This episode is a rebroadcast of The Rent Roll and brings together two of the clearest thinkers in rental housing.

First up is your host, Jay Parsons, economist, advisor, and creator of The Rent Roll, a top-ranked podcast known for breaking down market trends, operator realities, and the forces shaping rental housing.

He’s joined by Tyler Christensen, CEO of Funnel, who works directly with the industry’s largest operators to help translate this moment — AI adoption, centralization, and new operating models — into practical changes for teams and workflows.

You’ll learn: 

Episode transcript: 

0:00 The Rent Roll with Jay Parsons — AI and rental housing with Tyler Christiansen

Tyler Christiansen: The word “AI” is overused. Over time, much like we don’t say “cloud software” anymore, we just say “software” because all software is cloud, eventually AI won’t be the term that dominates everything. It’s not a product. It’s a technology, like the internet or electricity, that permeates many other products. 

Jay, I love the REIT recaps you do, but I don’t think you were doing them when Camden started talking about this. They attributed $4 million in annualized savings to their centralization and AI efforts. And it wasn’t one or the other. It was both.

AI is going to move workflow by workflow, identifying where a human does or does not need to be involved. Where we end up with better consumer experiences, you’ll still need humans, we strongly believe at Funnel you’ll need them. But instead of doing busy work to create the pet addendum, why not have them walk over a doggy gift basket to the unit and say, “Congrats on Fido.” That’s going to be the point of differentiation. If everyone is using AI and everything goes agentic, the differentiation will still be the humans.

1:08 Introduction 

Alex Howe: Welcome back to Multifamily Unpacked. Today’s episode is a special rebroadcast from The Rent Roll, featuring two of the sharpest minds in rental housing. First up is your host, Jay Parsons: economist, advisor, and creator of The Rent Roll, a top-100 podcast that cuts through the noise to unpack market trends, operator realities, and the forces shaping real estate.

He’s joined by Funnel CEO Tyler Christiansen, who’s at the center of the industry’s shift toward AI-powered and centralized operations. Tyler works with the largest owners and managers in the space to translate what this transformation really means for teams, workflows, and the future of property operations.

Jay and Tyler dive into where the industry is headed next and how leaders should get ready. Let’s get into it.

1:57 The Rent Roll with Jay Parsons

Jay Parsons: Welcome. It’s episode 61 of The Rent Roll, your podcast on all things rental housing. I’m your host, Jay Parsons, talking about multifamily, SFR, and BTR. Thanks for making us part of your day.

Today’s episode: there’s a lot of fuss around AI. It’s being blamed for the job-growth slowdown, and at the same time it’s supposed to be the future of apartment leasing and management. Every proptech company is talking about AI, and every owner and manager needs at least some baseline understanding.

We just had NMHC’s OPECH Conference in Vegas, a big proptech event for multifamily, so now felt like a good time to talk AI.

I’m not a technologist whatsoever, and to be honest, I hope I’m not the only one, sometimes I get burned out on the topic. There’s so much noise around AI, and I don’t want to contribute to the noise, but I don’t want to ignore it. I think that would be foolish. It’s becoming more real every day, and it’s only going to accelerate.

So we’ll try to make it real: where AI is today in rental housing, where it’s going, and what impact it could have on the economy and therefore on rental housing demand.

Our guest knows this space very well: Tyler Christiansen, CEO of Funnel, the AI and CRM software used heavily in the apartment business. Tyler is a second-generation multifamily guy, so he understands the industry not just from the tech side, but the ownership and operations side.

We’re going to have a fun conversation today. I’ve known Tyler Christiansen for a long time. He’s a good guy. 

One quick plug: I’ve been doing more newsletters, one to three a month, and you can get them at jparsons.com/newsletter.

As always, we kick it off with “Here’s a chart.” Today, we don’t have a chart, we have a quote. I’ll keep this section brief, but I want to talk about AI and set up the conversation with Tyler.

There’s a lot of noise in the space. I’m not an AI expert, and I’m not going to pretend like I am, but it kind of annoys me a little bit, and annoy is probably a strong word, but I have a healthy dose of skepticism when fellow non-experts like me talk about AI. Everyone wants to assign it way too much credit and blame without fully understanding it. I don’t want to contribute to the noise.

Think about how many headlines you’ve seen blaming AI for taking away jobs for Gen Z coming out of college. I see that and think: I just don’t think that passes the sniff test.

During the latest earnings calls, Angela Kleiman, CEO of Essex, was asked about AI’s impact, and I thought her answer was really good. It speaks not only to the impact on rental housing both from the operations and demand side, but I think a lot of other kinds of ministries could probably say the same thing.

She said: “In an environment where the macro environment is soft, businesses are, and they should, be focused on efficiency. And so I don’t think from what we’re seeing that they’re AI-driven job losses.” Okay. So right there, what she’s saying is that they’re, everyone’s nervous, they’re pulling back a little bit and they’re hiring as much, they’re trying to be more efficient but then not necessarily AI driven.

Okay, so let’s go back to the quote she says. “But in terms of what we think is going to happen with a conversation about AI displacing jobs and becoming or is viewed to be a disruptor, we do think it’s going to happen at some point. AI capabilities are rapidly growing and we’re seeing research suggesting that most companies are experimenting with AI.”

So that experimenting with AI is high, but adoption is low because the ROI is still unclear. That’s a very important point she is making.

So she is talking about how Essex is using it, and I think you can make this case for a lot of different industries around the country. 

She says: “Essex, where we see AI benefiting data analytics and certain repetitive tasks, but it is still in the early developmental stages, and we need additional technology to interface with the AI applications for utilization. Essex has not had significant workforce reduction using AI, and so what we do expect is that the pace of disruption or job displacement will become more gradual and on, because on the flip side, what we’re seeing is, as I mentioned earlier, an unprecedented number of startups, small companies, that because of AI can form businesses.”

And what a great point, right? So to have all this AI, we have to have more jobs that create more businesses to support all these things, not just AI technologists themselves, but the cottage industry that supports that too. 

And then go back to a quote, “And that’s not being picked up by the BLS, (meaning the Bureau of Labor Statistics), but certainly it’s being picked up by the demand that we are seeing in Northern California.”

So great comments from Angela there. I thought her comments were really interesting.

We all see these headlines, AI is taking these jobs, but again, I think Angela’s point backs this up, is that just at this point in the game, it doesn’t make sense. We’re all trying to explain softer job numbers, and at the same time we’re seeing this, we’re also, everyone’s asking chat GPT to rewrite some emails and to, uh, and then to create some dad jokes, right? So because AI is increasingly in front of us, I think we’re probably too quick to assign it the blame for these softer job numbers.

But I like what Angela says here, which is I think a balanced view. And I think she’s right. Yes, everyone is experimenting with AI. But how many companies are actually seeing AI fully take away a meaningful number of jobs that existed six to 12 months ago? Probably not very many if we are being honest. 

Long-term, AI could disrupt more jobs. But we’ve been through major disruptions before—the Industrial Revolution, offshoring, the computer era—and every time we adjusted. I’m no AI expert, but it seems like AI will further accelerate the shift toward a services-based economy. It disrupts, then we adjust.

So of course that could change in the future, like Angela said, and it wouldn’t be a surprise to see AI take away, over time, certain types of jobs. But is it really happening at scale today? I don’t think so.

Even Amazon—people point to Amazon, obviously they’re one of the leaders in AI—and they’ve just announced a recent round of downsizing. But what they’ve said is that it’s not really AI-driven. It’s more efficiency-driven. We’ve been seeing that pattern across a lot of tech companies these last few years. After the years of just building, building, building, and hiring, hiring, hiring, and offering all kinds of crazy employee benefits to be on campus, they pull back a little bit. That’s kind of what Amazon has said as well: it’s more the itch for efficiency and eliminating redundancies.

But in a lot of cases, those tech jobs are just getting shuffled around. It’s not like we’ve seen some big spike in unemployment, particularly for tech.

So again, I do think we’ll see AI cause more disruption in the years to come. You don’t have to have a crystal ball to know that. And I know that reality worries a lot of people, and for good reason in some cases. But think of it this way, if this is somewhat encouraging: AI is not the first major disruption we’ve seen here in the U.S.

We had that little thing called the Industrial Revolution a century-plus ago. That took away a lot of jobs, to say the least. But it took away some jobs and created a bunch of other jobs, and we adjusted.

Many decades later we had the offshoring spree, first for manufacturing, now it has affected us everywhere else, and then also later for back-office business jobs and back-office tech jobs, white-collar jobs. And you know what happened? We adjusted.

We had the computer era, which was also a big disruption, greatly reducing the number of, for instance, admin jobs routing phone calls, typing up memos on typewriters, or data-entry workers, etc. And what happened? We adjusted.

We’ve gradually become more and more of a services-based economy through these disruptions. Again, I’m no expert in AI, but it just seems like AI is going to further accelerate us in that direction. It disrupts, and then we adjust. I believe we’re a resilient bunch. We’ll adjust to this as well, and we probably won’t look back.

So again, short term I’m skeptical that it’s limiting a lot of jobs. Longer term it could disrupt a lot more jobs, but I think we’ll adjust, as always.

So what does that mean for apartment demand and leasing, SFR demand and leasing? Probably not a ton. There are going to be pockets where it does. Obviously, if you have pockets like Silicon Valley or the Silicon Slopes, and other tech places like eventually Seattle, which doesn’t have a lot of AI now, but that’s going to come, and places like Austin, etc., there are going to be jobs created that help support AI, and that could be a pockets opportunity and you see better demand there. That’s something Angela mentioned happening in the Bay Area.

On the flip side, you may have certain pockets of the country where there’s a concentration of job types that are more easily replaceable by AI. That takes a little bit of foresight: before we’re acquiring a site for development or acquiring an existing property, are they overly dependent on a certain employer or a certain job category that is at risk for displacement through automation and AI? If so, that probably should factor into the calculus.

Alright. More on AI, and specifically what it’s doing and where it’s going in the rental-housing space, in our conversation today with Tyler.

12:29 In the news

Jay Parsons: Alright, we’ve got a few headlines this week. This comes from NightVest, which is a multifamily owner and operator with a heavy presence in the Sunbelt. And of course we had their CEO on this podcast a number of months ago; it was a good conversation, actually almost a year ago now, probably early this year.

They just released their 2025–2026 Multifamily Renter Sentiment Report. It’s based on a survey of apartment renters, and there are some really interesting stats to share from this.

Three quick things I want to share.

Number one, and this one’s an encouraging one, 95% of renters expect their financial situation in 2026 to be better or the same as 2025. We always hear the bad news; that’s a great stat. Ninety-five percent said “better” or “the same.”

Second thing: 47% say they plan to rent for at least the next five years. Forty-seven percent, almost half, plan to rent for at least five more years. That is up from 42% who said the same last year.

And then the third thing, and this is an interesting one too, they said: if mortgage rates dropped, are you more likely to buy a home? Fifty-three percent of renters said yes, but that was down from 70% just two years ago.

I’m not sure how much of that drop-off is due to the challenges of getting a down payment, or just preferential shifts favoring renting, or if it’s just survey nuances and differences in composition. But that’s definitely an interesting stat.

Alright, let’s go to our next headline. This one comes from Bloomberg. Speaking of rising costs, by the way, the headline here is: “Soaring Insurance Costs Hit Owners of New York City Rent-Stabilized Units. Landlords are cutting spending on other expenses to cover higher operating costs, NYU report says.”

First of all, quick thought. Talk to people across the country, and insurance costs—I’m not an insurance expert—but it’s interesting to me. A few years ago when insurance costs started spiking in the Sunbelt, I thought, “Oh, well, it’s the storms down there. That’s causing everything to go up more there than elsewhere in the country.” And then they started to really come down. In fact, a lot of the groups in the Sunbelt and coastal markets say their insurance costs are down now, in some cases by double digits. They’re not back to where they were previously, but their insurance bills are coming down.

It seems like in other parts of the country, those costs spiked later and haven’t dropped off as much. Maybe that’s one of the cases here. Different timing in different places, I suppose, and maybe other factors. If somebody knows why that is, send me a note.

Anyway, back to this article. It says skyrocketing insurance costs are threatening New York City’s affordable housing stock. The landlords who own more than 450,000 of the city’s rent-stabilized apartments saw insurance expenses grow 150% from 2019 to 2025, far outpacing every other major cost, according to a new report from New York City’s Furman Center.

By the way, there are closer to double 450,000 rent-stabilized apartments. I’m not sure exactly what they’re saying there; maybe I misunderstood it.

Then it goes on to say the rapid rise in insurance premiums is just one of many pressures on housing in New York, part of a broader affordability crisis that helped Mayor-elect Mamdani win the city’s highest office earlier this month.

So this is the challenge for rent-control advocates: you cap or freeze revenues but not expenses, and then you put properties into a death spiral. We’ve seen that play out already in New York City, and at the current trajectory, with issues like this, it’s only going to get worse.

Alright. That’s going to take us to today’s interview.

It is sponsored by Funnel, the AI and CRM software trusted by four of the six major REITs and many more leading operators like BH and Cortland. To learn how Funnel can help your property centralize operations and automate everyday tasks, visit funnelleasing.com.

So our guest today is actually from Funnel. I felt a little funny reading this lead-in from Funnel because I want to be clear: I actually had no contractual obligation to invite them. That’s not how we roll here at The Rent Roll.

But the NMHC OPTECH Conference was last week, which is a big proptech event for the industry, obviously. Plus, there’s just so much buzz about AI, as I mentioned earlier. So I thought it was good timing to talk about AI and proptech, and I thought Tyler would be a great fit for the topic because his company is one of the leaders in this space and one of the leaders in using AI in rental housing.

I’ve known Tyler for a number of years now. Not only is he knowledgeable in the space, but he is a good dude. He’s a good guy to connect with. I always enjoy talking with him. He is one of the handful of people in the proptech space who you can talk to and it doesn’t feel like techno-speak. 

He understands the industry, not just the software side, but also the management and ownership side as well. I think it’s partly because it’s in his blood. He’ll tell the story, but he is a second-generation multifamily guy. Now he is the CEO of Funnel.

So we’re going to have some fun today. We won’t get too technical. We’ll have some fun with it. Please welcome in Tyler Christiansen.

17:57 Tyler Christiansen + Funnel creating a better renter experience

Jay Parsons: Alright, welcome to the interview portion of today’s podcast. I’m honored to welcome in my friend and the CEO of Funnel, Tyler Christiansen. Tyler, thanks so much for being here.

Tyler Christiansen: Jay, it’s an honor. Thank you so much for having me.

Jay Parsons: Of course. So first of all, I think everybody knows the name Funnel, but let’s first talk about you. What’s your background? How’d you get into multifamily?

Tyler Christiansen: I’m a long-time listener to the podcast, huge fan, and as is my dad. When I told him I was going to be on here, he was very excited. And that’s because I come from a real estate family.

My dad was a banker in commercial real estate his whole career. Then, right around the time I was in college, he switched over to multifamily development with a group out of Salt Lake City called Wasatch.

So I got exposure to the multifamily world and, in college, I interned for them, looking at pieces of dirt all over Salt Lake City, going to city offices, getting zoning plats. That was my first intro.

But I was also incredibly fortunate to be in what is now called Silicon Slopes, Utah County, Utah Valley. It’s where companies like Entrata are based. Also, companies like Domo, Adobe acquired big companies there. I was coming out of college when Silicon Slopes was emerging and was very fortunate that my first job out of college was at Property Solutions, which now is Entrata.

Back then, we were still helping multifamily convert to innovative technology like websites. That was the big trend.

Jay Parsons: We’re dating ourselves here now.

Tyler Christiansen: I know, right? I like to think of myself as a young guy, but I now have a 16-year-old daughter, and my first product I sold was websites. That is old.

But yeah, that was my background. I ultimately spent a lot of time there, ran the sales organization at Entrata as they transitioned from a website and payments provider to property management software.

I also did a brief stint at LRO. So you and I both love talking about revenue management and pricing software. Then I ended up over here, which we can unpack as well. But my background is: I am born into multifamily and I love it.

Jay Parsons: I like that, because most of us, I joke all the time, most of us sort of stumble into multifamily by accident, multifamily or SFR. But you actually have it in your genes. There are very few people who actually have it in their genes, unless there’s a hand-me-down New York small walk-up property or something. So that’s pretty cool that you’ve got that background.

Now tell us about Funnel’s origins. What’s the early foundational story of Funnel and how you got to where you are now?

Tyler Christiansen: Thank you so much for asking. We’re hopeful that a lot of your listeners have heard of Funnel. If not, we’ll unpack a little bit later what we do.

On the origin side, it’s a little bit like the Starbucks story that a lot of folks may know about Howard Schultz. You think you know Starbucks, but the background is wildly different.

The Funnel story starts in New York City as a company called Nestio. Even before that, there was a company called Urban Apartment. The original concept for the business was “Pinterest for apartment hunting” in New York City.

If you think about what we do today, CRM for REITs, that was a long way off. But it’s an important data point because Karen Mayo, who is now at GetHundred, and Michael O’Toole, who is our CTO and co-founder, had this idea: “I’m looking for multiple apartments in New York City, and all of the different ILSs aren’t really designed for the consumer themselves.” The core function was: I find apartments and I pin them to me.

That’s an important data point that’ll come back up later in what we call renter centricity.

So Nestio grew in New York City and ultimately landed into, folks who know multifamily technology will remember this name, VaultWare. They kind of became the VaultWare of New York City.

For those who aren’t familiar: they were taking disparate listings information from New York City owners and pushing that to the very bespoke New York listings world. If you’re looking for an apartment in New York, you don’t go to apartments.com, you go to StreetEasy, which is now owned by Zillow. You’re also going to have to work with a broker in that process. That’s changed a little bit over the last couple of years, but that is the one market where the brokers really still dominate the search process.

Jay Parsons: Still in the Dark Ages in New York City.

Tyler Christiansen: One hundred percent. The reality of that business was: Karen’s a phenomenal entrepreneur. Mike was a phenomenal CTO. But every entrepreneur will tell you the first question investors ask is: “What’s your TAM? What’s your addressable market?” What they didn’t probably realize at the time, when they first built it, was that this was not a transferable product.

So the company Nestio grew to about 30 employees, grew to about $3 million in revenue, but hit its head on the ceiling. Because in Tampa, Florida where I am, in Texas where you are, brokers are not how you find apartments. Maybe there are locators a little bit, but that’s not the normal multifamily model.

Myself, as I mentioned, I was running sales at Entrata at the time, and my big “A-ha” was that, during the Entrata–Yardi lawsuit, where I was deposed and saw clients had to pick a side, pick a platform, we felt there should be an agnostic renter management software tool.

Fast forward from then: when I joined Nestio in 2018, we launched Funnel in 2019. The big “A-ha” that we’re going to talk about from there was centralization. Centralization was the unlock, and that architecture of pinning properties to the renter became a big, big important deal.

In short: Nestio was a New York City broker company. That business we’ve sunset. There are still a handful of customers where we’ll send listings to brokers, but it’s almost a non-existent business for us now. In its place we’ve built Funnel, which now serves 1.5 million apartments across the country, 1.5 million units, has about 170 employees. That’s what we look like today.

Jay Parsons: And primarily a CRM tool, with a growing number of things too, right?

Tyler Christiansen: That’s right. Most of our clients use Funnel as their CRM and AI product. We have about a half million apartment units that actually do their application, screening, lease signing, and payments on us as well.

But we’re primarily known today as the CRM and AI platform for multifamily.

25:09 What is the AI hype cycle in multifamily

Jay Parsons: Let’s talk about AI a little bit. In the rental housing world, everybody’s talking about AI, obviously, but there’s an equal amount of excitement and cynicism about AI.

First of all: is that fair? Do you agree? And related question: I kind of feel like, we, in the multifamily industry, not you but more broadly, maybe abuse and overuse the word “AI” and set wrong expectations about what it is or isn’t. What do you think?

Tyler Christiansen: I actually want to take the second question first, because I think it’s super relevant to the rest of our conversation.

Absolutely, the word “AI” is overused. I think over time, much like we don’t say “cloud software” anymore, we just say “software” because all software is cloud, eventually AI is going to not be the term that dominates everything. Because it is not a product. It is a technology, like the internet, like electricity, that permeates many other products.

To take that back to your first question about hype and cynicism: to answer the question properly about what the sentiment is in multifamily, especially coming off of, I was in Las Vegas this week at NMHC’s OPTECH with the RETCC organization, there are two different spectrums or charts that I want to put together and overlap.

Hopefully folks are familiar with the Gartner Hype Cycle. It talks about when a new technology comes out, the promise of that new technology leads to a lot of hyperbole, hype, and over-promising. Inevitably, that leads to a disillusionment “trough of despair,” as it’s often called, where folks are like: “This technology sucks. It’s never going to be useful. I don’t know why we bought it.” Then you move into this slope of enlightenment where, eventually, much like the internet, there’s something similar to a plateau where you’ve found the usefulness of that technology.

If we take that concept, and then another concept for entrepreneurs or technologists, the idea of crossing the chasm, which buckets users of technology into different categories, and put those concepts together: the reality is there are some folks who don’t want to use AI and are cynics. And then there are others who are well through the chasm and through the hype cycle and are in the slope of enlightenment.

Maybe one I would highlight, for instance: a Funnel customer who this week just got named the RETCC chair, Kristy Simonette, CTO of Camden Property Trust. She helped Funnel develop our AI product in 2020, way before it was hyped and people knew about generative technology. We’ve been through multiple cycles with Camden on our AI products, first starting with chat, then with voice, and now you get into that slope of enlightenment where the second and third opportunities are hanging.

I will say, though: I’d say the majority of folks have implemented AI in some form, and there was an MIT study that validated this. The majority of folks in their first and early implementations of AI have not achieved the results they were hoping for. Put simply, in multifamily, they haven’t seen a reduction in staff. It’s very rare to do that. So a lot of folks are cynical.

What’s unique, though, is that they’re not wanting to turn it off. Those early findings, much like Camden, like Essex, some of our other partners, will transition into cost savings as they move into those next steps. But yes: hype is real, and there are a lot of folks who are a little bit frustrated right now. That was very, very clear at OPTECH this week.

27:41 What is the current state of AI in multifamily?

Jay Parsons: That’s really interesting. Let’s dive into that more, but maybe zoom out for a second. You were just at OPTECH; you’re doing a lot, and you see a lot of other groups doing a lot of things. What do you think is the current state of AI in the multifamily or rental-housing world right now?

Tyler Christiansen: I would say the majority of communities have AI turned on.

If you go out and pick a community, this is something I do all the time, every time I’m at a stoplight and I see an apartment community, I pull up the website. I’m like, “Who manages this? What technology are they using?” It’s a real thrill when it’s Funnel.

The majority of those communities have some sort of AI at the front door answering pet-policy questions and basic FAQs.

One of the things that you’ve shared on the podcast in previous episodes is that we’ve seen a flatlining, and in some places a decline, in rent growth. When you combine those two things, a lot of discretionary spend went into AI.

On one of your recent episodes, you talked about the increase in marketing spend. I think the ILSs are doing well. I’m good friends with the Apartment List CEO, Matt Woods, they’re doing a great job. But I also think a lot of that spend went into AI.

Unlike marketing spend, where you know what you’re buying, with AI, chatbots, nurturing tools—I don’t think people thought they were buying consumer-experience tools. I think they thought they were buying workforce-reduction tools.

So, to that sentiment question again: nobody’s turning off their AI. But a lot of the hopes of “We’re going to run properties without humans” have not materialized.

Certainly, a topic we’re going to get into, one that folks hopefully know about Funnel, is centralization. The customers that did embrace centralization first, Camden, BH (you’ve had Joanna Zabriskie on the show) those organizations, because they’ve aggregated the teams that do the work, have seen actual cost savings.

But if you just throw AI at an individual community with the normal one-to-100 employee-to-unit ratio, you’re not going to see a reduction in headcount. You won’t turn it off either, because it is a better consumer experience to get your questions answered at 2:00 a.m.

29:39 How do centralization and AI impact headcount in multifamily?

Jay Parsons: That’s such a good point. Let’s jump to that, because I’m glad you brought it up. I was at an event a while back where this conversation came up, and this was probably a year ago, but people were saying they weren’t necessarily seeing the expense reductions they wanted from centralization and AI.

So what impact, obviously you mentioned better consumer experience, which I think is undeniable, but what other impact are centralization and AI having on property-management staffing and operations? And do you think we’ll get to a point where it really does impact headcounts more significantly?

Tyler Christiansen: We’re there. There are certain organizations, and if you look back even to the pre-generative era, and Jay, I love the REIT recaps that you do, but I don’t think you were doing them when Camden started talking about this.

They attributed $4 million in annualized savings to their centralization and AI efforts. And it wasn’t one or the other. It was both.

Let me be very specific, and they’ve talked about this publicly, about how they did that. They do not have assistant community managers. Period. Full stop.

Essex, another Funnel customer, does not have leasing offices.

Both of those organizations started with centralization. Then, when you take the assistant community manager role—which does a lot of administrative tasks, and aggregate the role, rather than having 200 individual ACMs, you aggregate and say, “Even if we start at 150, we’re not completely eliminating the role; we’re bringing them into a centralized shared-services role.”

As you begin to leverage AI, you start to see real savings.

One example: our new voice-AI product can handle 70% of calls without human involvement.

The metric we measure is called containment rate. If I tell you, “When you call an airline, there’s a human waiting for you, but the AI is ready to answer as well,” we’re measuring how often you hit the escape button and go to the human.

You could hide the human and say 100% containment, but the real test is: I know there’s a human, but I’d rather talk to AI.

We’re seeing 70% of our calls now where the consumer knows there’s a human they could talk to, but they would rather schedule a tour, ask about the pet policy, or check the status of a work order with AI.

Seventy percent of consumers would rather talk to AI, because the AI has just gotten that good.

When you do that at a community level, you may or may not be able to reduce headcount. When you do that and you have 100% of your assistant community-manager roles centralized, that’s when the cost-saving opportunities come in.

So I think the disconnect, where people aren’t seeing results, is not really a chicken-or-egg question. You need a centralized operating model if you intend for AI to genuinely reduce headcount.

The analogy I always give to folks who don’t love multifamily as much as you and I do is that multifamily still looks like old-school car dealerships. Each individual store.

Henry Ford Brown down the road, a Ford dealership, is not going to see cost savings by automating some conversations. Rivian is. Tesla is. Because they’ve centralized that consumer brand experience.

So there are folks who are frustrated not seeing results. There also are folks who will tell you, and they’ve talked publicly, that they genuinely have reduced headcount.

One caveat: there’s so much turnover in those roles in our industry. Most of the “reductions” have come through attrition and not backfilling.

Jay Parsons: Oh, absolutely. It seems like it’s really elevating your best people to take on a broader role, and having AI and centralization take on administrative tasks and position good people to do more. But what we’re finding too is, oftentimes, you’re paying those good people more as well.

Tyler Christiansen: Yeah. One of our newer customers shared this publicly at our conference last year. GID is the asset manager; Windsor is their property-management company.

They have this beautiful vision they call “Bigger, Better Jobs.” What they shared this week with us is that their retention rates from an employee basis have nearly doubled. They’ve gotten much better at retaining people, and the costs of those individuals, their salaries and compensation, have grown 20 to 30%. They’re keeping those better people.

So it’s a huge win for everyone.

Camden shared publicly as well that their leasing agents saw their commission really take off. They had fewer sales associates, but those sales associates were making significantly more.

I’m a sales guy, Jay. If my addressable market was “Tampa, Florida to sell property-management companies,” I’d be frustrated. But if you give me a bigger pool and more sales opportunity, I’m going to lean into that.

So it’s definitely a retention tool for your best people.

Jay Parsons: Yeah, it’s a win-win.

34:13 What is the next frontier for AI in multifamily?

Jay Parsons: Alright, so what are the next frontiers for AI in multifamily, do you think? What’s next? What’s down the road?

Tyler Christiansen: There are two things I’d highlight.

First is voice. Voice is a game-changer for multifamily, for every service-oriented industry, because even in the early generative rounds, it was just so bad. We all still see that at times.

Flying back from Vegas this week, I had to get on a Southwest flight. I’m in my room packing up my stuff and I zipped the bag as I was talking to the voice agent. It said, “What was that?” It stopped the voice; it couldn’t understand the background noise, ruined it.

The newest, greatest voice-AI technology, we partner with the chairman of OpenAI, who has a company called Sierra, speaks 37 different languages. It can block out background noise. That’s where you get these really high conversion ratios, because it’s genuinely the case that most people prefer it to talking to a human.

That’s going to be applied to all sorts of different channels. We’re still relatively early as an industry.

Let me tell you about the really exciting next thing. It is a buzzword and it is hype, but if you follow tech like I do, all you’re going to hear people talking about is “agentic.” That’s the thing that people are talking about.

What does that mean?

To the Dale Christians of the world listening to this podcast, “agentic AI” means enabling AI and software, old-school software, CRMs, property-management software, through a conversational layer, like a chatbot, to automate the work being done.

Let me give you a tangible example of what we’re delivering this quarter at Funnel.

On a portfolio the size of Camden’s or GID’s or UDR’s, call it 60,000 units, everybody knows you’re going to have roughly half your leases renew and half move out, depending on the metro and what’s going on in the market. You know how many new leases you need.

Something that gets ignored is how many times, in a 60,000-unit portfolio, a resident wants to modify their lease, what we call a mid-lease change. It happens about 20,000 times on a 60,000-unit portfolio that somebody says, “Hey, I got a pet,” or “My roommate is going to transfer,” or something that requires administrative work to adjust the lease status.

Now that Funnel does online leasing for our customers, we see that.

What we’re enabling for our customers is a voice and chat agent that can gather the relevant information, let’s use the pet example.

“Hey, I got a chihuahua. Is the chihuahua allowed in our community?”

“Yes, it is.” 

“How much does it weigh?”

The AI is going to gather the relevant information. Historically, that would be a human interaction. Then, instead of just stopping at collecting information, our customers say, “Have it create the addendum. Have it send the addendum.”

The ultimate question our clients are debating is: should AI countersign the addendum?

Imagine a world in which 20,000 transactions with probably 100,000 individual pieces of communication are fully handed over to AI. That’s the promise of what agentic software means.

I think what’s going to happen over the next three to five years, on this slope of enlightenment with AI, is that we’re going to go workflow by workflow and identify: does a human need to be involved here?

Where we end up with better consumer experiences, you will still need humans. We strongly believe at Funnel that you’ll need them. But instead of doing the busy work to create the pet addendum, why not have them walk over a doggy gift basket to the unit and say, “Hey, congrats on Fido”?

That’s going to be the point of differentiation. If everyone’s using AI and everything goes agentic, the differentiation will still be the humans.

37:42 The future of multifamily is AI + humans

Jay Parsons: Yeah, that’s a great point. There’s been more conversation about this, and it seems like the best-case scenario is AI and centralization technology taking care of a lot of back-office stuff, and empowering your people, your “people people”, to be in front of their customers, residents, and prospects. That’s a great example of that.

Tyler Christiansen: We will make some missteps along the way. One of the things we and others who were early in maintenance AI have found is that if you give consumers the ability to chat constantly with you about their outstanding maintenance work order, it’s going to create more work.

There’s a lot of stuff, Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, said we are in the “throw it against the wall” chapter. There are a lot of AI use cases that may not actually make the consumer experience better.

But I think, as we get more into automating away mundane tasks and elevating your best people to differentiate the experience, and you’ve said it before on your podcast, it’s showing up in retention rates in the REITs.

All of these investments in better consumer experience, better renewal technology, people are staying more. I think we’re going to see an acceleration of that.

Most folks who work in multifamily onsite would describe their job as administrative: firefighting and administrative work, with very little true value-add customer service. I think AI has the promise to get us closer to that.

Jay Parsons: Yeah. I think part of that better experience is when you have people who, you’re letting your best people do what they do best, which is love on residents and take care of prospects. That creates a better, stickier experience for residents as well.

39:25 How is AI built in multifamily?

Jay Parsons: Let me ask you a question. You mentioned OpenAI earlier. This is something I’ve always wondered: how much of the AI being developed in an industry like ours is piggybacking off a company like OpenAI, which is the name everybody knows, versus, for lack of a better term, “ground-up” proprietary AI?

Tyler Christiansen: Really great question, and something I’ve shared before.

When I came into the industry, we were selling websites and payments. The reality is that websites and payments had been around for 10 years. PayPal was founded in 1998.

Historically, multifamily has had a very slow adoption cycle as an industry. One of my hot takes is: I don’t think that’s the case anymore.

Literally, and I gave this example a second ago, if you call a Greystar community that has Funnel’s AI on it, it’s better than calling Southwest right now. I can say that definitively.

The reason for that is that much of what is available to technologists today is available via APIs. An API is essentially the bridge between two technology systems.

Twenty years ago, when a new technology came out, I’d have to implement it on my servers, on hardware, to get the benefits.

Today, Funnel’s engineers don’t have to code 37 different languages of voice AI. Through the right partnerships and access, you can deploy that yourself.

That’s going to be a very intentional decision for Funnel that other organizations will approach differently.

For example, in the 2012–2015 era, voice technology in terms of telephony, moving phones from on-desk to in software, was happening. A lot of the original CRMs that Funnel competes with built their own phone systems. As the technology got better, they stayed behind because they were still negotiating deals with the telecom providers.

Funnel uses Twilio. Your old employer uses Twilio. Every software developer today, if they’re building a phone system, uses Twilio. It just keeps you up to the latest and greatest.

Same thing with payment software: you’d use Stripe.

So the short answer is: as an industry, it does not make sense for us to build proprietary AI tools at the foundation level. What we need to do is what we’re doing.

Let me tell a fun story. I mentioned the chairman of OpenAI, who runs a startup called Sierra that Funnel partners with. I was super fortunate to get a call with him about a year ago. He took the call because we had a similar investor.

You can tell he didn’t know why he was talking to me, this guy in pink. He said, “What can I do for you?”

His name is Bret Taylor. He created Google Maps and the Like button. This guy is like talking to the Michael Jordan of software.

My first question to him was almost the same one you asked me: “Do you want to build in my vertical, in the rental-housing space, or do you want to partner with companies like me that are systems of record, CRMs, transaction tools?”

I genuinely believe he had not thought about that question for our vertical, because he sat there and processed it. Lucky for me, he said, “No, we want to partner.”

Since then, we’ve spent the last year working together. They don’t want to understand the nuance of working with multifamily revenue-management software, which does need to be proprietary. They don’t want to deal with the nuance of property-management software systems, Blue Moon leasing, fee transparency, things Funnel has spent the last year building.

There is a ton of industry-specific nuance in how we communicate.

But it doesn’t make sense for us to build 30, 40, 50 different language AI models.

So I think the answer to your question is: we’re all going to gravitate toward an API-driven technology economy where the differentiation is in the last mile.

It’s that service of connecting it so that a UDR, who just announced earlier this year that they’re rolling out Funnel, doesn’t need to do all that work. We can plug directly into their multifamily systems.

43:38 How to measure the value and impact of AI in multifamily?

Jay Parsons: Yeah, that’s a great answer. It makes sense, since we all see those names and tools.

Let me ask you another question you’ve already touched on a bit. Early on, when you got into proptech and you were building websites, multifamily was always historically behind on technology.

In the old days, if you had a cool widget or a good idea and went to OPTECH to pitch it, you’d get some adoption. Nowadays, it feels like there’s a lot more focus on: “Will this actually impact NOI? Does it make our business better? Does it make the customer experience better? Does it integrate with the thousand other things I have?”

So my question is: when we think about new things happening with AI and centralization, what’s the proper way to measure the value and impact of AI on actual performance? Can you measure it in terms of expense reduction, revenue growth, NOI?

Tyler Christiansen: Really great question.

If I were to summarize the three themes of OPTECH for me, they would be: automation (which is really AI), centralization, and consolidation.

To your point about widgets and startups, and to the core question of measuring NOI: in technology and in this “throw it against the wall” era, most of what we’re doing is relatively hard to define financially.

At Funnel, we’re experimenting with tools. Every software developer in the world now has an AI-coding assistant. Originally it was sold as, “Hey, you’re not going to need engineers anymore.” The reality is that it has not eliminated engineers; it’s made them more efficient.

Similarly, as I mentioned, most operators have deployed an AI chatbot. Most have not reduced headcount, but they’re not turning them off, because it is a better consumer experience.

One way other verticals are solving this question is through usage-based pricing. If you buy Salesforce, historically you’ve bought it by the seat or license. With newer AI tools, we’re all moving to a usage-based model.

That’s how we pay for our Sierra usage: how many times does the AI actually handle the call? They’re incentivized, and we’re aligned, to get that containment rate to 70, 80, 90%.

Multifamily has a bit of a disconnect, because we have a pricing model historically based on per-unit cost.

Over time, I think we’ll need to move to a different measuring stick, maybe outcome-based pricing.

What I will say, and you’ll appreciate this because you recently did your budgeting session, is that we’ve proposed to our clients earlier this year, because we acquired a tool previously called LeaseHawk (now rebranded to Fenix) that replaces secret shops and scores calls:

We said, “Would you like to pay for this on a usage-based pricing model?”

You might guess the answer. Asset managers did not like that idea. They did not like the variability of “pay for what you use.” Our industry likes predictability; it likes fixed budgets.

Unfortunately, that means it’s going to take us a few years to really align on what’s worth it and what’s valuable.

By and large, I can’t think of a single example of a customer turning off AI. What is happening, to bring this together, is consolidation.

We’ve always believed CRM and AI need to live together. We’re seeing a lot of folks turning off what I’d call standalone AI.

Jay Parsons: Yeah, the standalone-widget era seems to be long gone for the most part.

Tyler Christiansen: It comes back in little peaks. You and I were talking before the show: Zoom was a technology in 2021 that everyone thought was going to take over the world. Fast-forward three years, it’s the worst-performing technology stock because you get video for free from Google and Microsoft.

Similarly, it’s a very scary place to be in multifamily if you’re a pure point solution, but that’s always been the case. You have to start there.

We started as just a lead-management tool. We now manage the entire front office for companies like Cortland. It’s a starting point, but startups will not survive if they don’t move into being a platform.

48:21 OPTECH 2025 recap

Jay Parsons: That brings up another question. One thing I’ve always liked about proptech is you get to see all kinds of startup ideas. Proptech is still a hot area, and OPTECH has always had that pitchfest where you get to hear five-minute pitches from different startups, in addition to hearing from established companies like Funnel.

You’ve talked about some of the themes, but for those who weren’t at OPTECH, share some more of the highlights: the buzz, the mood, what was getting people excited. Any color from the event, for those of us who have FOMO, would be appreciated.

Tyler Christiansen: I think there was a healthy dose of reality.

“Survive ’til ’25” was not the right mantra, and most folks were a little bit pessimistic and definitely looking forward. It’s not going to magically fix itself in ’26. It’s going to get to, what was it? “Heaven in ’27”? Is that the new mantra, Jay?

Jay Parsons: Yeah, absolutely.

Tyler Christiansen: So that sentiment did permeate. I think it was good, because that same question, “How does this show up in ROI?”, was front-and-center.

Broadly, there’s not a single technology tool vendor that doesn’t now have AI features.

One thing I’ll share that I’m optimistic about: there’s a concept in technology called the Innovator’s Dilemma. Clayton Christensen talked about how large incumbent businesses have an incentive to protect their old business model. Think Blockbuster. Blockbuster could have bought Netflix in the ’90s. They said, “No, that’ll ruin our business,” and didn’t embrace it.

If you look today, that’s not really happening at the hyperscalers. Microsoft has an incentive to defend the old world, so does Google, but they’re investing heavily in the new world.

I think the current generation of business leaders is embracing that. I’d say the same in multifamily. There are probably five startups at OPTECH pitching an “AI-only CRM.”

But companies like Funnel, and candidly, I’m good friends with the new CEO of RealPage, Dirk Wakeham, and the president at Yardi, Akshay Rao, all of us are innovating pretty quickly.

I think there was a lot of excitement that, “Hey, I’m already on a tool, and this AI shows up in my existing stack.”

That has shown up for Funnel as well. There’s a stat we track with our investors called net revenue retention: how much your existing customers stick with you and buy more. We had a record year of customers saying, “Wow. If you have an AI product, we’d rather buy it from our existing provider, because it’s in the same context.”

One of the things, for instance, that Joanna Zabriskie is really excited about, and this goes to an opportunity where I think multifamily operators are getting smarter about how to deploy AI, is memory.

I got asked multiple times about the concept of memory, which is a pretty novel concept in AI. Jay, you may ask a pet-policy question at one community, but what if you ask that same question at another BH community, and we know you’re Jay Parsons?

We could say, “Oh, are you asking about Fido, your labradoodle? That’s great. At this community, our pet policy would accommodate him.”

One of the features Joanna reminds me we need ASAP is a “Customer 360 AI”, that as soon as I open a page and look at Jay, who’s up for renewal, I see the three things I need to know about him, rather than pages and pages of history.

I think multifamily is applying proper pressure to their existing providers: “You have a chance right now. If you can innovate and move with the pace of innovation, we’re going to move with you. It’s not worth ripping out the stack, especially when rent growth is what it is.”

Jay Parsons: For those listening, Joanna is, of course, the head of BH Management and a past guest of the podcast. So if you’re listening Joanna, Hi!

52:04 What’s next for Funnel Leasing?

Jay Parsons: Tyler, what’s next for Funnel? What does the next chapter of your business look like?

Tyler Christiansen: We are really excited with our partners.

Most of our customers start with Funnel using the CRM, fixing lead management. I would say there’s a resurgence right now in lead management, and your data would back this up. It’s still highly competitive.

So while, coming out of the zero-interest-rate era, everyone was focused on protecting the back door, as you showed on a previous show, marketing budgets are high and we’re seeing a lot of operators, especially in third-party management, really focused on doing the basics right.

One of the trends we’re seeing is that large third-party managers, many of whom use Funnel, are embracing elements of centralization. I think they’re looking at their clients, the asset managers who listen to your show, and saying, “We can get you Camden and UDR-type results if you allow us to operate more cross-functionally.”

So that’s one big trend I don’t think is going to stop: enabling the next chapter of centralization, especially as it works within third-party management.

The analogy I always give is that the concept of centralization already exists in hospitality. Asset managers are comfortable with Marriott sharing leads across the portfolio. For some reason, we’re not in multifamily. We say, “Greystar, ZRS, you can’t do that.”

I believe they’re starting to see those back-office centralization opportunities.

The next thing for us that we’re hyper-focused on, and why we’ve partnered with Sierra to have best-in-class conversational AI, is that the next era of cost-savings opportunity and employee-to-unit ratio improvement will come from automating the agentic layer.

As I discussed earlier, starting today with mid-lease changes, we believe renewals may be another low-hanging fruit, and certainly the onboarding experience in general.

What you need then is a singular system, a singular customer-service experience. About 500,000 of our units use Funnel for application, screening, lease signing, and resident portal. That creates the right framework to begin automating away the work historically done onsite.

Jay Parsons: Yeah, that’s fantastic. Certainly best of luck as you navigate the next chapter.

Tyler, thanks for being on the program. And thank you also because sometimes proptech conversations can be mired in technicalities and things that go over my head. So thank you for making it easy to digest, and I’m sure those listening would say the same. Thank you again for being part of the show, Tyler.

Tyler Christiansen: Jay, one last story to tell you really quick.

I used to hire new salespeople at Entrata, and I would often bring them into multifamily. I’d always get the question, especially from the younger generation: “Hey, what’s a podcast I can listen to in order to learn about multifamily?”

I had no answer. Genuinely. It’s part of the reason we started our own podcast, to unpack the history of multifamily technology. Now we point everyone to you.

It’s a must-follow for our Funnel employees, and you do a great job. So thank you for what you do for the industry, keeping everybody up to speed and dispelling a lot of misconceptions about the industry, which is really helpful.

Jay Parsons: That’s the fun part. Thank you, Tyler. And by the way, if you’re not seeing Tyler’s screen on video, he’s also the host of Multifamily Unpacked, the podcast, another good one.

Thank you so much, Tyler. Appreciate it.

Tyler Christiansen: Thank you, and best of luck getting into 2026.

Jay Parsons: Thanks, Tyler. I appreciate it.