Tyler Christiansen’s keynote made the case that in a market shaped by flat rents and rising concessions, the winning model will be built at the intersection of agentic AI, centralization, and human experience.

At the opening of Forum in Scottsdale, Tyler Christiansen, CEO of Funnel, put the challenge in front of multifamily leaders directly. In a market defined by concessions, flat rent growth, and operational strain, he argued that the next winners will be the ones who rethink how their organizations operate from the ground up.

Believing in a better operating model for multifamily leaders starts with a larger ambition. Funnel elevated its mission, “Not just to have a better renter experience, but we genuinely believe deep down in our hearts that we are in a position to create the world’s best renter experience,” said Christensen.

“Not just to have a better renter experience, but we genuinely believe deep down in our hearts that we are in a position to create the world’s best renter experience.” — Tyler Christensen.

In a difficult market, incremental improvement is no longer enough. The question is whether operators are building organizations that can perform better under pressure and differentiate more clearly when conditions improve.

A market that demands more than incremental improvement

That formula matters because the industry’s pain points are not theoretical. Christiansen acknowledged from the stage, “It is a concessions market. They are back stronger than ever, whether we like it or not,” and “rents are flat.”

Hard markets force strategic honesty. Operators have to and are confronting what, exactly, will make them stronger three to five years from now. Christiansen framed that challenge in blunt terms: “What competitor could put you out of business?”

AI alone will not deliver the savings operators want; the strategic combination of centralization, agentic AI, and humans will.

Christiansen argued that multifamily should be skeptical of the most seductive AI story in the market: the idea that layering AI onto legacy operations will automatically create meaningful savings. 

After working with the leading and largest operators to centralize their operations for the past six years, Christiansen and the Funnel team learned that you have to centralize first if you want real cost savings, and AI does not create cost savings by itself. “You’re just not going to see the cost savings [from AI] without some form of aggregated labor [centralized, specialized teams], some elements of restaffing, the properties.”

This reframe of AI as aid to teams, and not a multifamily magic button, is a useful correction for an industry currently under pressure to do more with less. Christiansen is not dismissing AI. Far from it. He was arguing that agentic AI produces its strongest returns inside a model built for scale, role specialization, and flexible labor deployment. Without that foundation, automation can speed up activity without improving the underlying economics.

A better workflow, not a faster broken one

If you throw AI at a broken process, you do not create transformation. You just automate confusion faster. The real opportunity is not to remove people from the system. It is to redesign work so people spend more time where judgment, service, and accountability matter most, while AI handles more of the repetitive and response-heavy workload around them.

Christiansen challenged the idea of fully autonomous operations. He asked, “If AI does everything, what is the role of property management?”

He sharpened the risk even more by arguing that if every workflow is handled the same way, every interaction sounds the same, and every handoff disappears, then service becomes generic. And if service becomes generic, the operator becomes easier to replace.

In other words, the industry is entering a period where sameness may become a bigger threat than inefficiency. 

Why multifamily is starting to split into distinct models

The industry is about to stratify: Multifamily may start to look less like a sector where most communities run on nearly identical staffing models and more like an industry where distinct operating models create distinct performance profiles.

In other industries, people often assume there is a tradeoff between cost efficiency and great service. But the best operating models prove that is not true. The companies that win do not make the experience generic. They design distinctive models that align labor, economics, and value. 

Christiansen pointed to grocery as a useful analogy. A company like Costco is not winning because it looks like every other grocer. It wins because they thoughtfully designed brand expectations, differentiated service, and value. Costco has an employee-to-square-foot ratio roughly three times better than Whole Foods, along with a 90%+ member renewal rate and 95% employee retention. That combination matters. It shows that a differentiated operating model can drive efficiency, loyalty, and stronger workforce stability at the same time.

For years, the multifamily industry treated staffing norms, service design, and operating structures as relatively fixed. Christiansen’s thesis is that AI and centralization now make those assumptions more fluid. Operators can build models that look materially different from one another and still perform well, as long as the model is intentional and aligned.

What this looks like in practice within multifamily

Funnel highlighted results from ZRS Management (the No. 13 NMHC top 50 third-party manager operating across 110,000 units) as one example of what that can look like in practice: 

Those numbers support the broader claim that AI is most powerful when it is embedded into a better workflow, not treated as a shiny overlay.

From AI that informs to agentic AI that acts

Across industries, the market is moving toward systems that embed agentic AI that is proactive and not just reactive. AI that can help complete tasks, advance workflows, and reduce the gap between intent and outcome.

In multifamily, that shift could reshape renter interactions around scheduling, payments, approvals, and service. It also points to a future in which those interactions happen less often inside isolated portals and more often inside the digital environments renters already prefer to use.

That future may be closer than it seems. Funnel in partnership with BH, completed the world’s first ChatGPT rent payment, offering an early signal of how renter transactions could begin moving into new interfaces and experiences.

For operators, the implication is larger than any single technology moment. The advantage will go to the organizations built to meet renters where they are, support teams with AI, and turn intent into seamless action to deliver the world’s best renter experience.

What model will you build?

That is the question multifamily executives should be asking now. Not whether agentic AI matters. It clearly does. Not whether centralization matters. The evidence indisputably shows the results. 

The real question is: will leaders will use this moment to design operating models that are more resilient, more differentiated, and more capable of delivering the world’s best renter experience? Or will the moment pass them by? 

The leaders who come out ahead will be the ones who use this period to rethink the model itself.