What are you seeing in this tech bloat, the drive for consolidation? And what do you think we should expect to see in these next couple of years?

Yeah, so it's a pretty uncontroversial thing to say that people have been buying too much tech for the last, probably most of the last decade.

I spent a lot of time in leasing offices during 2025 just doing client work.

And it's just not at all unusual for a community manager to have more than 40 logins.

For you just to do their job.

It's funny, I was on Peter Lohman's podcast the other week.

Peter's really well known in the smaller, you know, sort of 500 to 1000 unit rental housing business.

Do you have any like takes there as to why we're not seeing more people in that category in 2026? Yeah,

How would you tell people to think about that?

All right, it all depends on your objectives.

You've got a range of what these events cost.

If I think about events like, for example, if I think about Retcon and Blueprint, Blueprint I'll be speaking there again this year.

I'm a big fan of that event.

If I think about those two events, they for me feel like tech ecosystem shows.

So you've got, first of all, there are multiple different food groups in terms of real estate, but it's also you've got everything from small startups to mature companies.

wandering around just connecting with everybody.

And, uh, so what did you mean by that, and why did that theme stick out?

out?This was a really interesting thing that kind of sprung up when I was reviewing these 20 sets of responses after the fact.

You know, we, we...

Most of the questions are about what people are working on, like what technology they're evaluating, implementing, what they're trying to change about operations.

But this, this sort of background idea that, um, the last few years have really been a grind, um, was something that, uh, y- you saw across multiple different, uh, responses, particularly from people on the operations side of the business.

And the, th- the way I characterize it is this, th- th- that there have been two things going on at the same time in the industry, right? One is that, and, uh, yeah, I'm sure we're gonna come on to this, but, uh, I, I think we'll look back on the last few years as the most sort of productive period in terms of changing ways that we manage, um, multifamily real estate.

So much has changed about the operating model, the technologies we use to support it, and so on.

Are we at a point where now the tech is ahead of the fraud and blocking most of it?