The Rise of the Smart Apartment and the Connected Community

Smart homes are enjoying a rapid increase in popularity, and renters are experiencing greater connectivity with their communities than ever before. In 2025, nearly 500 million users worldwide will have smart tech in their homes, and today’s residents are increasingly expecting to find these value adds in the top apartments on the market.

Property managers who aren’t investing in smart upgrades risk turning off potential tenants and slowly losing the efficiency battle with competitors. Here are some of the biggest ways smart apartments are elevating resident life, improving operations, and saving PMs time and money. 

How Smart Apartments Unlock New Opportunities

Being able to set your thermostat with your phone is pretty cool, but smart tech offers a lot more than just dazzling perks. Connected communities and digital infrastructure allow residents and PMs to make better choices, save money, and engage in activities that improve everyone’s lives. 

When property managers embrace smart home technology, they benefit from:

• Improved energy and utility efficiency. Smart lights, plugs, energy monitors, and sprinklers make it easy to keep costs down.
• Enhance security for their units. When your apartments have smart locks and doorbells, granting access, troubleshooting resident issues, and keeping your community safe is much easier. 
• Access powerful data. With the data smart devices provide for KPIs like consumption and building maintenance, you can make informed management decisions for your apartments.
• Maximize your time and productivity. Devices that can be monitored and adjusted remotely allow PMs to handle time-consuming tasks without leaving the desk. 

The Smart Home Features Modern Tenants Want

Today’s renters may not be willing to pay less to live in an unconnected community, but they’re often willing to spend more for smart tech's benefits. These investments are part of a solid strategy to gradually increase the market value of your units by keeping up with property management trends.

Today’s tenants want smart home features like:

Smart Locks

With smart locks, residents don’t need physical keys to unlock their apartments. Instead, they can access their homes with a fingerprint scan, a smartphone app, or a numeric keypad.

These devices also make it easy for PMs to grant access to potential renters and manage access issues efficiently across the property. Smart locks can also enhance your building’s security by eliminating the risk of lockpicking, and they timestamp access so you know exactly when someone enters the apartment.

Smart Doorbells

If a tenant’s apartment has a smart doorbell installed, they can check a video feed of their front door from their phone. PMs may also be able to access doorbell cameras to keep an eye on the property or access footage to support legal action. 

Smart Lighting

In the past, tenants had two options for built-in apartment lighting: “on” and “off.” But with smart lighting, your residents can get work done under cool white lights, relax later in the day with warmer tones, and even enjoy rainbow-colored lighting during parties.

Of course, the benefits of smart lighting go far beyond changing colors. These lights can improve energy efficiency and deter intruders with a dedicated “away mode.”

Voice Control

The most convenient way to control smart lighting isn’t a physical switch or a smartphone app. Instead, your tenants can control these lights and many other smart home features with simple voice commands. Giving your residents access to this ability is easy—just add one or more smart speakers to your apartments as an amenity. These tools also address accessibility issues for residents with disabilities. 

Smart Thermostats

When your units are equipped with smart thermostats, you’ll notice a substantial increase in energy efficiency. With the help of these thermostats, you can minimize utility costs for your building’s unoccupied apartments. 

At the same time, your tenants will enjoy reduced utility bills and a thermostat that learns their preferred temperatures and schedule. This can have a significant impact on their overall budget calculation when choosing an apartment, so it’s an opportunity to edge out the competition or up your fair market value. 

The Challenges of Implementing Smart Home Technologies

The smart devices listed above can provide substantial benefits for you and your tenants alike. However, you’ll need to overcome various challenges while implementing smart home technology.

To successfully add smart devices to your apartment units, plan for:

• A complicated setup process. Setting up a single smart device shouldn’t be too complex, but things can get tricky when you’re implementing multiple devices for every unit in a multifamily apartment building. Using platforms like Amazon Alexa or Apple Home can help.
• Compatibility issues. Smart devices aren’t guaranteed to work with every other product in this category. While buying smart technology for your apartment building, make sure the devices you’ve picked out are compatible with each other.
• Connectivity problems. Most smart devices rely on a wireless internet connection. With that in mind, you’ll want to ensure your buildings have strong Wi-Fi coverage in your community before making other improvements.
• Cybersecurity and privacy concerns. Smart home systems can collect user data, which could be exposed in the event of a privacy breach. To minimize this risk, keep your smart devices updated and change their passwords on a regular basis.

Using Technology to Connect Your Resident Community 

While these devices can save money and help your property operate more efficiently, they also make it easier for residents to interact. Highly connected communities allow people to communicate quickly with management and each other when there’s a problem and develop relationships that support healthier, happier living environments. 

To achieve that goal, you’ll need property management software that offers a robust resident portal. Through it, your residents can access running updates on what’s happening in their building, send messages, post on community boards, and coordinate activities. 

Resident portals offer many practical benefits as well. Your tenants can use your resident portal app to submit work orders and make online payments with minimal difficulty. The top software can streamline every aspect of work order creation, vendor management, invoicing, and payment tracking, so it’s a huge opportunity to simplify your workflow and minimize costly errors.

Enhance Your Multifamily Buildings With Property Management Software

In addition to resident portal functionality, property management programs allow property managers to simplify work order management, view real-time data for their apartments, and screen prospective tenants. 

By implementing smart devices and resident portals, property managers can create sustainable, resilient multifamily buildings. Along with improving an apartment building’s energy efficiency and security, this technology can help tenants connect with their neighbors in new ways.

With the help of a best-in-class property management platform like ExactEstate, property managers can seamlessly organize and optimize every aspect of their business.

If you’re looking for a property management system that improves your community from the ground up, schedule a demo of ExactEstate and find out how to turn your smart investments into intelligent insights.