More Doors = More Moving Parts: Growing Utility Management with Your Portfolio

It’s alive! The multifamily market is alive! The industry’s biggest property managers have developed a serious appetite for growth. This year’s rankings show just how many doors they’ve added.

Multi-Housing News’ 2026 ranking of top multifamily property management companies found that 65 participating firms managed more than 4.1 million units across approximately 18,800 communities during 2025. That’s up from 3.8 million units across roughly 16,500 properties the year before.

Nearly two-thirds of the firms included in the ranking expanded their footprints. Greystar surpassed 1 million managed units, while Asset Living reported more than 446,000 units after growing its portfolio 55% year over year.

Multifamily’s biggest property managers are getting even bigger. 

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For growing multifamily operators, those additional doors represent opportunity. 

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Yet what of the monster growing underneath? Thousands of additional accounts, meters, bills, providers, residents, data points and property-specific processes that are bursting out of larger operations.

As your portfolio expands, can your utility-management systems, integrations, and resident-billing processes scale across new properties and markets without fragmenting workflows?

Every New Property Comes With Its Own Utility Environment

Adding a property to a portfolio rarely means plugging another address into an existing process and moving on.

Each community can introduce a different combination of:

That’s a long laundry list of operational to-do’s for every new property.

Maybe teams are able to manage some of those differences property by property at a smaller scale, but as portfolios grow, that approach becomes hard to sustain.

The challenge is not making every community operate identically. Properties serve different markets, work with different utilities and may be subject to different requirements.

The challenge is creating a consistent process for identifying, documenting and managing those differences.

Start With an Inventory, Not an Assumption

When a community enters a portfolio, the first utility-management question is simple:

What exactly are we taking responsibility for?

That review can begin with an inventory of the property’s utility providers, account numbers,  service addresses, meters, billing arrangements and other responsible parties. Making sure you lay out all the cards you have to play paints a clear picture of where to go next.

It’s especially important as some utility arrangements do not necessarily transfer automatically when ownership or management changes.

Consider Dominion Energy South Carolina’s Revert-to-Landlord program as an example. 

Its agreement allows designated electric or natural-gas service to automatically transfer into a landlord’s name after a tenant disconnects service. But the agreement also states that it ends when Dominion receives notice that the property has been sold or is no longer managed by that landlord, among other circumstances.

This might not be the case for every property, but it does demonstrate that it is possible. It also illustrates a broader operational 

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Existing utility processes should be verified during a property transition rather than assumed to carry forward.

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As portfolios expand into additional utility territories, documenting those arrangements becomes a crucial step at the very start.

Standardize the Process, Not Necessarily the Property

Scalability should not be confused with uniformity.

A scalable utility operation doesn’t require every property to have the same provider, meter configuration or resident billing structure. 

It requires a repeatable way of answering the same questions. 

• Who owns each utility account?
• Where should the invoice go?
• Who is responsible for paying for it?
• How does service transfer during vacancy?
• How are resident charges calculated where applicable?
• What information should flow into the property-management or accounting system?

Creating a standardized review and approval process gives operators consistency without ignoring property-level differences. 

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Scalability should not be confused with uniformity.

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That becomes particularly important when resident billing is involved. Requirements can vary by utility type and jurisdiction. That makes a one-size-fits-all configuration difficult to support across a multistate portfolio.

It is one disciplined process for determining the right setup at every property.

Portfolio Growth Can Create a Data Problem

Utility management is not only about paying invoices. It can also be a goldmine of information, especially when acquiring a property.

As these portfolios grow, utility data becomes increasingly valuable for understanding cost, consumption, recovery, exceptions and building performance. But collecting the complete picture isn’t always straightforward.

EPA ENERGY STAR notes that multifamily owners seeking to benchmark a property may have difficulty obtaining whole-building energy information when residents pay some utility bills directly. In those cases, property owners may need aggregated information from the utility to understand total building consumption.

More than 75 utilities now make some form of aggregated whole-building energy data available to owners, according to EPA, but the agency also reports that the vast majority of U.S. utilities still do not provide this type of access.

This creates yet another important consideration for expanding portfolios.

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Having every property in the same reporting platform does not automatically mean every property has the same depth of quality or utility data.

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One community could have detailed whole-building consumption information. Another will only have owner-paid common-area data. You can’t plan on your newly acquired property arriving with a complete history.

Portfolio reporting shoulding hide these differences, they need to account for them.

Leadership and stakeholders should be able to see not only utility performance, but also where the underlying information is complete, incomplete or still being integrated.

New Properties Should Join the Workflow, Not Create a New One

Let this serve as a warning to growing operators: beware of the workaround.

A new community arrives with a slightly different process, so someone creates a spreadsheet.The next new property uses a different utility provider, so invoices start going to a separate inbox. The third cannot immediately connect to an existing system, so someone manually moves data between platforms. Shouldn’t be a problem, right?

Individually, each workaround can seem manageable. A temporary solution that will be fixed eventually.

But we’re not talking about individual properties. These portfolios cover dozens, hundreds, even thousands of communities. A portfolio cannot survive with thousands of separate operating models.

Integrations should be evaluated by more than whether two systems can technically exchange data. EPA, for example, supports utility integrations that automatically send energy-consumption information into ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager, reducing the need for repeated manual data entry.

The same principle applies more broadly to multifamily operations.

A scalable integration strategy asks:

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Where does the information originate, where does it need to go, and what happens if it does not arrive correctly?

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The objective is not simply connecting software. It is reducing the number of manual handoffs required every time the portfolio grows.

Growth Should Make the Portfolio Bigger, Not More Fragmented

While multifamily’s largest managers are demonstrating just how quickly portfolios expand, they are also learning operational scalability is measured differently than portfolio growth.

It is measured by whether the organization can add another community without rebuilding the process behind it.

For utility operations, that means creating a repeatable approach to:

• Identify utility accounts and responsibilities
• Review property-specific billing arrangements
• Maintain service during transitions and vacancies
• Connect utility information to existing systems
• Establish usable portfolio-level reporting
• Document exceptions and assign responsibility for resolving them

Cease the growing pains. Make differences visible, make operations manageable and make processes repeatable within a larger operating model.

Ready to see what better utility management could mean for your portfolio? Talk to a Utility Expert