Renewals and retention are no longer side notes in multifamily operations—they’re becoming an increasingly critical driver of NOI and portfolio stability.
According to public data from apartment REITs, multifamily lease churn has dropped from 55% to 40% over the past decade as residents stay put longer. That shift creates a major opportunity: operators that treat renewals as a core business line stand to outperform those still focused primarily on new leases.
This article explores how modern technology, consumer expectations, and operator strategies are reshaping renewal management. From AI-powered resident engagement to new data-driven philosophies, retention is rapidly moving from reactive tactics to proactive portfolio-wide strategies.
In this report, we will cover:
- How resident churn and renewal trends are evolving
- Examples of software and AI tools that are redefining the renewal process
- Practical strategies to turn renewals into a scalable, revenue-driving function
- Insights on what residents actually value—and how to meet those expectations
- Guidance on selecting the right partners for a modern retention strategy
Renewal and Retention: Which Comes First?
A significant share of residents stay because moving is costly and inconvenient. This isn’t news. Nor is residents’ unwillingness to give up certain property amenities or access to easy mass transit, for example. The list goes on.
Problems arise when operators rely on those common macroeconomic factors as a retention strategy. Consumer experiences and technological capabilities are evolving across the industry and competing operators will find ways to beat those objections. This is why targeted, resident-specific renewal efforts are so important today.
In the context of what’s now possible to learn through modern consumer behavior analysis, have every reason to verify why a resident chooses to stay. Merely assuming it’s the inconvenience of moving isn’t enough.
Without verifiable insight, renewal rates can’t be tied to a deliberate retention strategy. Without it, what do property managers really understand about their residents’ decisions? Not capturing that information leads to less-informed decision making across the operation and without putting too fine a point on it, leaves money on the table. Often, a lot of it.
Directing resources toward a technology-based retention strategy seems counterintuitive when market dynamics keep residents in place. RealPage reported in 2024 that renewal rates were increasing: “with just over 54% of renters in market-rate apartments renewing in the year-ending October 2024, which was a 120 basis point (bps) climb over last year.”
Still, Renew CEO and co-founder Rob Hayden told Blueprint that despite that, there’s little actual strategy or measurable deployment of technology behind that increase.
When it comes to technology used to identify and capture new residents, “It’s a full ecosystem of 10 different vendors,” Hayden said. “And then you say, ‘What metrics do you track?’ And they can rattle them all off. Lead-to-lease, cost-per-lease, cost-per-click. They know it all. And then you pause and you say, ‘Okay, what percentage of your rent roll did you acquire through new leases last year?’ And they say, ‘Well, 45 percent, because I have 55 percent retention rate.’”
Components of a Modern Renewal Strategy
Reactive renewal pleas and reliance on market forecasts miss the insights a tech-driven plan can provide. Operators can benefit instead from being more proactive, looking deeper into resident relocation trends and creating consistency in resident experience, whether across 200,000 units or 200.
- The right technology: Partnering with advanced software solutions that weave consumer data into progressive renewal tactics leads to tenants being more communicative, flexible and participatory in the process. Sound renewal plans begin at the top of the leasing funnel, relying on sharp property marketing and rapid responses to worthy applicants. Prospective tenants are more apt to complete applications and respond to calls to action when they’re relevant and timely. Data captured during intake provides the foundation for renewal.
- Understanding resident intent: Implement systems that determine a tenant’s intent to renew as soon as possible, starting at move-in. This period of frequent engagement can be used to collect insights on how long a tenant plans to stay and be carried out by post-move-in surveys, tenant portal appeals and financial incentives. If a resident indicates staying for only a single term, find out why. Data on why residents don’t renew is critical for identifying trends and determining solutions.
- Objection handling: There are many reasons residents leave, and most of them were once seen as immune to renewal efforts. Marriage. Family expansion. Roommate breakups. New jobs. Yet, those objections to renewal are not quite as bulletproof as they once were. If a tenant is merely seeking change at the end of a lease term, moving them to a “better” unit or property in the portfolio is a smart option. When a notice-to-vacate is filed, use it as a trigger to automate a retention sales sequence that promotes alternative locations if the portfolio allows.
- Scalability: An effective software partnership should be able to scale – expanding and adjusting to each property, market, and unit type, leading to improved resident autonomy and portfolio-wide office automation. The right software can extend to the resident jobs that were once exclusive to the leasing office, exceptionally beneficial when faced with an unrelenting wave of lease term expirations. A range of tasks can now be handled by residents, such as new price requests, incentive selection, roommate swaps or additions, notice-to-vacate forms, new pet registrations and fee payments, among other common leasing activities.
- Upsell: Look for upsell opportunities throughout residency and certainly during stages of renewal marketing. Storage, pet insurance, additional vehicle parking and other revenue drivers beyond rent no longer need to be offered upon move-in or as last-ditch efforts before the Pod arrives.
High-Touch, High-Renewal
Industry consensus finds that consistent, bespoke communications that segment tenants and trigger messaging based on residence milestones are often the anchor points of effective renewal.
Succeeding with advanced email marketing requires more than standard desktop applications. Specifically, what’s used to coordinate meetings and respond day-to-day isn’t particularly well-built for mass outreach, collecting recipient data or categorizing residents. These systems—Gmail and Outlook clearly being the most common—are restricted by send limits, ISP regulations and don’t have proper authentication protocols in place, for starters.
Without automation, list management becomes difficult—flagging bad or non-responsive addresses and even building lists in Gmail or Outlook requires many manual steps and nuanced categorization, especially if the metrics needed to segment them (building number, lease commencement date, renewal propensity score, etc.) aren’t clearly provided.
Effective execution requires familiarity with unsubscribe policies, effective email design, response sequencing, content standards, and integration of recipient behavior with the databases that depend on it. Instead, renewal systems built especially for behavior-based responses provide a great deal of value to the operation.
With minimal setup on the front-end, the right email automation platform can react strategically to an array of recipient behaviors that lead to renewal decisions, and it’s these eventual reactions that build out resident scoring models.
Consistently unopened messages can be replied to with stronger calls to action while responses about price can redirect a tenant into an incentive cadence. Links clicked, time to open, access by device type, payment methods and a host of other resident characteristics are all factors that can be leveraged to streamline outreach to tenants. Listen to what their inbox has to say.
Renew specializes in this exact kind of automation, as does Elise AI and RealPage’s Lumina AI. These products can deliver timely renewal pitches in multiple languages and consumer channels, return detailed feedback and demonstrate hours of time saved. They can also abide by state regulations on notification periods.
There’s little reason for operators to not explore the range of outreach capabilities modern email and renewal-focused technology vendors are offering to the industry. They reduce staff time, automate email list scrutiny and reveal trends hidden to busy leasing offices.
Putting it All Together: What To Look For in a Technology Partner
Specialty providers offer more hyper-focused solutions characterized by rapid deployment and easier adoption. They also tend to cost less and ship frequent updates. However, an enterprise PMS offers stability, proven support structures and vertical data integration, among other existing advantages.
An array of overlapping features—and vendors eager to customize—can make the decision matrix more opaque. This can lead to more confusion and indecision. If there’s a clear renewal goal and the internal support in place, the clouds will part.
Generally, here’s how the landscape breaks down.
Enterprise Property Management Systems
Examples: Yardi Matrix, Entrata, RealPage, AppFolio, DoorLoop, MRI Systems
These horizontal solutions spread wide and far, offering operators of large portfolios a selection of integrated and in some cases modular solutions for all aspects of the operation, from apartment portal advertising to rent payment reminders.
They can command massive implementation lifts and require extensive training but offer stability, consistency in UX and data models, centralized reporting, streamlined support and predictable costs.
There is also a lack of specialization for some areas of need, such as marketing and resident communications. They are also less likely to allow for property- or portfolio-specific customization and tend to be more resistant to sharing data with third-party systems. Expect slower product updates and at times, indifference to user feedback.
Know that staff readiness is more critical in these types of software installations. Teams from multiple departments will be required to participate and any accounting, maintenance and marketing databases will need to accommodate the implementation.
All said, it’s very likely that any existing enterprise PMS will have a renewal-specific module on their roadmap if not already available. This can offer operators a number of notable advantages, the first being its connectivity to the rest of the operation. This could very well mean data is being captured from the top of the leasing funnel, a central tenet to an effective digital renewal strategy.
Other advantages include staff familiarity with overall user experience, faster rollout because of common data structure and predictable costs.
Specialized Renewal and Experience Solutions
Stand-alone systems have strong advantages when focused strictly on resident experience services and renewals, provided they can bi-directionally integrate with enterprise accounting applications or any existing PMS providers. However, these systems are also built from the outset to rely on data from companion applications.
Specialty renewal products rely on data intake to power up, meaning operators should ensure rent roll data is in its best possible state. If it’s not, expect vendors to need time to reconcile resident, cost, and unit mix as well as other metrics required to launch renewal efforts. Some may charge for this while others consider it part of their onboarding.
Operators can also select from a category of software providers that offer “super-app” models for portfolio management. These resident experience systems excel in ways renewal functions attached to full-scale portfolio managers can’t. They emphasize resident journey mapping, offer advanced renewal appeal metrics and automation, faster onboarding and lightweight, more mobile user experiences.
Examples: Renew, Funnel Leasing, EliseAI, Lively
Key Considerations in Vendor Selection
Look for functionality in renewal point solutions that offers consumer-grade experience management to limit adoption headaches. Support during onboarding is crucial and the best providers understand that adoption challenges are common across all real estate verticals. The attention granted during the sales cycle should match the implementation process.
Mobile functionality is paramount, as tenants will expect to be met where they do business and how they transact.
How does the software treat the new user? Is onboarding clunky and subject to extensive staff oversight and approval? Fast support and an open feedback loop from user to vendor provides confidence that suggestions are heard and bugs remedied.
Identity management technologies and secure, single sign-on interfaces go a long way toward building resident trust in the systems selected, especially since payment systems will likely be connected. A vendor should have adoption case studies and renter surveys to review on these matters.
Advanced communication functionality is crucial, and as discussed, it’s very likely a daily-use email engine isn’t set up to tackle it.
It’s tempting to consider email platforms like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, or SendGrid. These systems can do a lot in terms of automating outreach to residents and excel in recipient segmentation, offering detailed delivery metrics and bespoke send cadence.
However, large-scale consumer platforms are often too big an adoption lift for leasing and management teams and typically have cost models that don’t square with the structure of a property management office. They also demand frequent database reconciliation with existing components of the tech stack presenting security and data integrity risks.
Know what role a vendor will play in educating residents on the system’s use and benefits. Leasing staff aren’t always qualified right away to train and lead adoption efforts. Does the vendor offer recorded demos and run-of-the-mill presentations or are there actual, measurable opportunities for live engagement? Resident-facing training materials need to be ever-present to accommodate the vastly different schedules throughout an apartment community.
It All Comes Down to Data
The importance of careful, insightful data handling in the renewal workflow can’t be overstated. Thankfully, renewal management systems pull from a closed system operating on insights from small, select user groups, not hundreds of thousands of ever-evolving consumer personas.
This makes understanding residents that much easier. The data pool is smaller, mostly static and already providing revenue. From the retail perspective, consider residents your regular customers. Treat them accordingly.
In an interview with trade publication Rental Housing Journal, RPM Living’s Vice President of Operations Tony Sousa said infrequent communication is the primary reason tenants become ex-tenants.
“The biggest impact on renewals continues to be the communication between residents and onsite teams,” Sousa said. “The pandemic seemed to have amplified the residents’ expectation of receiving personalized communication on a frequent basis in the manner that they prefer, and we’ve found it’s that consistent, customized messaging that really strengthens the relationship between the residents and onsite teams.”
Of course, email is only one communication method a resident may request. Texting, web-based AI chat interfaces and ringless voicemails are common functions provided by property management solutions.
“The golden rule is to respond back swiftly and in a way that the residents choose, which is generally the same way they reached out to us,” Sousa said to Rental Housing Journal. “Email still accounts for a large percentage of our communication but text messaging is definitely gaining traction. Either way, automation makes it possible for us to contact each and every lead and create a bond with them, not just with onsite associates but the entire community. Once that relationship exists, the chances of a resident renewing skyrockets.”
No Longer Bleeding Edge: AI’s Role in Renewal Success
Artificial intelligence is firmly entrenched in the multifamily industry and above all else, it’s helping operators untether staff from manual renewal processes, among many other benefits. The odds of a vendor not pitching its benefits have grown increasingly small.
Specifically, AI is allowing property owners to integrate timely market data, regional occupancy trends, operating costs, average relocation costs, concession considerations, competitive rent analyses and property budget concerns into community-specific renewal strategies. It also binds internal lines of business, as the best AI tools are driven by internal, proprietary data.
RealPage unveiled a team of AI agents at its August 2025 conference. AI agents are essentially individual “AI employees” charged with conducting specific business tasks; they’re typically capable of performing an array of common business support functions but their ability levels are growing more impressive across industries.
Called Lumina, RealPage will be deploying the technologies to cover leasing, resident services, operations, facilities and finance. The Resident agent is described as a ‘24/7 retention engine’ that operates ‘as a coordinated AI workforce across leasing, maintenance, operations, and finance…’
This is a unique example of how a large national player in property management is incorporating the specialization of point solutions. Expect this to become the norm sooner than later, making these decisions all the more vexing.
One primary advantage of agentic AI in the renewal funnel is speed of response. An AI can be trained to react at determined intervals and at all hours to create stronger bonds with residents and proving their renewal is critical to the community. PMS software provider Entrata’s research found that price is the most important factor in renewal rate and deployed an AI, called simply Renewals AI, to ensure renewal plans are intelligent, segmented and quick to respond to targeted residents.
“Manually calculating renewal rates based on competitors’ pricing, inventory, demand, and seasonality is inefficient—and by the time a rate is finalized, it’s often outdated. This can lead to two critical problems,” according to a company white paper, “Underpricing and overpricing.”
“Powered by machine learning, Renewals AI predicts which residents are most likely to renew up to 90 days [or 120 days, according to state] before lease expiration. It engages residents in real time by sending automated, personalized messages and renewal offers, which can be reviewed and signed online—minimizing vacancy and maintaining steady revenue,” it states.
Agentic AI also offers autonomy to on-site staff, alleviating the operational burden of looking upward for decisions on occupancy, increasing decision speed and supporting a leaner, smarter office.
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Multifamily is on the verge of a major operational shift from being entirely focused on new leases to making renewals a higher priority. Legacy operators stuck in less progressive mindsets could find themselves nudged aside by owners who emphasize more resident-first living experiences. The more you know your resident, the more predictable and scalable retention becomes.
Summarized, smart retention plans focus on sustaining the resident, not the lease.
–Craig Rowe
