In this episode, Alex Howe, SVP Marketing + Growth, at Funnel talks with Tyler Christiansen, CEO, Funnel about what RETTC Tech Executive Summit revealed, and why execution beats hype. 

They break down: 

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Episode transcript:

0:00 Agentic AI Rent payments in ChatGPT + 2026 reality check: trust, transparency, and out-executing the market

Alex Howe: Hey this is Alex back with another episode of The Report. Tyler reports back from RETTC’s Tech Executive Summit, we’ve got a big AI story on a historic world’s first, Camden’s 2025 National study on multifamily workforce trends report is out, and as an overall theme we’re seeing why 2026 is looking like a year where the winners just… execute better. Let’s jump in.

Before we jump in to today’s episode, quick update on the Forum, our user conference. We are nearly sold out. The event is March 24th to 26th in Scottsdale at a five-star resort. We’ve got over 135 attendees at this point, some of the largest property management owners and operators in the country.

Great speakers: Mia Hamm, Jay Parsons, Kristy Simonette, Clay Bavor, and others. We’re going to be focused on AI, centralization, and the human experience. Get tickets while you can before we sell out completely.

1:05 Introduction

Alex Howe: Tyler, we’re recording this on Monday, March 2nd. You just got back last week from Coral Gables, RETTC’s Tech Executive Summit meeting, which was intentionally small and working-session focused. Tell me a little bit about the most useful disagreements that were happening at RETTC and whether it changed your mind about anything.

Tyler Christiansen: RETTC is awesome. I was skeptical. I’ve been told that the early days of OPTECH were similarly very small. The vendor-to-operator ratio was a little bit better than what OPTECH is today, or a lot of the conferences we go to. I say that as the vendor who messes up the ratios.

I think what’s made RETTC so awesome is the focus on what’s going on in our industry right now. It’s a group that really aligned around a purpose. That purpose, in many ways, is tied to the shifting sands of regulation, fee transparency, and this transition toward larger operators in the industry.

There’s not one particular disagreement that stands out to me. Rather, what stands out is the camaraderie around, “We’re going to compete with each other, but we want to compete by the same set of rules.” I think fee transparency is the most obvious example of that. It doesn’t behoove anybody to create confusion.

Everybody was sharing that we’re on the side of renters. We want fee transparency as well. We want clarity for renters. The tricky part is when you have a different set of standards by market or a different set of standards by operator.

Seeing operators all moving in this direction, led in many cases by some of the larger operators—the Greystars, the GID’s who have really been big leaders in this—was encouraging.

It was a fun opportunity to dive into a ton of topics. The bigger debate continues to be the role that AI plays in housing. Not that anybody’s opposed to it, but is it worth spending time on autonomous buildings, or is it better to spend time at the intersection of where the human delivers the superior experience?

All in all, big fan of NMHC’s new group, RETTC. It’s something Funnel is very proud to be a member of and to serve on the committees that are deciding a lot of important policy for how we operate and how we manage data in the industry.

3:20 Funnel + BH complete the first rent payment in ChatGPT

Alex Howe:  Let’s jump into the news. One in particular that was exciting for us: Funnel processed the world’s first rent payment inside ChatGPT. It was reported by a number of outlets, and we did it in partnership with BH Management. If you’re not familiar with BH, they’ve got more than 93,000 units nationwide. They’re number 11 on NMHC’s Top Managers list, 39th on the Owners list.

A major step toward bringing truly agentic AI to property management workflows. When people hear, “You did a rent payment inside ChatGPT,” they may assume that’s a novelty. But the real story is what it takes to let AI execute inside foundational core systems without losing oversight.

What guardrails made this viable, and how should operators think about adopting agentic workflows in a way that’s scalable and auditable?

Tyler Christiansen: I was really proud of the team. At RETTC last week, BH got a big applause from one of the committees for doing this. That makes us excited when our partners are leading the industry.

Let me start with the why. That’s a question we get asked: are there a lot of renters that need this? Technology is never about the masses at first. It’s about what is possible. Then you let consumers guide you.

We’re all using LLMs more as consumers—everything from redesigning a living room to finding a restaurant. This is a use case near and dear to operators’ hearts: helping consumers pay their rent. Nothing is more important than paying the bills. 

Proving the feasibility that a renter was able to go in and, in a conversation with ChatGPT, get their balance, make their payment, set up an auto payment, and they never had to log in during that experience of the resident portal really changed the game in terms of, “Hey, it’s a whole new channel.”

When I came into multifamily in 2012, about 3% of renters were paying rent online, period. So in about a decade we went from 3% to 100%. Today there’s one renter in all of America who paid their rent via ChatGPT. Not even a percent, it’s one, but it is not a stretch to think that is gonna be double digits in the next couple of years, that it could be the norm in a decade.

And so proving feasibility is important.

To your question Alex on guardrails: your technology providers need to modernize to interact with LLMs. To nerd out for a second, there’s a term called model context protocol. Funnel’s data and our customers’ data need to interact with these LLMs in a model they’re comfortable with, so we can take advantage of their interfaces and vice versa.

And that sets up then a secure—and this is different than, for anybody who pays attention to technology, you may have heard of things like Claude bot. Not Claude. Claude is awesome. It’s a tool from Anthropic and you can use it. Yardi already did a really cool press release where they set up an MCP and via Claude you can connect to it.

Claude bot is open source, which means not really owned by a company but owned by the community and accessible to a lot of people. That way that you can build really cool agents—that sort of thing is not ready for the prime time of secure rent payments. It would inadvertently potentially expose PII.

We’re talking about highly secure guardrails. Funnel connected our secure infrastructure to process payments for BH, integrated with their property management software in real time, but in a new operating system—a new channel—rather than the resident portal.

Behind the scenes, you’re still accessing that portal and hitting the property management software. There’s going to be a world for every existing technology provider if they modernize and provide the rails.

And most importantly, I use the term agentic. This is not simply, “Ask a chatbot, what’s my balance?” This is then empowering said agent to go and make an action on my behalf. In this case, make a payment, set up a recurring payment without me necessarily every single time having to log into that account and do it myself.

Self-service will have a place, but there will also be a percentage of consumers in the future that rather than logging into my Delta app and my Uber app and my Funnel app, I’m just in my ChatGPT app and I’ve connected those other accounts so that I let it act on my behalf inside of those.

That’s what agentic means, giving it a sense of autonomy to complete tasks.

So we’re just so proud of BH being willing to say yes.

And last thing—I realize I haven’t told this part of the story—the speed. You hear a lot of people talking today about the speed of development. This is probably one of those moments for me that I felt it.

The idea and my first conversation with Joanna Zabriskie, the CEO of BH, about this—I’m gonna go check my text—but I think it was probably in December. And we made that first rent payment in February.

That is how fast the world is moving right now.

And credit to our engineers and our co-founder who use these coding development assistants to help them move faster. The pace of innovation in multifamily is going to pick up because it’s picking up all over the industry and all over technology in general.

8:23 New policy on institutional housing ownership. What it means for multifamily.

Alex Howe: It’s wild. I had a ton of folks that I know outside of multifamily reach out and tell me how cool it was that happened. Multifamily, you don’t often see leading the charge on these things, but the fact that we’re out there ahead of most people is very cool.

We finally have a few more details on Trump’s housing policy, a topic we discussed on last Report. Big hat tip to Jay Parsons, who broke this down. He’ll be speaking at Forum.

So it’s not a blanket ban on institutional ownership. It’s really framed around investors with at least 100 homes. It could land on mid-size local regional groups more than the biggest headline villains typically. The carve-outs seem to matter. It reportedly exempts build-to-rent and investors who substantially renovate homes to rent them out. So some scaled rental supply models may be protected, not punished.

It also doesn’t read like an immediate forced sell-off. So it’s less mass disruption tomorrow and more of a policy signal that could shape sentiment, capital, and strategy even if Congress never passes it.

These headlines really enforce a recurring public narrative that housing is rigged. From your seat, what’s one concrete thing operators could do today to start building back some of that renter trust?

Tyler Christiansen: You nailed the last word there, which is trust. And I think that has to be first and foremost with renters.

As somebody who’s rented from an individual landlord and somebody who’s rented from big landlords or institutional landlords, it really comes down to the relationship at the end of the day.

It is critical in a world with more technology and AI conversations that residents feel a sense of relationship with their landlord. And that begins at the initial inquiry.

We’re seeing all over LinkedIn these days examples—our friend Lisa Trosein has posted about this—of just how bad we’re getting as an industry at using AI. Funnel is one of the largest sellers of AI in this industry, so trust me, I love it. But come on. We need to have a personal touch. We need to start the relationship from the get-go and not have people feel like, “I’m just pinging Corporation A, B, C and they’re giving me their stuffed canned answer.” 

People want to feel connected.

All of us who have rented in an apartment community can remember being taken on a tour. You can remember walking into the leasing office and having some interaction with a human. That could be on the phone. There are myriad ways you can do that.

Trust is a relationship. And in this world in which there’s going to continue to be federal policy conversations—I’m sure at Forum our friend Jay Parsons will expound on how misguided some of this is in terms of the outcomes you want to achieve.

If the outcome is better housing affordability, punishing landlords is not that. But the reality is, how do I respond as an operator?

I need to lean into building trust with my individual renters. The more that I can do that through establishing a relationship with them, the less likely they are to perceive me as the big bad landlord.

Now that does not resolve you from potential legislative risks that are going to come. But ultimately, operators will be just fine if they maintain 93-plus percent occupancy and high renewal rates.

The legislative environment is always going to be tricky. In fact one of our stories is about the REITS talking about how messy it is right now. But if you’re operating your business and establishing trust, and your renters believe they can trust you to stay in your building and that you’re going to take good care of them, you’ll be just fine.

11:40 Multifamily rent growth predicted to stay flat through 2026. Where can PMCs find success in this low rent-growth era?

Alex Howe: Let’s talk about a couple of stories around that supply issue. News to probably no one listening, it is a pro-renter market today. Vacancies are up, rent growth is soft. A number of outlets tied some fresh reporting back to the same core concept, that new supply and slower demand is resulting in more choices for renters, pushing operators toward record-breaking concessions and tighter revenue expectations.

It’s not a story of rents crashing everywhere. It’s pricing power getting super localized, with the most pressure often seen at the higher end of Class A luxury apartments where new deliveries tend to cluster.

There was an article in Zillow that stated multifamily rent growth is expected to stay basically flat into year-end, with affordability improving as vacancies stay elevated.

Tyler, teams can’t optimize everything at once. In a year like 2026 is looking to be, where do you see our partners being most successful? Where should they stop spending their time and spend more time, because some of those results could compound more effectively?

Tyler Christiansen: I want to go back to the last question, which was about policy. Unfortunately, having run a business for a few years and throughout my career, I’ve come to recognize that perception sometimes lags behind reality.

You still see a lot of articles out there about the housing crisis. Broadly speaking, as a category, rentals — this is the most affordable period in decades that we have had. We’ve had years of essentially no rent growth. So renters have been getting more buying power, purchasing power over the last couple of years. And so that’s a huge win.

And we should frankly talk more about that as an industry, that we are helping on affordability because we provided so much more supply.

Now the inverse side of that, of course, is that provides a lot of pressure on operators to execute really well.

And I think you’re seeing a bifurcation, Alex, and the question is how do you survive in an environment in which your core product is harder to sell and harder to monetize at a higher rate when costs continue to go up and there’s more competition and it’s not stopping. You hear macroeconomists talk about a K-shaped economy for various elements of the economy. I think we’re seeing that as well in housing operations.

There’s been a lot of stories recently about regional operators, subscale operators, moving out of the management business and pairing up with a Greystar, pairing up with the ZRS, pairing up with BH and Cortland and some of these larger third-party managers. Morgan is growing tremendously.

And really what that tells us is that this is a unique opportunity to have a differentiated service model.

And you can do that, to your point, when you have more competition, lower demand because of that increase of competition. You have to execute at a higher level.

We’re thrilled when we see stats like what we’ve seen from our partners at ZRS where they’re increasing the number of tours that they’re able to book. They’re increasing the show rate on those tours. And that’s done through a combination of AI and centralization.

Which I really think my big takeaway for folks is that from probably the 1980s until 2022, you could simply staff a property with the old model and you were going to stay leased and you were going to be able to grow rents.

In a challenging environment like this, if you want to be one of the companies that survives and thrives in that environment and is there to capture every time — when I came into the workforce, I worked for a home builder during the Great Financial Crisis. And I remember my first meeting, I was a week in, and I got to sit in a hundred-person all-hands meeting with the CEO. And he said, “Guys, it’s not going to be as good as the last two or three years. But if we can weather this storm, we will be the best positioned on the backside of this to take advantage of the growth.”

And they were. They became the top home builder in Utah and the Mountain West because they were one of the companies that survived. There were a ton of home builders that got wiped out in the Great Financial Crisis.

Those who survived had their best years ever after.

I think similarly we are seeing a clearing of property management companies that did not truly innovate and have not truly embraced — a lot of people say they centralized — but the companies that centralize, like Camden, who saved $4 million and simultaneously continued to deliver great customer service, are going to survive.

And ultimately that’s the answer, Alex, is that tough times build tough character. And I think the operators that grow and thrive through these tough times are going to be better positioned. They’re better operators than they were when they came into it.

So we’re seeing that — fewer leads, higher conversion ratios, better employee-to-unit ratios, better pay for those employees that are still there.

So yes, it’s tough. But ultimately those tough environments create better operators. And ultimately the renters win in that because they have more choice, they have more housing affordability, and they’re being serviced better than they were before.

16:48 Where are REITs seeing the biggest difference with centralized teams and AI? 

Alex Howe: To your comment on the last question, it’s about earning their trust, right. If you can go in and show them that there’s a better experience for them at your location, that’s what matters.

Let’s jump to a Multifamily Dive piece. The headline was “REITs Are Planning Around a Messy 2026.”

A bunch of coverage of REITs of late has emphasized that even the biggest, best-capitalized players are treating 2026 as very uneven. Operations matter more than macro narratives, and some are repositioning portfolios rather than just waiting for rent growth to come back.

Apartment REIT commentary pointed to challenging near-term income growth and strategic moves like asset sales, with concessions explicitly discussed. It reinforces a broader signal to the industry that you need to out-execute the market.

Underwriting and ops plans are leaning harder on controllables—turn times, conversion, fraud, collection, centralized leasing performance—rather than rent growth assumptions. Consistency matters more than heroics.

Where are you seeing centralized teams and AI make the biggest difference right now? And what are we building to make that consistency repeatable across every community, not just the best-run ones?

Tyler Christiansen: Amazing. And I think that if this sounds like the last topic, it’s because it is.

I want to highlight the core there of how those who are going to outperform are going to do it, and how they’ve been doing it. This is a topic we’ve talked on a lot about at Funnel, which is that a lot of folks try different strategies and then when they don’t work, they point at it and say that was the problem.

The REITs had been centralizing before rents fell, and so they know centralization has to stay. Some of the third-party managers who tried centralization as rent growth fell off, there was this tendency from asset managers to point the finger and say, “Centralization didn’t work. Let’s throw AI at it.” And then when AI doesn’t magically solve the problem, now let’s go back to centralization.

I think the reality is you have to have both. And it’s very simple. You don’t need to have a PhD in multifamily to understand this. But when you try to throw AI at a fragmented process, you will not save money. You’ll save a little bit of time and you’ll slightly improve the renter experience.

I, as a consumer, would rather be able to book my tour on a Sunday rather than waiting till Monday when I’m at work for you to follow up with me. That’s a win. But I’m not going to improve my unit economics that way.

Which is why, again, you’re seeing these third-party managers grow massively. And we’d love to see that. And they’re getting better at it. But the real cost savings that you’re seeing with a Camden, for instance, is that you have to be able to aggregate the work first.

And then ultimately when you do have the automation opportunities — for instance, voice AI technology has gotten radically better in the last two years than where it was a couple of years ago — meaning that a high volume of your calls will willingly be handled by AI.

And it’s one thing to not give renters an exit. I don’t think that’s the right choice. I think you should give renters the ability to talk to a human always, even if you have great technology.

And the barometer of if you’re doing it well is they choose to talk to the AI anyway.

And that used to be in the single-digit percentage. We’re now seeing that with some of our partners north of 50%. You can get it as high as 80% if you really optimize for it. It should never be 100%, because if you’re doing 100%, that means that you are not giving them an off-ramp. That’s not the ideal customer service experience, though it is a cost-savings opportunity.

Really the opportunity is to find aggregate work, automate the beginning of it for the consumers that are willing to let you have an AI-automated experience, and then aggregate and specialize the remaining work.

When you do that across the size portfolios we have in multifamily today, cost savings are there.

And so that’s how you outperform. You have to specialize, you have to centralize, you have to automate. And you can’t do a slice of it. We’ve seen a lot of our operators do a slice of it, and you just don’t get the full peanut butter and jelly experience of centralization plus automation, which not only yields improved employee-unit ratios but simultaneously delivers really great customer experience.

We’re very glad to be partnered to four of the six big REITs. And in doing so, you can see that again in tough times, you’re still continuing to operate and that FFO, funds from operations, continue to move in the right direction.

20:49 2025 National Study of Multifamily Workforce Trends Report by Camden Property Trust

Alex Howe: You mentioned Camden briefly there. They just released their 2025 National Study of Multifamily Workforce Trends Report. A lot of interesting data in there, but we’ll zoom in on one piece.

The report put a spotlight on the earliest moments that really make or break employee retention. They found 74% of employees decide within the first month whether they’ll stay, and with 83% ranking “working smart” as a top value for job satisfaction.

So Tyler, what does that mean? What does work smart actually look like in leasing or centralized models, and what changes in process, coaching, and tooling need to happen to work a little bit smarter?

Tyler Christiansen: Yeah. Highly recommend anybody check out Camden’s LinkedIn if they shared this story. They know what they’re talking about. If you’ve interacted with somebody who used to work at Camden, you know that they hold that experience in high praise.

There are leaders throughout the industry that came from that culture, similar to an Archstone, where you find these individuals leading companies all over the place. Leaders from Camden are all over the multifamily industry.

So them talking about culture and employee development, talent development, that got my attention.

I thought it was really interesting that — and we all see this — a lot of companies say they’re slow to hire, quick to fire. That’s not the reality. But employees are right. They recognize when they get in somewhere, they make a judgment call very quickly about what kind of work am I going to be expected to do here.

And if within a month I’m being asked to do menial, redundant, grinding type of work, I’m probably already back on LinkedIn looking for my next job.

But if I’m being challenged in a way that is growing me, in a way that I find genuinely fulfilling, then I’m going to lean in.

And we all know it’s that first 90 days that you’re not getting maybe the ROI out of your net-new employee. You need them to stay 100-plus days where you start really getting the employee ROI.

Camden is one of our customers who has really leaned into role specialization. They eliminated the ACM role. That does not mean they eliminated all of the positions. They created bigger, better jobs — which is a phrase that actually a Camden alum, Tom Sloan, helped create at GID with their Windsor 2025 initiative.

They created bigger, better jobs where I’m no longer a single community assistant community manager. I am now a general manager over multiple communities. Or I’m a specialist in resident operations and resident support, or a specialist in sales across multiple communities.

It also creates better career paths that align with individual talents, and it creates more compensation upside.

What a lot of our partners have seen, and Camden is certainly one of these, is that they can pay a smaller group of team members — because they’re specialized and centralized — a higher individual compensation.

And if you’re not as familiar with multifamily or you don’t believe this exists in other industries, the same thing is true with Costco. Costco has way better retention than Walmart, and they pay their employees way more. But shocker, they also have the most efficient stores. Their employee-to-square-foot ratio is insane.

So these things that sometimes seem at odds with each other really aren’t.

If you buy into both and deliver great customer service, you can have great employee retention and you can pay the individuals more. It’s a no-brainer. You just have to do it all. You have to be committed to it. You have to do the whole operating model. You can’t take a little bite of it.

24:05 Multifamily policy activity is heating up. What conversations are happening in the boardroom?

Alex Howe: In Camden’s case, they even get Sundays off.

Plus, I like how you were going outside multifamily to think of Costco, but if you recall, they’re now building multifamily buildings here in California, so that’s going to overlap pretty soon too.

Rent regulation is back in the headlines again. In Massachusetts, the mayor of Boston just endorsed a statewide rent control ballot push with some caps tied to inflation or 5%, reigniting a debate the state historically rejected.

In New York City, there’s been coverage highlighting affordability commitments and the constraints of implementing rent freezes, plus a bigger supply bottleneck there.

Even when legislation doesn’t pass immediately, the pushes and efforts around bringing the topic back to the forefront can affect investment, sentiment, development feasibility, and political pressure on owners and operators, especially in supply-constrained coastal markets.

You can tell that when rent regulation headlines and activity heat up, even before anything gets passed, it changes the conversation leaders are having in our space.

From what you’re hearing, what questions start showing up in boardrooms and executive meetings first when policy risk spikes, and how do you think that pressure reshapes priorities?

Tyler Christiansen: Going back to the REITs, the first thing you hear is that there’s a capital flow away from those markets. Capital rotates out. The dollars want to go to the markets where it’s easier for them to develop and easier to get ROI.

For those that are in those markets and have no choice but to operate, they begin looking for other opportunities within that. If we have rent caps, what are we allowed to charge for?

Folks in multifamily across the political spectrum recognize that rent control just isn’t the answer. It’s been proven time and time again.

I’m very impressed by the operators who are committed to markets where you see a lot of that regulation and more of it, because capital doesn’t have to be committed to a market. They can say, forget that, we’re going to invest where it’s easier to develop.

But for operators in those markets, they have to operate on fine margins. They have to operate with smaller playbooks. And they have to outperform.

It is still possible — everything we’ve talked about in the show — leaning into automation, leaning into centralization.

I will say, it begins to be apparent that the opportunities are in the places where growth is going to come. Talent is going to follow that. Development is going to follow that. And ultimately renters will as well when there are more options and better housing affordability in those markets.

Count us on the side of a supply-oriented housing policy.

A lot of respect for operators that work in tough markets.

There’s a difference between being anti-regulation and being anti-consumer. We are certainly not anti-regulation or anti-pro-consumer sentiment. Fee transparency is a great example of that. We as an industry have rallied around making that a win for both operators and consumers.

But housing regulation where you’re imposing rent control has been proven empirically at this point not to yield the types of results that we need.

So operators, we’ve got so much respect for those that have to work in those tough environments and figure out a way to still perform.

27:20 Zoning and multifamily’s ongoing tug-of-war for local control and need to add supply

Alex Howe: There was a really interesting piece in Bloomberg about a nearly 100-year-old Supreme Court decision. It involved a growing movement to reform land use rules that constrain housing supply.

It’s relevant because zoning reform or backlash toward it is one of the few levers that can really materially change the supply curve over the years or decades. So zoning is basically the operating system for where housing is allowed to exist.

Philosophically, Tyler how do you think about the balance between local control and the broader need to add supply? And what do you wish more people understood about why this issue keeps resurfacing?

Tyler Christiansen: This is a bigger one, and I’m not a constitutional attorney.

Folks that are well-intentioned at every level have their arguments. Why I said earlier in the show that I think that we as an industry need to continue to tell the story that supply is working.

As an operator, it makes your job harder when rent doesn’t grow. But as an industry, it’s a fantastic story that we’ve been able to deliver quality product. If you haven’t visited these new lease-ups, they are incredible. These are so nice.

The ability to deliver super high-quality product at essentially flat prices shows that supply is the answer.

Over time, the beauty of the American economy is that consumers can move around. I think that we have seen in certain places a willingness to embrace YIMBYism, the opposite of NIMBYism, yes, in my backyard. But no matter what you always have pockets that push back on that, and that will create consumer choice. 

Where I live, the Funnel office is just on the county side of Pasco County in Florida, and I live across the county in Hillsborough.

Even in Florida, which is pretty obviously a red state, you have different county regulations. Pasco is pro-development, and there are a lot more apartments on that side of the line than this side.

Because of that, they pay less taxes because there’s so much coming in on the development side.

There are always trade-offs. That’s okay, the competition is good, even within local jurisdictions.

We just need to continue to do our part as an industry to tell the story that while it’s difficult for operators to deal with a lack of rent growth when supply comes in, where there’s enough demand, that’s the right answer for housing affordability.

Alex Howe: Thank you, Tyler. That’s a wrap. We hope to see many of you listening at the Forum in a couple of weeks. Talk soon.

Tyler Christiansen: Thanks, Alex.