect. Companies have been focused on capturing intent data during virtual tours — what people focus on as they look at model units — and there is now the opportunity to capture that on physical tours. What questions are they asking, what alternatives are they considering, what is actually driving the decision. Today all of that is effectively lost to a leasing agent trying to drive a close. It is another example of upstream intent data nobody is capturing.
BH: You are also doing a fireside with Dave Feldman at Progress. Single-family rental is a different operating problem. What do you want to get at there?
CY: Progress is the largest SFR platform in the country — close to 100,000 homes across more than 30 markets — and structurally it is the cleanest test case in rental housing for everything we have been talking about. There is no leasing office and there is no on-site staff. The operation runs on software. So when you ask where agentic AI actually earns its keep in leasing and in maintenance, they have had to answer that question at a scale and with a level of dependence that most multifamily operators have not.
I also want to get into the shift from buying homes to building them, which is a genuinely different business, and the regulatory environment, which has been about as scrutinized as any part of housing this year. It is a candid conversation about where the puck is going, and I think it is relevant to anyone who owns or operates rental housing, not just the SFR crowd.
BH: You are doing the main-stage fireside with Steven DeFrancis. What do you want to draw out of Cortland’s story?
CY: Steven and Cortland have been a longstanding RET partner and one of our most steadfast supporters, and I think the reason is one and the same as what makes the conversation interesting. From the beginning he had a vision built around vertical integration, a brand, and direct connectivity with the resident — this bet that multifamily is really a consumer business and that you have to deliver a hospitality-grade resident experience. Those are not words commonly used in multifamily.
Structurally, Cortland is very vertically integrated. They raise capital, they are an asset manager, and they manage in house, but more so they also take a hands-on approach to the resident experience and the technology stack that powers it. Tracing that through to what is now one of the largest owner-operator platforms under one brand and one roof is a fascinating journey. It is also the throughline for everything else we are programming. All these agents, all this technology — what does it actually mean for the resident.
BH: Outside your own sessions, what are you looking forward to at Blueprint this year?
CY: It has been a great partnership with the organizers, both in growing the footprint of the conference and in continuing to bring the owner-operator voice to it — bringing in more owners and operators who are looking for new startups, and connecting them with one another. Against an established landscape of more traditional industry association conferences, it has been great to watch Blueprint grow into a place that brings investors, startups, and owner-operators equally to the table. And having a significant focus on multifamily this year is near and dear to our hearts.
