AI isn’t a choice. It’s the syllabus no one read but everyone’s graded on.
It’s brutal out there. None of us consciously opted into this new AI reality, yet our performance, success, and even relevance now depend on how well we adapt to it. You know it, we know it, and at this point, even our pets know it.
MavenAI asked us to share what felt different about AI in multifamily in 2025 for its annual report, Multifamily Marketing Trends that Shaped 2025. As an AI property technology company providing Virtual Leasing Assistants and automation tools, we reflected on the shifts we saw across operators, onsite teams, and owners this past year.
Below is our honest take as AI builders in the multifamily industry and where we believe the industry is headed next.
We Didn’t Have to Sell the Value of AI as Much
AI didn’t just arrive this year. Technically, if you trace it back to the release of ChatGPT, AI turned three years old in November. Old enough to form complete sentences and certainly old enough to disrupt an entire industry.
What made 2025 different for multifamily wasn’t AI itself. It was the quality of the questions being asked about AI.
We watched operators evolve from “What is AI?” to “How do we make AI work for our operations?” That shift may sound subtle, but for those of us building AI tools, it changed everything.
Instead of spending precious time explaining what AI could do in theory, we spent more time diagnosing real operational pain points. The industry moved past surface-level curiosity, and as a result, we no longer had to “sell” AI’s value. The value was assumed. The conversation started deeper, moved faster, and created stronger outcomes.
In other words: Nurture Boss got down to business quicker, and our clients’ business was better.
“Operators came to Nurture Boss conversations and demos with sharper questions to understand how AI would support their teams. Better questions led to stronger AI outcomes,” said Nurture Boss’s Director of Marketing, Ashley McGovern.
Some of our favorite “A+” questions from operators this year included:
- How deeply does your AI integrate with my property’s tech stack (CRM, PMS, etc.)?
People no longer wanted superficial automation. They wanted AI that lived inside their workflows, not adjacent to them. - Does your AI adjust its behavior based on context and lifecycle stage?
Awareness became a priority. Operators recognized that AI shouldn’t sound the same to every renter, and they demanded adaptive intelligence. - Can your AI recognize when human intervention is needed and escalate accordingly?
The industry’s understanding matured. Great AI doesn’t replace humans; it collaborates with them. - Can your AI surface insights, patterns, and analytics to help leadership make better decisions?
Data transparency became non-negotiable. Teams wanted AI and partners that didn’t just do tasks but also helped them understand performance. - How easy is implementation and what does post-launch support look like?
The industry grew wary of “set it and forget it” vendors. Ongoing partnership mattered as much as features.
This evolution tells an important story: multifamily didn’t suddenly adopt more AI in 2025; it adopted AI with more intentionality.
Owners and Operators Became More Discerning About AI Tools
Early AI adoption in multifamily felt a little like app-store chaos. Everyone was downloading tools, testing widgets, and hoping something would magically fix onsite overwhelm. But 2025 marked the end of that era.
Owners and operators became significantly more discerning about the AI vendors they worked with.
They didn’t want:
- More logins
- More complexity
- More stress on onsite teams
- More “automation” that still required human babysitting
Instead, they wanted solutions that meaningfully lighten workloads, improve operations, and ultimately increase NOI. In our conversations, we saw three major trends emerge:
1. AI had to prove it reduced work, not disguised it.
Operators spent less time impressed by features and more time measuring outcomes. The bar rose. If AI added steps, required manual oversight, or created new failure points, it was out.
2. Consolidation became a priority.
Teams sought platforms, not point solutions. They wanted tools that spoke to each other, shared data, and streamlined processes instead of fracturing them further.
3. Vendors were evaluated like long-term strategic partners.
This was the biggest shift. The question changed from “Can this tool help us?” to “Should this vendor help us run our business?” Reliability, transparency, roadmap maturity, reporting and analytics, and integration depth became essential selection criteria.
The days of adopting AI because it sounded futuristic are over. Multifamily now treats AI as infrastructure — mission-critical, measurable, and expected to deliver quantifiable performance improvements.
What This Means for Multifamily and AI in 2026
If 2025 was the year multifamily asked better questions, 2026 will be the year multifamily learns how to run better AI pilots.
The industry is done guessing. Leaders want evidence. They want confidence. They want clarity around how AI impacts workload, conversion, and resident experience. They want structured, fair, controlled pilot processes to prove it.
This is where the next evolution begins.
2026 Will Be the Year of the Intelligent, Well-Designed AI Pilot
You can feel it building already. More operators are pursuing head-to-head AI pilots. “Robot Wars,” as coined by our client, Windell Mollenido, Vice President of Marketing and Technology at The REMM Group, who piloted Nurture Boss against another AI vendor in the space before selecting Nurture Boss as the MVP. These matchups are where vendors compete in real time to solve real operational problems.
This is an exciting trend, but it’s also one that requires discipline.
A competitive pilot can be powerful, but only if it’s run correctly. When it’s rushed, unstructured, or designed without clear success criteria, it drains onsite teams, confuses vendors, and leads to decisions based on opinions instead of outcomes. It’s important to get the feedback of your onsite teams who will be working with your AI; and once you get the onsite teams buy in to a program then it becomes an easier onboarding process.
When done right, however, a pilot becomes the lowest-risk, highest-clarity path to selecting the right partner.
And multifamily is finally ready to get this right.
At Nurture Boss, we believe that 2026 will be the year operators:
- Evaluate AI with transparent, measurable benchmarks
- Structure pilots that allow apples-to-apples comparison
- Prioritize integrations and workflows over flashy features
- Consider both qualitative feedback and quantitative results
- Give onsite teams a meaningful voice in vendor selection
This shift will shape vendor ecosystems for years to come.
Want to Run a Successful AI Pilot? Start Here.
If you’re planning to run a head-to-head pilot in 2026, we created a comprehensive, unbiased guide to help you do it with confidence: How to Run a Head-to-Head AI Pilot
Inside the guide, we break down:
- If you should even consider AI at your properties
- Best practices for structuring a fair pilot
- Key steps for evaluating AI behavior, performance, and compatibility
- What to watch out for so you don’t get blindsided
- How to validate results and capabilities without bias
- How onsite teams can stay supported, not stretched
And before you ask: Yes, we run an AI company. Yes, we offer a Virtual Leasing Assistant. And yes, that could make us sound biased.
But here’s the truth: we wrote this guide to help the industry, not ourselves. We genuinely want multifamily to understand how to evaluate AI. As we like to joke internally, we’re AI nerds first, AI vendors second.
So here’s our promise: The guide won’t try to sell you on Nurture Boss. Our customer reviews can do that. Instead, the guide gives you the clarity, structure, and confidence needed to choose the right partner, whoever it is.
Final Thoughts: AI Isn’t Optional But How You Approach It Is
We didn’t choose AI. None of us signed up for this class. But here we are, graded daily on how well we use it.
The good news is multifamily is getting smarter, sharper, and more strategic about AI every year. The questions are improving. The discernment is strengthening. The stakes are rising, but so are the opportunities.
AI isn’t something we observe anymore. It’s something we operate. In 2026, the companies that learn to evaluate it rigorously and deploy it intentionally will lead the industry forward. If you want to ensure you’re one of them, start with the right pilot and build from there.
