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Maravedis has published its latest market report U.S. Multifamily PropTech: Trends, Economics, and Market Forecasts 2026-2031. The headline number is that vendor revenue from PropTech and IoT systems in U.S. multifamily housing will approach $4 billion by 2031.
This is mainly an adoption market
The recurring software opportunity in U.S. multifamily is already large. Over the forecast period it barely moves. What moves is capture. The industry today collects a small fraction of what full deployment across every category would generate, and by 2031 it still collects well under a third. Almost the entire growth story is the closing of that gap, not any expansion of the ceiling.
The distinction changes where vendors should be spending. In a growth market, you invest in category creation and demand generation. In an adoption market, you invest in removing the reasons deployments stall: install cost, integration effort, operator training, and the approval cycle inside the asset management team. The ceiling is not the constraint. The friction is.
A decade of point solutions has run out of room
The average property now runs ten to twelve systems that do not talk to each other. Access control from one vendor, thermostats from another, leak sensors from a third, a resident app from a fourth, none of them sharing a data layer. Every company briefed for this report described the same three pressures, in almost the same words.
First, per-door software spend has become a board-level number rather than a line item. Second, the operational burden of managing a dozen hardware platforms has hit a ceiling that no property team wants to push past. Third, operating data has commercial value only once it is unified, and it is almost nowhere unified today.
The stack has a price, and that price explains the consolidation
Maravedis priced the stack directly from vendor-disclosed figures rather than modeling it. When bought as separate point solutions, the four categories run roughly $9 to $26 per unit per month. Consolidated onto a single platform contract, the same functional coverage costs a fraction of that.
That gap, measured per door per month across a portfolio, is the commercial engine behind the consolidation now underway on two fronts: among the smart apartment platforms themselves, and among the property management software incumbents bundling adjacent categories into an existing contract. Owners are not consolidating because integrated architecture is elegant. They are consolidating because the invoice is smaller.
The market is more hardware-weighted than the pitch decks imply
Equipment and installation account for the majority of vendor revenue in 2026 and remain the majority through 2031. Anyone modeling a clean software margin profile for this sector should look closely at that mix before setting expectations, and anyone selling into it should assume the capital conversation comes before the subscription conversation for years to come.
The new construction pool is shrinking
Units in properties delivered within the last five years decline steadily across the forecast period as the construction wave recedes. Over the same window, the stock of large existing assets grows by millions of units. Any go-to-market built on new development specification is selling into a pool that gets smaller every year. Retrofit economics, not new build specification, decide who wins this market.
Outcome pricing is being negotiated, not deployed
The report devotes a section to Smart Building as a Service, in which a building’s intelligence arrives on a single contract priced against outcomes such as energy saved, incidents avoided, and work orders closed. The model is real, and it is early. No single party yet holds the network, the devices, the data layer, and the appetite to underwrite performance all at once.
A per-door subscription is negotiated against other per-door subscriptions, which is a race downward. An outcome contract is negotiated against the cost of the outcome not happening. That is a different and considerably larger number.
What this means for each stakeholder
The report closes with recommendations by group. The short version is below, and each one points at a different decision.
Property Owners
Owner leverage sits at renewal, not at purchase. Before the next contract cycle, operators should consolidate every per-door subscription across the portfolio into a single number. Most have never seen that figure in one place, and it is usually larger than expected. The consolidation savings in this report are real but conditional: the lower platform price generally assumes the owner accepts the platform’s hardware in at least two of the four categories. Which categories an operator is willing to concede is a decision best made before negotiation begins, not during.
Two other points deserve attention. Data rights belong in writing, because unified operating data is the asset that outlasts any individual vendor and almost no standard contract assigns it to the owner. Retrofits are also better sequenced by payback than by enthusiasm. Access control and leak detection recover cost fastest. HVAC recovers slowest wherever the resident pays the utility bill, which is the split incentive that keeps that category the smallest of the four.
PropTech platform vendors
In an adoption market, growth comes from conversion rather than category creation. A dollar spent shortening install time, simplifying integration, or training the on-site team returns more than a dollar spent on awareness. The pricing gap between a stack of point solutions and a single platform contract is the strongest argument available to platform vendors, and it is arithmetic rather than positioning, which is reason enough to lead with it. The competitive threat is probably not another platform. It is the property management software incumbent that adds the same category to a contract the owner already signs every year. Platform vendors should plan for that and for a revenue mix that remains hardware-weighted longer than most platform narratives assume.
Point solution and device vendors
Standalone renewal gets harder with each cycle as owners consolidate. The choice facing device vendors is deliberate and binary: become a component inside someone else’s platform, on that platform’s integration terms, or expand across enough of the stack to be the platform. Sitting between the two is the expensive option. Commoditization is first visible in access control hardware, where revenue per served unit declines even as the category leads in total revenue. Open standards and open APIs cut both ways here. They reduce the friction that keeps a vendor out of deals, and they make that vendor easier to replace once it is in place.
MSPs, integrators and channel partners
These firms already hold the owner relationship, the field technicians, and the network inside the building. That is most of what a PropTech deployment actually requires, and it is the part platform vendors find hardest to buy. The economics favor the partner that owns the installation and the ongoing support, and thin out quickly where the opportunity is only referred. Existing assets, not new development, are where that field presence pays. The retrofit pool grows while the recently delivered pool shrinks, and retrofit is where an on-the-ground partner is worth most.
Investors and corporate development
If this is an adoption market rather than a growth market, diligence should test deployment velocity, install cost per door, and churn at renewal rather than the size of the addressable ceiling. The ceiling is not what constrains these businesses.
Revenue mix deserves the same scrutiny. With equipment and installation accounting for the majority of vendor revenue through 2031, the honest comparable for many of these companies sits closer to systems integration than to pure software. And because consolidation is running on two fronts, exit paths differ materially: acquisition by a platform and acquisition by a property management software incumbent are not the same outcome or the same multiple.
How the research was built
The report draws on executive briefings conducted with vendors, operators, integrators, and managed service providers between April and July 2026, 20 company profiles, standards documentation, and a unit-level forecast model that segments the full U.S. rental stock into properties of five or more units. It ships with a fully editable forecast workbook in which every penetration rate and price lever is exposed, allowing buyers to rerun the projections under their own assumptions.
Managed Wi-Fi and bulk internet are treated as network infrastructure rather than PropTech and are analyzed separately in the companion connectivity report.
All analysis is independent. No vendor sponsored the research, no company paid to be included, no ranking was sold, and no vendor reviewed the report before publication.
