Authored by Autumn Hunt
AIM 2026 wrapped last week. The conversations didn’t.
Four days of meetings, hallway run-ins, and late-night discussions at our private cocktail hour, Off the Record, left me with a brain buzzing for what’s next in multifamily marketing.
Five deep themes kept resurfacing, across rooms, across operator types, across every honest conversation. Here’s what every multifamily marketing leader should be sitting with between now and AIM 2027.
1. Marketing your marketing should be 25%+ of your job
If your marketing function is invisible inside your organization, it’s expendable to ownership. That’s the hard line I kept coming back to.
The marketing leaders pulling ahead in this industry aren’t the ones running the most efficient campaigns. They’re the ones spending at least 25%+ of their time marketing to their own organization (in my time, I spent 50% of my time most weeks). Proving outcomes to management and ownership. Aligning outcomes with revenue and strategy with operations. Educating on what marketing actually drives, and what it doesn’t (hint: it’s definitely not a support department, creative studio run by Canva, or a vendor manager). Defending the line between what marketing owns and what gets handed to marketing by default.
This is the job nobody trains you for. It’s not in the job description. And it’s the difference between a marketing function that gets invested in and one that gets cut in the next budget cycle.
It comes down to four disciplines running in parallel.
Developing it. Big bets, planning, resource allocation, budgeting, innovation. This is the upstream work a marketing leader should be doing, and it’s the first thing crowded out when the calendar fills with execution. Protect the time, or the marketing never moves past the present.
Proving it. Connect strategy to outcomes, activity to leases – not sessions or impressions. If you can’t draw the line from spend to occupancy to renewal, somebody else will draw it for you, and they’ll draw it wrong. (Don’t get distracted by single and multi-touch attribution models – they are flawed).
Translating it. Management and ownership doesn’t think in marketing KPIs. They think in occupancy, NOI, and cap rates. Your job is to translate marketing and prove outcomes led by marketing.
Defining it. Half the friction in this role comes from people assuming marketing should fix things marketing can’t fix. Poor leasing practices. Insufficient tech. Status quo strategy. Be loud about what marketing actually is, and just as loud about what it isn’t.
Marketing your marketing isn’t politics – it’s elevating it into a central and strategic business function – a seat at the table – right where it belongs.
2. Multifamily leasing is becoming an e-commerce experience, whether we’re ready or not
Every other industry has digitized the purchase. Mortgages close online. Cars get bought from a couch. B2B software sells without a sales call. And apartments? We still treat the digital experience as the front of the funnel and the in-person tour as the finish line.
That breaks down the moment you watch a real renter shop.
Renters now expect to do everything online. Browse units. See real availability. See the actual price after fees. Schedule a tour, or skip it entirely. Apply. Sign. Pay deposits. Get keys. Every gap between what they expect and what we deliver is a place the lease leaks.
Marketing’s job has expanded into architecting that entire digital journey, not just the top of it. The website used to be just a digital brochure. Now it’s the storefront, the showroom, the leasing office, the FAQ center, the AI nurturing component, and the checkout counter. (And the data layer between everything – because if you don’t measure it, you can’t optimize it).
What would happen if you flipped the script? Invest more innovation, tech, and strategy into where renters start and end their journey – transforming the renter purchasing experience into how they already are trained to shop online.
The operators with the steepest growth curve in the next 24 months are the ones who stop treating leasing as a separate function and start treating it as the back half of a human-led, AI-enabled e-commerce experience. That shift is going to redraw what marketing owns, what leasing owns, and where the line between them sits. The teams that move first won’t just lease faster. They’ll define how the rest of the industry buys.
3. AI is on every stage in multifamily. It’s on almost no marketing teams.
Every panel mentioned AI. Almost every booth had it on a sign. And then you’d walk into a marketing director’s office and ask how AI is actually showing up in their day-to-day work, and the honest answer was: it isn’t.
The conversation in the industry right now is shallow. AI gets framed as a product you buy. A leasing bot here, a sentiment tracker there, a predictive analytics line item somewhere else. That’s not an AI strategy. That’s a procurement list.
The deeper question is the one nobody is asking on stage. What does a marketing operation actually look like when AI is embedded into the workflow rather than bolted onto it? What changes about how a marketing team is structured? What they spend time on? What they measure? How fast they ship?
AI done well isn’t about replacing marketers. It’s about giving each marketer the leverage of a team three times their size. Sharper insights, faster. Execution that doesn’t wait. Pattern recognition across portfolio data that no human team could surface on their own.
That requires strategy first, then sequencing, then execution. Most teams are skipping straight to execution because the procurement cycle is easier than the strategy cycle. We’re going to spend the next 24 months sorting the operators who built an AI-centered marketing operation from the ones who bought an AI feature and called it a strategy.
4. Leasing is sales. It’s time we treated it that way.
Pull up a B2B sales job description and a leasing job description side by side. One of them is honest about the job.
Every other industry calls this what it is. B2B has sales reps. Retail has sales associates. Cars have salespeople. Multifamily has… leasing consultants. The softer the title, the further we’ve drifted from the actual function.
Leasing is sales. The leasing office is a sales floor. The tour is a discovery call. The application is a contract. The renewal is a renewal sale. Everything about how a unit gets filled maps cleanly to a B2B or B2C sales motion. We just collectively choose not to treat it as such. Why? (There’s a lot of nuance here, so let’s stay high-level for now).
Look at the gap. A B2B sales rep gets methodology training (MEDDIC, Challenger, SPIN) and a 6-month ramp plan. A leasing agent gets a script and a few online trainings. A B2B sales rep has a robust CRM, sequences, lead scoring and qualification, call coaching, and quota structure. A leasing agent has a functionally slim CRM (a digital guest card), floor plan collateral, secret shops, and has to throw resident parties. A B2B rep has a defined career path from SDR to AE to manager to leader. A leasing agent has Property Manager, which is a fundamentally different job. (The best leasers don’t make the best property managers and vice versa).
Then we wonder why conversion is what it is, why turnover is what it is, and why the marketing-to-leasing handoff leaks at every joint.
This is an org problem – and it’s marketing’s problem too. Leads arrive into a function that wasn’t built to convert them with as much expertise and gusto required by other industries. Reporting breaks because you can’t run pipeline analytics on a team that isn’t running pipeline (does this data even really exist now?). And the compensation is upside down (when leasing isn’t comped like sales, leasing doesn’t behave like sales).
The operators ahead of this are rebuilding leasing as the sales arm of the property. Hiring closers, not hospitality. Training methodology, not memorization. Comping on conversion, with a strong base and even higher upside. Stacking real sales tools and training onto the leasing seat.
What if you completely rebuilt this from the ground up today? Call it sales, treat it like sales, comp it like sales – and watch what changes.
5. The more AI shows up, the more human you have to be
This one was a thread I was anticipating (hoping!) to show up soon. The more AI flooded the conversation at AIM, the more clearly the operators winning right now stood out for the opposite reason.
They’re not racing to automate every touchpoint. They’re protecting the moments that matter. The leasing agent remembering Casey Smith’s dog, Fido, from their tour two months ago on move-in with a welcome gift complete with a dog toy and treats. The phone call from a regional manager when something goes sideways. The hand-written note from maintenance. The leasing agent who solved a problem instead of routing it.
As AI commoditizes interactions, the human moment becomes the differentiator. Renters lease from brands and people they trust. They renew when that trust and value has been proven over and over again. AI can augment a lot of the work that surrounds that trust. It can’t manufacture the trust itself.
The brand qualities that matter most right now are the ones AI can’t replicate. Personable. Personalized. Warm. Approachable. Real. Truthful. A brand that earns trust at every step, and then renews it at every renewal cycle.
If you’re investing in AI without a parallel investment in the human experience, you’re optimizing for efficiency in the part of the journey that wasn’t going to win you the lease anyway.
