A highlight recorded live at Forum 2025.

In this Forum panel, four leaders share what it actually takes to scale a centralized operating model—across asset types, management structures, and team sizes. 

You’ll hear from:

What you’ll learn:

Don’t miss out next year. 2026 registration is open, can’t wait to see you there. 

Episode transcript:

0:00 Forum highlight — Today in operations: Centralization in action

Dom Beveridge: The takeaway from this is that compared to a decade ago, the average property in the United States is far likelier to be third party managed and third party managed by a large third party manager than it, than it used to be.

Melody Reid: Today, I’m happy to report we are just over 180,000 units live on Funnel. So we’ve moved very quickly to scale out the solutions and are finding a lot of value in how we’re supporting our operators and certainly our centralization teams.

Jason Terry: Before Funnel, all we could really do was like, “you got it buddy.” You know what I mean? “Hang in there, champ.” It was a lot of platitudes, right?

These people are telling us we need help, we’re desperate, and we didn’t really have a solution. But now with Funnel and our centralized leasing team we can easily flip a switch. I have two requests just in the last two hours of someone reaching out to me saying, Hey, we need help right now. Do you have any of your leasing paratroopers that we can just flip this Funnel switch and they can start leasing with us to ensure that we don’t lose momentum.

Melody Reid: From a productivity standpoint. Automating those notices saved up to 10 hours in a work week for our centralized team members, because historically they would have to go between their PMS and other systems to just execute a notice. That’s all automated for them now.

Joni Lowe: It’s kind of nice when you have multiple operators because they get stacked against one another, but in a good way to temperature check them and say, okay, we’re operating very successful in this area for this particular operator. Why are we not over here? 

1:34 Introduction 

Alex Howe: Welcome back to Multifamily Unpacked. Today’s episode, Today in Operations, is a panel highlight from Forum.

I moderated this session, and if you like dad jokes you should stick around. This panel is special because it shows how centralization works for operators of different portfolios and ownership structures including the largest third-party manager in the country, a student housing leader, an asset manager, as well as a multifamily researcher. 

You’ll hear from, Joni Lowe, SVP of Marketing at Pacific Urban Investors, Dom Beveridge, Principal at 20for20, Jason Terry, former Director of Resident Services at Redstone Residential, and Melody Reid, Managing Director of U.S. Property Systems at Greystar.

Let’s roll the tape. 

2:24 Panel introduction

Alex Howe: All right. Welcome to Today in Operations. We’ve got another powerhouse of operators representing a very diverse group of portfolios within multifamily. And we have our favorite researcher with the coolest accent on stage with us.

Why are we here? Expenses continue to go up. Margins are challenged, as you’ve been hearing. If you’re not already convinced: centralization is no longer an option—it’s the new normal. But the “how” varies widely. Let’s unpack where we’re at, how we got here, and where we’re going next.

I’ll start with the operators. Every centralization superhero needs an origin story. Jason, let’s start with you. Title, where you started with centralization, and where you’re at today.

Jason Terry: My name is Jason Terry. I’m with Redstone in Provo, Utah. My [former] title is Director of Resident Services, as well as Managing Director of our CLO, Redstone Connect. Our ownership structure is about half third-party and half owned and managed.

I was brought on to start the CLO—essentially, what could we do to help our leasing teams be more agile and respond quickly to demand. We’re about 50% student housing, so we have a huge leasing season that we have to hit. No one really cares in September; you have to hit it in the summer. That’s why I was brought on.

Melody Reid: Hello, my name is Mel Reid and I’m with Greystar. For anyone that doesn’t know, we manage just over a million units. We own or manage 274,000 units and have developed around 73,000. We cover all asset types: conventional, student, active adult. My title is Managing Director of Property Systems, so I’ll be speaking from that technology lens.

I can tell you for anyone in this room that is not a funnel user, or funneler as Nikki calls us, last year I sat with the leader of our centralization team here at Forum. We had just executed our MSA with Funnel and were just getting started, and today, I’m happy to report we’re at just over 180,000 units live on Funnel. We’ve scaled quickly and are finding a lot of value in how we support our operators and centralization teams.

Joni Lowe: My name is Joni Lowe. I work in the marketing department at Pacific Urban, and we’re on the ownership side. We’re structured a little differently. We work with three operators, but at Pacific we curate everything in-house. So all of our own strategy, we negotiate all of our own MSAs, execute those internally.

I guess we could say we’re technically vertically aligned to manage our own assets, but we employ property management companies to do it. So I think it’s a nice tag team for strategy.

We started our journey in centralization probably much like most—the pandemic really forced us into that. When we spoke about AI and how we were going to continue business with our doors actually closed, that was many years ago. Now we’ve evolved. 

I was here much like most of you last year looking at Funnel and some other options in terms of CRM software and AI and things of that nature. I’m happy to report, much like Mel, we executed internally our own MSA with Funnel and we went live Q4 of last year.

So I think you have a nice variation of folks up here—from the operator, ownership, researcher.

6:08 Centralization trends in multifamily: Keep leasing on-site

Alex Howe: Let’s start with that researcher. Dom, your most recent 20 for 20—if you’re not familiar, Dom interviews anonymously some of the leading property management companies, owners, and managers in the space about a number of topics. Centralization has been playing a big role lately. That one focused broadly, and another paper we partnered with you on focused on third-party managers specifically.

If you wouldn’t mind, start by speaking to the broader trends, and then we can get into the third-party management pieces.

Dom Beveridge: I started to look at centralization in earnest a few years ago. This comes from the most recent research I did at the end of last year. I’ve been thinking about centralization in terms of three different categories of work that have been moving offsite: maintenance, leasing, and property admin. By property admin, I mean the stuff you associate with the assistant property manager role.

One of the things I noticed this year—if you ask which roles have actually been taken offsite—you see an increasing divergence between leasing and admin. For the last two or three years, most of the talk was about leasing—it’s obviously very visible and top of mind. But when people actually start to centralize, they tend to start with admin-focused things: high-friction, low-value-add, but very necessary work that happens at properties.

What you start to find is the really aggressive movement of work offsite is associated with the assistant property manager role. You see that again this year. Out of the 20 executives—a cross-section of fee managers, small owner-operators, REITs, and so on—the most popular answer when asked if they’ve taken leasing offsite is “no.”

Most companies have not, and probably are not planning to take leasing roles offsite the way some REITs had done a year or two ago. There’s still a need to keep people involved in leasing at a property, which gives us a clue to where this is going.

The answers on property admin are much less uncertain. The “nos” generally just haven’t gotten around to it yet. Most people have either taken that work offsite already or done it at some properties. Third-party managers don’t get to make these changes unilaterally—they can only move as their ownership groups permit them to.

If you ask people the more forward-looking question—where do they think this is going?—on leasing, the most popular answer is “not sure.” We’ve been talking about this for a long time and it’s still uncertain how the blend between centralized and property-based work will play out.

Six of the 20 people talked about having potted teams. There’s REITS involved so there are several that have already done that, but there is a growing area where there’s more of a hybrid model—doing more stuff centrally, investing in contact centers which we’ve never done before, supporting properties with tech, and modifying roles. That seems to be the direction on the leasing front.

On the admin side, most people see that as being centralized, or centralized subject to what owners permit for example third party managers. The two “don’t knows” are companies that should have made more progress than they currently have.

9:53 Centralization trends in multifamily: Third-party management on the rise

Dom Beveridge: Now, Alex mentioned the research we did last year specifically into third-party management. This has been a big hobby horse of mine for years because I think this area is misunderstood.

In 2023, when the NMHC Top 50 lists came out, I noticed for the first time there were no REITs in the top 10 operators. I went back a decade to 2013 and realized that in 2023, compared to 10 years earlier, the average size of the top 50 operators had gone up by nearly 60%, while the average size of the top 50 owners had gone down by 17%.

That means during that period of favorable lending rates, more owners came into the industry, and they’re smaller and more likely to third-party manage their properties. That number is now nearly 80% higher compared to where it was back in 2013. The takeaway is that compared to a decade ago the average property in the U.S. is far more likely to be third-party managed—and by a large third-party manager—than it used to be.

To put some facts around this, we surveyed 14 third-party managers, including all of the top five NMHC operators, these are all third-party managers. The thing that we were trying to do was to figure out what progress our companies are actually making. We characterized progress in terms of two things. If you’re a third-party manager and you want to be centralized, you have to have created some kind of shared services that are doing work for multiple clients that used to be done at the property. That’s stipulation number one.

Stipulation number two is you have to have changed the way you charge for it, because one of the problems you’ve got with centralization in third-party management is you have the chargeback model that’s orthogonal to doing centralization. If I’m hiring people locally and charging their salary cost back, there’s no way to centralize that unless I change that arrangement.

So if we look at the top right on this chart, these are companies who have multiple clients for whom they’re doing property management work out of central shared services, and they have changed their property management agreements. Those properties are now purchasing those services from the operator rather than billing back staffing costs.

When you look at it according to those two attributes, you can see there’s a real spread in terms of the tangible progress that companies have made. The companies in the top right who’ve said, “It’s part of our operating model,” those are companies that have been doing this long enough now and have a firm enough handle on how to do it that it would be their preference that every deal that they do, they would do using centralized services rather than the legacy model.

So this picture is relatively positive, but still very indicative that enough companies are working on this and making progress that it’s going to be a really big thing.

13:00 How to approach centralization at scale

Alex Howe: Thank you. One of the biggest companies moving in this direction—and Mel mentioned it—if you haven’t heard of Greystar by now, I have some oceanfront property in Denver I’d love to sell you.

Mel, you operate on such an enormous scale, across so many asset types. How are you approaching centralization in a way that doesn’t disrupt your teams but still delivers performance and efficiency?

Melody Reid: Certainly the magnitude of scale at Greystar is a significant factor in really any large initiative that we have. Due to our size and scale, we find that we pivot and refine a lot along the way—more iteratively—just because we’re always going to be chasing completion because we’re so large. And that doesn’t happen in the course of a couple of months. For Greystar, it typically occurs over a couple of years.

One thing I would also say that’s very different from when we first started is initially, I think we really just looked to lift and shift the work to a more centralized team. Over time, we understood just how paramount it was to really invest in the right tools and technology to support those team members. A lot of that traditional technology that our traditional properties use is very property-centric technology. It doesn’t allow for bulk capabilities—certainly not bulk across multiple properties.

So we really looked at all the different areas. We sat with our centralized teams, we did a lot of time-in-motion studies to understand where they’re spending a lot of time in their day. And for us, certainly a lot of time was being spent around just that delinquency and collection effort. The notices that would go out, even on a daily and weekly basis, consumed so much of their time. So we immediately knew there would be a lot of opportunities there to create efficiencies, and AI and automation were going to be key to that.

That’s where partnering with Funnel has been so key for us. We were able to work very closely to automate, and we leveraged a lot of that resident AI product to automate a lot of the notices that go out. A couple of things that we saw—one, collections were occurring earlier in the month. Historically, without those reminders—and everyone gets busy, and some people don’t like to set up auto payment—just having those on-time, real-time notices and the humans not having to manage those, we saw that late payers were paying earlier in the month.

From a productivity standpoint, just automating those notices saved up to 10 hours in a work week for our centralized team members—just automating those notices. Because historically, they would have to go between their PMS and other systems just to execute a notice. That’s all automated for them now. So now they can spend that time on other functions that may not be automated currently.

A lot of our centralized efforts today are focusing more on that legacy assistant community manager role where there’s a lot of administrative work—and where, at Greystar, we’ve found a lot of value. Immediate boost to NOI is centralizing a lot of that function. And we’re at over 400 properties live with those centralized services today.

16:15 Centralization not one size fits all

Alex Howe: Those hours add up. Joni, jumping to you on the asset manager side. You work closely with your third-party managers, design strategy, and ensure it’s executed. What makes you confident that your centralized model is being executed well, and what red flags do you watch for?

Joni Lowe: What I would first say is that I think most of us like to say that centralization is not really a one-size-fits-all, but when you’re an ownership group that is curating the strategy for various operators, it does kind of have to be a one-size-fits-all—but in a bigger way, right? And maybe that’s where we are curating guardrails of some sort that make us, as an ownership group, feel more comfortable or more confident to deliver that to the operators and say, “Okay, operate how you see fit within these guardrails for centralized assets, potted assets, or perhaps standalone properties that may benefit from some of the technology use that the others do.”

We have KPIs that are in place that we track to measure the success of a centralization or potted strategy, and we temperature-check things like scalability. Are all of the operators that are launching successful? And it’s kind of nice when you have multiple operators because they get stacked against one another—but in a good way—to temperature-check them and say, “Okay, we’re operating very successfully in this area for this particular operator. Why are we not over here?”

When you have great relationships with them, you can bring them together and say, “Where are we doing really well? Where do we have some growth opportunity?” And we all can collectively work together to identify those. But it could be things like delinquency, rent collection, consumer sentiment—and not just prospect sentiment, but employee sentiment. How are they feeling? Is there less friction in their day-to-day? Is there less friction with our prospects and residents on their touchpoints—whether it’s researching a home, moving in, submitting a work order, doing renewals—all of the things that they do? Is there less friction with that?

So there are various ways that we check to ensure success of implementation. But tying it back to operations, it’s really just individual property success—and we can measure that by all of the various operators.

18:59 Centralization, AI, and choosing Funnel 

Alex Howe: Jason, I know AI has been a big part of your centralization strategy, and I know you’ve also experimented with another vendor that kept you up at night with all kinds of issues, but maybe you could speak to some of the bigger operational wins you’ve had since moving over to the PINK side. 

Jason Terry: When I first took on this role my boss, our president, pulled me aside and said great news you’re going to roll out this new AI implementation, it’s going to be great. 

I won’t say the name but it started with E and ended in AI. 

That was my first big project and I had a full head of hair when we launched that. There were so many hiccups with it. Whether it was misinterpreting questions, pulling the wrong data, hallucinating there were so many different things. I was getting 5-10-15 messages a day from folks telling me the AI wasn’t working. 

It got to the point where property managers were saying Jason we will still pay for it, we get it we are in a contract, but just turn it off. We would rather pay for it and have it not mess up our leasing than the alternative. 

We came over to the PINK side as Alex says, and we are still getting the same amount of leads and still able to incubate our leads after hours. In fact pulling a report, for student housing 30% of our leads are coming in at 1 am. So we had a couple options, we either pay someone to be available at 1 am or we come up with a solution to keep them warm until our leasing office was open. 

What we’ve noticed is we’re still getting the same number of leads as we were getting with other AI solutions, but guess what I am not getting freaked out messages from staff. In fact, I haven’t gotten any. 

It’s one of those things like baby steps. We learned AI is good but it’s all about how you implement AI and what roles you give the AI. So that has been a major win for us. We’re keeping the same amount of leads and I’m in the process of regrowing my hair. 

Things are looking good. 

20:56 Supporting onsite teams with centralization paratroopers

Alex Howe: Jason, we’re coming back to you. I heard you say you’ve got a student portfolio, and as we all know, a single month often makes or breaks the year. Thus far, how has centralization—and Redstone Connect, which is your branded centralized team—helped your corporate team better support onsite team members?

Jason Terry: Being on site’s hard. It’s exhausting for a lot of our properties. And what happens when you have a leasing agent who just decides they’re done and they walk out? What happens when you have unexpected turnover? What happens when they’re sick? What happens when they want to go on vacation?

So many of our property managers and onsite team members, they feel such a connection and such a responsibility for their property that it’s hard for them to walk away. It’s hard for them to take a break. And so when you have an onsite team saying, “Hey, I’m struggling. I’m close to burnout,” and they’re three states away—before Funnel, all we could really do was, “You got it, buddy. Hang in there, champ. Here’s a DoorDash gift card.”

But that’s essentially what it was. It was a lot of platitudes, right? These people are telling us, “We need help, we’re desperate,” and we didn’t really have a solution.

Now, with Funnel and our centralized leasing team, we can easily flip a switch. I’ve had two requests just in the last two hours—someone reaching out saying, “Hey, we need help right now. Do you have any of your leasing paratroopers that we can just flip this Funnel switch and they can start leasing with us to ensure that we don’t lose momentum during this busy leasing month for student housing?”

One of the things a lot of our community managers are telling us with our CLO is that onsite, they really don’t have the time to walk through the contract or the lease with everyone. You have a dad who says, “I’m not going to sign until I understand this.” I don’t know why he has a southern accent, but they always do.

They don’t have 30 minutes or an hour to walk through that. But the after-hours team—we do. They’ve reported, our onsite teams have said, that the leads have been faster to sign, they’ve had fewer questions, and they’ve been less grumpy with them—not only as leads but as residents—simply because we have the availability to help halfway across the country after hours with these leads.

Alex Howe: A grumpy KPI is another good one to track, for sure.