Scott Pechersky, Chief Technology Officer, RPM Living
Korey Howell Photography
Scott Pechersky
What emerging technologies are having the biggest impact on the industry multifamily today?
The increasing use of AI agents as part of the leasing process is having the biggest impact. This has enabled us to respond immediately to all of our prospective tenants and has also enabled them to communicate with us at all times of the day.
What are some of the most promising proptech solutions you’ve recently adopted or are considering?
So much of the tech has been focused on property performance, but I am excited to see how we can leverage AI more effectively for our corporate departments. For example, we recently introduced a knowledge management system that is able to distill many of our documents so that we can reply to requests with an answer to a question versus referring someone to a webpage. The results so far have been promising. We are also starting a pilot program with Microsoft Copilot to see if there are additional ways we can automate and work more efficiently.
How do you ensure seamless technology integration across a diverse portfolio of properties?
At RPM, we have put together a core technology stack that covers most of the functions needed for a property to perform. Our stack has taken into consideration where we can leverage the property management software company’s native APIs and limit products that are not one of their integrated partners.
What strategies do you use to future-proof your tech stack in a rapidly evolving digital landscape?
Partnering with vendors that are nimble and have an aggressive development cycle allows us to stick with them longer and not have to change course every 12 months.
How are you managing the rising costs of implementing and maintaining new technologies?
I’m not sure if I agree that costs have been rising in terms of implementing and maintaining. I think the bigger challenge in rising costs comes from the need for additional niche functions that might require an additional tool to perform. I think we can manage this in the same way that we future-proof: by selecting partners with a road map that includes additional functionality as part of their core product offering with no additional costs.
What are the biggest barriers to technology adoption in multifamily, and how do you overcome them?
From an ownership perspective, the barrier comes from adding additional operating costs that haven’t resulted in savings at the property. We need to see a bump in net operating income that truly impacts the value of their asset.
From operators, our challenge is that they already work within too many different systems, which makes their day-to-day job very challenging. We try to overcome this by introducing a single sign-on tool to easily navigate around systems if we can’t provide this in a single-stack solution.
How are you leveraging data analytics to optimize asset performance and decision-making?
We have a comprehensive data warehouse that is used to track and report on KPIs that have the most direct impact on asset performance. Our operators are alerted of items trending in the wrong direction and our systems also serve up common suggestions to overcome these deficiencies to assist with their decision-making on how to improve.
With increasing cyber threats, what best practices are you implementing to ensure data security and protect resident information?
We have been enhancing our cybersecurity training to include specific trends. In addition, we have increased the frequency and the complexity of the phishing tests we send to our users to hopefully educate them even better.
If you had unlimited resources, what’s one technology you would implement across all multifamily properties today?
As the large technology firms are spending billions developing their AI, I would like an unlimited budget to concentrate and train models on all our data to create agents that could perform any function within our organization with a simple question by either our residents or associates.
Looking to the future, what emerging technologies do you see having the biggest impact on the multifamily industry?
For our industry, the focus on AI agents to perform many of our day-to-day functions, remove most cases of fraud, and automate many of our processes will be the thing that will impact how we operate our communities the most in the next two to four years.
