When the National Multifamily Housing Council opens OPTECH 2026 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas on November 16th, the exhibit hall will once again be lined with companies promising to be the platform that finally ties everything together. Operators have heard that pitch for years.
What feels different heading into this year’s show is that many of them have started counting how many platforms they already run, and the totals are getting hard to defend.
Art McCann, senior vice president of IT at Bell Partners, offered one of the more candid counts this summer. Speaking in a webinar, he said Bell manages roughly 70 applications across its properties and is in the second year of a program to bring that number down. His case was financial: buying power concentrated in one solution goes further than the same spend split four ways, and the difference shows up in property NOI.
Bell’s number is unusually public, but the pressure behind it runs across the industry. The survey, now in its fourth biennial edition, drew respondents overseeing more than 112,000 properties and 2.8 million units. Its AI findings are the ones drawing attention.
Two years ago, 92% of respondents reported no AI anywhere in their operations or tech stack. This year the figure is 6%. Only 14% call AI transformative in their organization today, while 85% expect it to be within one to two years.
That expectation gap sets the tone for OPTECH 2026, because AI is arriving on top of stacks that were assembled one point solution at a time. Consolidation won only 7% of first-place votes among emerging priorities in the survey, yet it took 27% of second-place votes, the strongest second-choice showing of any trend.
Few operators lead with it, and most keep it close behind whatever they do lead with.
In the industry, spending is rising anyway. Deloitte’s 2027 Commercial Real Estate Outlook found that more than 90% plan to increase data and technology investment next year, up from 76% in the prior survey. Over the same stretch, the firm’s industry sentiment index fell for a second straight year, to 57.8 out of 100. Budgets are growing while confidence is slipping, which raises the stakes on where each dollar lands.
When RETTC asked respondents to divide a hypothetical $100 across priorities for 2026 and 2027, the largest share, $14, went to data science, warehousing and integration. Operators are now paying to connect what they already own, and the vendors who can show that connection working, rather than describe it, are the ones likely to get a second meeting after Las Vegas.
That is the solution Get Covered, led by CEO Brandon Tobman, is bringing to Booth #133. The company built its business on insurance compliance, helping operators confirm that residents carry the coverage their leases require. In June it also acquired Revyse, an AI-powered vendor intelligence platform that multifamily teams use to manage bids, contracts, vendor credentials and spend.
This is the first OPTECH since the deal closed, and the combined company is using it to show the two products working side by side.
At a typical company, insurance compliance lives in one system and resident feedback in another, while technology and spend data sit somewhere else entirely. At the booth, Get Covered and Revyse are showing how those streams can be read in one place.
Insurance compliance runs automatically, resident trends surface at both the property and portfolio level, and the technology stack becomes visible enough to evaluate on cost and use, which lets risk show up sooner. The company’s shorthand for the outcome is less time chasing information and more time acting on it.
When the deal was announced, Revyse CEO Bobbi Steward said the platform was built for “the messy middle, the edge cases, the exceptions.” That is where compliance tends to break. A vendor’s coverage can lapse between contract renewals, or a resident’s renters policy can quietly cancel mid-lease, and neither event appears on a leasing dashboard until it turns into a claim.
Insurers are paying closer attention to exactly that kind of gap. Marsh McLennan’s Real Estate Risk and Resilience for 2026 report, published in April, found that underwriters are scrutinizing operational execution across multifamily.
NMHC’s most recent State of Multifamily Risk report recommended that owners require third-party vendors to carry sufficient liability coverage and include robust indemnity clauses in their contracts.
Writing those requirements into a contract is the easy part. Confirming, across hundreds of vendors and thousands of units, that the coverage is still in force on the day something goes wrong is where the work sits, and that work tends to be scattered across inboxes, spreadsheets and separate portals. An operator who can pull current resident and vendor coverage records at renewal time negotiates from a different position than one who has to assemble them under deadline.
The resident side has its own visibility problem. In the RETTC survey, resident experience and CX technology ranked among the lower-rated categories, with 47% of respondents satisfied and 17% dissatisfied. Feedback that is collected but never connected to the rest of the operating picture tends to stay a report. Tied to property-level data, it can flag a service issue while there is still time to fix it before renewal conversations start.
None of this means every operator will collapse onto a single platform. On the same RETTC webinar, Bozzuto’s Shawaun Alexander pointed out that third-party managers are often not the final authority on technology, since owners bring their own systems. For those firms, the practical path is deciding which core tools are non-negotiable and choosing others that plug into whatever property management system sits underneath.
That gives OpTech attendees a useful filter for three days in Las Vegas. At every demo, ask what the product replaces and what it connects to. Bell Partners’ target, as McCann described it, was simply a number below 70. For a lot of operators walking the floor at the MGM Grand, getting below their own number would count as a good year.
