Bracing for the Holiday Spike: A Shopping Center Snapshot
It’s a mixed shopping bag for shopping center operators, property managers, and retailers this holiday season. While vacancy rates are at a 15-year low and shoppers have returned post-COVID, the ongoing labor crunch resulted in longer wait times on Black Friday, and many retailers…
Scaling Mid-Tier Firms While Utility Providers Buckle
Talk to anyone–literally anyone–whose job it is to keep properties warm, lit, and connected to running water right now, and they’ll sigh. The major labor shortages seen throughout Q1 and Q2 of 2022 hit utility providers hard, and the result…
Meter Management: The Great Manufactured Housing Thorn
Every real estate market has its own set of utility thorns—a persistent group of struggles that tend to dig deep, latch on, and find every possible way to disrupt utility services and gouge property management budgets. And in the mobile…
Utility Rate Audits: Because Assumptions Aren’t a Strategy
Making assumptions about massive amounts of cumulative dollars year-over-year is never a good idea. Yet every year, real estate owners all over the country are making the costly assumption that their utility rates are fair, accurate, and as low as they…
Scaling the Student Turn Mountain
If resident turnover rates were landscapes, rates for conventional multifamily communities would be the Smoky Hills of Kansas, and student housing rates would be the steep, jagged Rockies in Colorado. Because while both community types may experience similar turnover amounts…
Gas and Power Prices: An Escalating Future
Change causes change. As the headlining big numbers that affect our lives and our businesses get bigger, the quieter goods and services that stand on top of them begin to shift in hard to nail down ways. Consider a recent…
Don’t Let Utilities Eat Your Accountants
Accountants create value. They’re money managing superheroes. Individually, they analyze expenditures and maintain your business’s institutional compliance. As a part of a whole, the financial reports and future-earnings analyses they create are the foundation of business intelligence. Essentially, they fuel growth.…
7 Commercial Utility Revenue Robbers
As a commercial real estate (CRE) owner, you have a lot of tasks and expenditures to worry about—and, odds are, utilities aren’t your primary focus. But with an average cost of $2 to $4 per square foot—they aren’t an expense you…
Electricity Execs, and Sustainable Utilities
Last week, on February 9th, President Biden hosted a roundtable meeting with executives from electric utility companies throughout the U.S. to discuss the benefits and drawbacks of his Build Back Better plan and what it may mean for the future of clean…
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Editor's Picks
Ask An Expert: With Sustainability Expert Jason Krychiw
Meet Jason Krychiw Jason Krychiw started his career in the research camp. Yet somewhere between studying biofuels and environmental impacts, he found himself drawn to work with a more direct human impact. That need for purposeful work led him to…
Don’t Mistake AI for Automation: A Primer for Property Management
At October’s Rent Manager User Conference, a speaker asked a room of property management professionals a simple question: “How many of you track the late fees you’re paying on utility bills?” In a room packed with dozens and dozens of…
More Doors = More Moving Parts: Growing Utility Management with Your Portfolio
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.…
The State of Manufactured Housing in 2026
The State of Manufactured Housing in 2026 | RSS.com In 2024, we said manufactured housing was parking itself at the intersection of innovation and resilience. Two years later, the industry has A LOT more traffic to manage. Demand for manufactured…
Utility Theft Detection: Protecting Revenue with Smart Monitoring
What does a case of “utility theft” even look like? A broken meter? A cyber attack? Someone hotwiring an electric panel like it’s some kind of car? Utility theft is a broad term for a simple concept—the loss of recoverable revenue to undetected utility use. This can include physical meter tampering, missed service transfers, account…
The Only 5 Utility Management Companies Worth Considering in 2026
The multifamily utility market has no shortage of providers. But only a handful offer the scale, service depth, technology, or specialization to deserve serious consideration in 2026. Five stand out: Conservice (unashamed plug, but true is true), RealPage, Yardi, Entrata, and Zego. Each brings a different strength to the table. Some embed utilities directly into…
Why Should You Centralize Your Utility Management?
TL;DR Ever hear the saying “you need to get your ducks in a row”? That can be a difficult ask when those ducks are running in different directions, across multiple states. Some are even hiding from you, with a few practically kidnapped by strangers, turning duck management into a wild goose chase. Unfortunately, we’re handling…
Broadband Summit 2026 Debrief: The Infrastructure of Connectivity
Telecom strategy used to be limited to a few baseline questions: Who is the provider? What speeds do they offer? And are they offering the best rate? That was often the extent of the decision-making process. Walking out of Broadband Summit 2026, one thing was clear: those questions aren’t enough anymore. Internet has outgrown the…
Rental Junk Fee Laws in 2026: What Utility Billing Teams Need to Know
TL;DR: Fee transparency law is tightening in 2026, and most of the new rules target disclosure, not the formulas billing teams use to calculate a utility bill-back. This guide breaks down what counts as a junk fee, where disclosure rules end, and billing accuracy begins, the laws currently in effect, and practical steps to keep…
The How-to Guide for Reducing CAM Charges and Shared Space Costs
TL;DR When investigating where to reduce CAM charges and multifamily common-area costs, shared utility expenses might be the place to start. A higher bill doesn’t automatically signal waste, so it’s important to compare cost and consumption before deciding where to act. HVAC, lighting, water systems, and amenity equipment are good places to identify any mismatches…
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