Property Managers Pulling Ahead Aren’t Working Harder. They’re Managing Differently. – Commercial Observer
There is little doubt at this point that widespread adoption of AI, when used wisely, can lead a company to greater growth and profitability.
But the difference between the companies enjoying massive gains from this and those that are not is shocking, and comes down to one factor: full buy-in.
A 2026 study by PricewaterhouseCoopers found that “nearly three-quarters (74%) of AI’s economic value is captured by just one-fifth (20%) of organizations, revealing a stark and widening divide between a small group of AI leaders and the majority of businesses still stuck in pilot mode.”
In property management, a slew of operators are still stuck in pilot mode. They use legacy platforms for task execution: tracking leases, work orders, and payments. But, they stop short of using it to deliver real performance: the complex, outcome-driven decisions that guide a portfolio forward.
The difference is not academic.
According to data from the 2026 AppFolio Property Management Benchmark Report, property managers who are broadly adopting AI are projecting 31% portfolio growth in 2026, compared to just 12% for the rest of the industry.
We’ve reached the point where property managers who aren’t using AI to not just fulfill daily and weekly functions but to guide the growth trajectory of their businesses are quickly losing ground to their competitors.
The difference between the mavericks and those left behind comes down to a fundamental shift in mindset about the nature and the goals of a company’s software.
We recently spoke with Cat Allday, Vice President of Product at AppFolio, to learn more about how some operators are missing out on AI’s full potential.
“AppFolio reflects a fundamental rethinking of what software is supposed to do for operators,” said Allday. “The platform has to actively drive results, not just record them. That’s the difference between property management and performance management.”
The AppFolio Performance Platform doesn’t so much document what’s happening at a company’s properties as dictate what happens next, helping drive outcomes for the entire portfolio.
AppFolio was designed with the belief that a Performance Platform should actively help operators achieve their big picture goals. Rather than just determining, for example, whether maintenance requests are being properly logged in, AppFolio addresses items such as whether residents are being retained, and if portfolios are being managed in a way that enhances their value and increases NOI.
Operators on AppFolio can act on performance signals before they become problems, protecting NOI, improving resident value, and fundamentally changing the economics of what a portfolio can achieve.
“It’s not about looking at software utilization or task completion rates anymore,” said Allday. “It’s measuring things like how fast are vacant units being filled, or renewal rate trends over time, then gleaning and sharing insights from that information.”
AppFolio helps operators determine appropriate goals and regularly track progress on achieving them while suggesting actionable items to help when progress lags. Over time, as the platform learns more about the operator’s business, AI agents can begin to take these actions to keep progress toward performance goals continually on track.
The difference in the results shows the extent to which property managers not fully adopting AI could be costing their businesses valuable, measurable, and easily achievable gains.
“An operator who’s using AI for lead nurturing is filling vacant units 5.2 days faster on average, and capturing about 55 percent more after-hour leads that previously went unanswered. That’s not just an incremental gain. That’s an expansion of the effective leasing funnel without adding any headcount,” said Allday. “You’re getting your revenue faster, but also getting revenue you wouldn’t have been able to recover otherwise.”
When it comes to resident retention, said Allday, AppFolio operators report that their renewal rates have risen an average of 20 percent after implementing AppFolio, in addition to average NOI increases of 2.8 percent.
At the foundation of AppFolio is its AI-native architecture, intelligence built into the platform from day one, not added on top of a legacy system in the form of chatbots or plug-in modules.
“That kind of architecture has a hard ceiling,” said Allday. “It can automate individual tasks, but it can’t orchestrate across the entire portfolio because it doesn’t have access to all the data that would make that possible.”
AppFolio was built cloud-native from day one with intelligence designed as a foundational layer, operating across leasing, maintenance, financials, and resident communications within a single unified platform.
“Things like leasing, maintenance, the financials and the resident communications are all in one place,” said Allday.
This allows for complete performance optimization, which Allday defines as “when every participant in the property ecosystem is simultaneously creating and receiving value.”
“That includes the residents, owners, investors, staff, and the business itself, so not one stakeholder winning at the expense of another, but all of them winning together,” said Allday. “When you think about what that looks like day-to-day, it goes back to things like what’s happening to NOI quarter-over-quarter, or, are residents staying and referring others. Thinking about your business that way really makes any performance gaps visible.”
AppFolio-client Advanced Management Company (AMC) owns and operates over 12,000 multifamily units in California.
Frustrated by disjointed communications systems that were diminishing its resident response abilities, AMC turned to AppFolio, which allowed them to consolidate nine separate systems down to one.
“Having our data centralized in one system is so helpful to our team performance,” said AMC president Danielle McCarthy.
AppFolio took over and enhanced processes for AMC such as screening residents and highlighting missing information on applications, automatically sending texts and emails to residents 90 and 180 days after move-in, improving renter’s insurance adoption to 100%, and constantly tracking and reporting up-to-the-minute performance insights.
The results have been concrete: consolidated operations, stronger resident retention, and performance visibility that AMC’s leadership now tracks in real time.
“AMC has always believed in innovation and in having strong technology as the foundation of everything we do,” said McCarthy. “AppFolio was the perfect solution because it satisfied so many of our needs, from mobile capabilities to having a centralized system with everything in one place.”
To Allday, the success AppFolio users are experiencing says less about emerging technology than it does about a fundamental shift in the importance of focusing on desired outcomes.
“The operators seeing this advantage are the ones who’ve shifted what they’re measuring, and are building infrastructure to drive those metrics instead of just reporting on them,” said Allday.
Allday makes clear that AppFolio gives operators the operational foundation to focus less on day-to-day task execution and more on the decisions that drive portfolio growth, from identifying properties ripe for acquisition to steering investments in the most profitable direction.
“The operators who are winning have stopped asking how to do more with less,” said Allday. “They’re asking how to build an operation where every signal leads to action, and every action moves the portfolio forward. That’s what performance management looks like in practice, and it’s what separates the operators investors will want to back.
Learn more about how you can drive real performance for your entire portfolio.
