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New Orleans gave us a lot. Humidity, incredible food, tornado warnings and hundreds of conversations that confirmed something we've been watching build for a while. Operators aren't debating whether to invest in smart home technology anymore. They're debating what it's actually supposed to do, and what seems “smart” vs what is actually smart infrastructure.
That's a meaningfully different conversation. And it was happening everywhere on the show floor, in meeting rooms, over dinner, in the hallways between sessions. Five themes kept surfacing. Here's what we heard, and what we think it means.
Access
The lock is the smallest conversation in the room.
Here's something that would have seemed strange five years ago: we spent almost no time at Apartmentalize talking about the lock itself. This is because the lock has become the entry point, not the destination. We mean that literally. It's where the conversation starts, and then it moves.
For properties still running on physical keys or fobs, upgrading to smart access is one of the most immediate operational wins available. Residents get a better experience. On-site teams eliminate key-cutting, lockout calls and fob replacements that quietly drain time and budget every month. The ROI shows up fast.
But even those conversations didn't stay on the lock for long. Within a few questions, they became conversations about what else a connected access layer makes possible. When access is connected to the same platform managing thermostats, leak sensors and the resident app, every piece of that system gets smarter. A vacant unit can be automatically set to energy-saving mode the moment it's vacated and returned to a comfortable temperature before a tour. A move-in can trigger automatic credential provisioning without a single manual step from the site team. A maintenance tech can be granted time-limited access to a specific unit without a master key ever leaving a drawer.
We're not buying locks anymore. We're designing access layers and asking what those layers unlock beyond the door.
The best conversations happened when operators went deeper than just a smart lock brand. They were asking how access integrates with their lease management system, how credential management scales across a portfolio, and what the data generated by access events can tell them about how a community actually operates. That's a more sophisticated buyer, and it reflects how much the category has matured.
It handles every entry point, unit doors, common areas, parking, and amenity spaces, all under one management layer with real-time visibility across the portfolio. The lock is just one piece of a much bigger picture.
If the first question in your next smart home strategy meeting wasn't "which lock," what would it be?
Operations
The most expensive work order is the one that should never have existed.
Maintenance has a reactive problem, and everyone knows it. A resident notices water damage. They submit a request. A tech is dispatched. By that point, what started as a slow drip under a bathroom vanity has become a $25,000 insurance claim, a displaced resident and a unit offline for weeks.
The question operators kept bringing back to us wasn't how to respond faster. It was how to stop responding to things that didn't have to happen in the first place.
This is where SmartRent's leak detection and sensor ecosystem does something fundamentally different from what most people expect when they hear "smart home." The property gets an immune system, a network of sensors and connected intelligence that catches problems at the signal stage, before they become incidents.
A healthy immune system isn't measured by how quickly it recovers. It's measured by how rarely it has to.
SmartRent customers using our leak detection have reduced water damage losses by 50% year over year, saving an average of $133,000 per property. That's what happens when a sensor catches a slow leak at 2 a.m., sends an alert to the maintenance team, and the team resolves it before the issue can escalate into catastrophe.
The same logic applies to HVAC. A thermostat connected to SmartRent's platform generates data with every reading, paired with freeze and overheating safeguards that act on it automatically. Occupied or vacant, it doesn't matter. A resident might not notice a slow decline until the unit stops working. An empty unit has no one to notice at all. Either way, the data speaks up when temperatures drop low enough to risk frozen pipes or climb high enough to signal a failing system, catching the problem before it becomes a resident complaint or a costly surprise on turn day.
Reactive maintenance has a fixed cost structure which results in you paying for parts, labor, and urgency. Preventive operations are a different model: you're paying for information, and information is cheap compared to remediation. The properties building maintenance programs around sensor data instead of work order queues are the ones pulling ahead.
Which work orders at your properties should never exist in the first place?
Value
Covering the cost of smart home is easy. Leveraging its long-term value for stakeholders is the real work.
Budget conversations were everywhere at Apartmentalize. Financing options and lower hardware costs have made smart home at scale more accessible than it was a few years ago. A transparent technology fee that covers the amortized cost of the upgrade is something residents have shown they're glad to pay, given the lifestyle it brings them. Bottom line: getting a program underwritten is becoming the easiest part of the budget conversation.
But treating that funding as the finish line is a trap. If the mindset is simply "the cost is covered and the hardware is installed," you're missing the true value proposition. Funding is just the mechanism to install. Stopping there leaves the most significant operational and community benefits on the table.
Operators getting the value proposition right spend that time on a different question entirely. How much water damage can connected sensors prevent? How many hours per week can onsite teams reclaim when they're not manually tracking key inventory, managing lockout calls, or jumping between disconnected systems? How many vendors can be consolidated onto a single platform, and what does that do to overhead?
Centerspace built a smart home premium into its underwriting from the start, and its overall ROI has since surpassed those initial projections. As Sue Picotte, Centerspace's Senior Vice President of Asset Management and ESG, put it: "That's just on the cash. That doesn't include the time savings, the efficiency savings or the productivity increase. It doesn't include the loss reductions through early leak detection and low temperature alerts. The total impact of the deployment hasn't been fully quantified, but it has been significant."
What your residents and teams experience every day is how you prove that value to the people signing off on the next investment. SmartRent's platform generates outcomes that make the case straightforward across every property. The resident app drives real engagement with 770,000 monthly active users across our installed base, which means residents are actually using what they're paying for. Energy management delivers average annual savings of $20,000 per property, according to our research with Parks Associates. Operational efficiency numbers including tour volume, staff time recovered, and maintenance cost reduction give site teams and regional managers real data to put in front of ownership.
The question shifts from "can we afford this" to "what is the cost of inaction, and will our stakeholders accept that strategy."
What's the first operational outcome your technology investment should be improving?
Consolidation
The hidden cost of disconnected technology is time and nobody is tracking it.
Here's a scenario that played out in almost every consolidation conversation we had. An on-site team is running three or four technology platforms that don't talk to each other. A resident calls with a question about a maintenance request. The associate pulls up one system. The request is there. The status update is in a different system. The access log showing whether a tech entered the unit is in a third. By the time there's an answer, four minutes have passed and two browser tabs are open.
Multiply that by every resident interaction, every work order, every move-in and move-out, every vendor coordination touchpoint and disconnected technology becomes a tax on operational capacity. It doesn't show up as a line item. It shows up as a team that's perpetually behind, a resident experience that feels fragmented, and a site manager spending their best hours managing systems instead of managing the community.
Operators weren't asking for more technology at Apartmentalize. They were asking for technology that actually works together.
SmartRent is built on the premise that a connected platform is worth more than the sum of its parts. The resident app, smart home devices, access control, energy management, and self-guided tour capability all operate within a single ecosystem. A maintenance tech doesn't close a ticket in one system and update another by hand because it's the same system. A resident doesn't need three apps because they have one. A regional manager doesn't need four dashboards to understand how a portfolio is performing because they access it within one view.
The consolidation benefit compounds over time. Every integration that doesn't have to be built, maintained, or troubleshot is capacity that goes somewhere better. Every vendor relationship that collapses into a single partnership simplifies procurement, support, and accountability. The communities that have done this work tell us the same thing: they didn't realize how much time the old model was costing them until they stopped paying it.
Where are your teams spending time managing systems instead of managing the community?
What Comes Next
We've outgrown the phrase "smart home."
Smart home was always a product category name. Thermostats, locks, sensors, apps, discrete products evaluated, purchased, and installed one at a time. That framing made sense when operators were figuring out whether any of this was worth doing at all. That question is settled. The one that's open now is what you're actually building toward.
The conversations at Apartmentalize this year had a different quality. Operators talked about portfolio performance and how technology drives consistent NOI across every asset, not just flagship communities. They talked about resident retention as a direct outcome of experience design. They talked about protecting asset value over a 10-year hold period, which changes how you think about infrastructure decisions entirely.
What emerged from those conversations is a phrase we keep coming back to: connected communities. It's not a rebrand of smart home. It's a different frame. A connected community isn't a building with smart devices in it. It's a property where technology operates as an integrated layer connecting residents to their homes, onsite teams to the information they need, and owners to the performance data that drives real decisions.
Every capability in a connected community becomes more valuable because it's connected to everything else. The lock is smarter because it talks to the access system. The thermostat is smarter because it talks to the energy platform. The resident app is smarter because it talks to all of it.
SmartRent's installed base reflects this shift. As of March 2026, we're at 911,000 units with 770,000 monthly active resident users, which means this isn't theoretical infrastructure. It's a platform residents are living on, on-site teams are working on and ownership groups are making capital decisions around. Scale matters because it's what makes the data meaningful.
The best version of this is something a resident never notices. The temperature is comfortable when they get home. The package room opens with the same credential as their front door. A maintenance issue gets resolved before they knew it existed. The technology disappears into the experience, which is exactly where it belongs.
That's what connected communities look like. And based on what we heard in New Orleans, it's where this is headed faster than most people realize.
Are we still evaluating products one device at a time or are we designing communities that perform better because everything works together?
About SmartRent SmartRent, Inc. (NYSE: SMRT) is a premier enterprise technology platform delivering AI-enabled smart home and property solutions to the rental housing industry. As the only comprehensive provider to unite purpose-built hardware and software under a unified ecosystem, the company’s solutions reduce daily operational complexity to elevate resident living, increase net operating income, mitigate property risk and reclaim valuable hours for onsite teams. Trusted by the top names in real estate, SmartRent is executing its Vision 2028 strategic framework to transform an installed base of millions of smart devices and daily users into advanced property intelligence. Learn more at smartrent.com.