The Real Estate Technology Alliance (RETA) creates standards, best practices, educational material and other information for the benefit of real estate, multi-family, and other adjacent industry verticals. This is done by creating workgroups, which are project teams composed of a cross section of an industry (operators, vendors, consultants, academics, others).
Workgroup participants typically include senior technology executives, product leaders, software developers, or any other functional group or role that is a stakeholder in a particular process or technology issue. Workgroups have a well-defined goal (built in advance by consensus among senior industry leaders) and are tasked to work together to achieve that goal, typically in a 6-12 month time frame.
You must be a RETA sponsor, member or invited guest to participate in a workgroup. If you are unsure if you qualify, please contact reta@nmhc.org.
- Active workgroups meet on a regular basis and have a well defined objective.
- Recruiting workgroups are in the development stage and need additional industry support and consensus to launch.
To join these workgroups, or for more information, continue reading below. You may submit a form at the bottom of this page to join a workgroup.
NEW - Coliving Marketing Tech Strategies - Recruiting
Coliving is a rapidly expanding asset class in the multi-family sector, growing yields by 23% in certain locales. With nearly 10K beds online and more than 50K in the development pipeline, coliving will remain a growing presence across the world. While similar to multi-family, coliving is still fundamentally different. One of the largest challenges we face is educating prospective residents about coliving. While coliving operators continue to rely upon ILSs for demand generation, many of those prospective residents remain unaware of coliving as a distinct form of an apartment.
The specific problems we're evaluating are (but are not limited to):
- Avoid coliving vs. conventional apartment confusion in the minds of consumers.
- Support a more flexible model that allows units to be marketed as conventional or coliving.
Rental Debt Collections - Active
Property and corporate collections are an important pain point for many real estate companies but often utilize manual processes that result in frustrated property owners, incomplete financial projections, or ultimately a loss in revenue. As customer payment habits change, so does most of the collections technology and customer engagement processes. This group is evaluating technology integrations between systems to achieve a higher conversion rate and ultimately increase revenues across the industry. Join this group to help define the future of the collections process. The relevant MITS standard may be found here.
Self-Guided Tours - Active
Real estate and multi-family properties must embrace digital transformation in various forms, including self-service tours that rely on bullet proof access control and operational processes. These new capabilities will drive potential customers from the search process to the model unit to a signed lease in new ways, perhaps fast - but how can real estate and multi-family companies adapt to the risks and challenges associated with these new phenomena? Join this team to shape the future of self-guided tours!
Benchmarking for Multi-Family - Active
Other industries have long benefited from common benchmarking key performance indicators (KPIs), including functional area in finance, operations, marketing, and other core components of a modern real estate enterprise. These KPIs could be used to judge the performance of a property, or other functional unit of an enterprise against a competitive set of properties or other entities. This group is evaluating the current landscape of available KPIs and industry level sources of data to perform a gap analysis and ultimately produce a recommendation to the industry. This recommendation may include high value candidates for KPI standardization, data integration standards to support those KPIs, and the requirements for a centralized system. This group is led by Jason Grovert, Chief Information Officer at Steadfast Companies, and Chair of the Data Standards Committee. Any member of RETA may join this workgroup.
Cybersecurity Taskforce - Recruiting
Cybersecurity is an urgent and important real estate business requirement with exponentially increasing risks and complexity. From sophisticated criminal organizations to state-based actors, attackers are constantly probing for any weakness to exploit in your organization and data. Join this group to discuss the cybersecurity environment in real estate, multi-family, and adjacent industries in a trusted, peer-sharing group that only admits persons with cybersecurity roles or responsibilities. No sales or unrelated job roles will be admitted to this team.
Core Data - Recruiting
The real estate market, and the data which many companies rely on, is changing at a rapid pace and many companies are falling behind. The multi-family real estate industry operates on essential set(s) of data that many, if not all properties and technology companies utilize to conduct day-to-day business. These categories of data include, but are not limited to: lease information, customer information, property information, property marketing information, unit data, and staff roles. Without this data, many real estate companies and technology providers will not be able to function. Join this workgroup to identify new data sources and use cases that real estate companies evaluate to maintain pace with the industry and adjacencies. The relevant MITS standard may be found here.
Lead Management - Recruiting
An inability to effectively track the customer acquisition process leads to lower property values, lease rates, and higher vacancy rates. Effective management of your customer pipeline and conversion rates depend on modern customer relationship management practices, but the real estate industry has been slow to adopt new technologies and processes that are available in the marketplace. Join this group to identify best practices and key data points that will help you drive an ROI to your customer engagement practice. The relevant MITS standard may be found here.
Lease / Application - Recruiting
The traditional lease and application process and terms, while still relevant in many markets, is not sufficient for new business models such as short term leases, shared and co-living spaces, and many other models emerging in the wake of a dramatically changing customer demographic. The real estate industry needs to quickly adapt contracts and software systems to enable these business models. Join this group to discuss these new business models and what data is necessary to achieve success in this challenging (and exciting!) environment. The relevant MITS standard may be found here.
Property Marketing & Internet Listing Services (ILS) - Recruiting
Successful distribution of your salable units on third party systems (or ILS) relies on a consistent, coherent, and comprehensive unit data model that shares your information where guests prefer to search and compare offers. However, this process is often bespoke, time consuming, and inundated with out-of-date information that detours potential customers from your property. New amenities and constantly changing multimedia content (pictures, videos, descriptions) are just some of the public-facing information you need to share with third parties – join this group to define the industry standardized information that you need to share with your partners and reduce costs across the board. The relevant MITS standard may be found here.
Resident Transactions - Recruiting
The transaction and payment process is rapidly changing – your customers expect to be able to pay in the same way they do in other industries. Most importantly, this means web-first, mobile wallets, peer-to-peer payments, and other non-traditional forms of payment are rapidly cannibalizing the traditional ACH, check, or credit card process that has long defined the industry. Coupled with new amenities and ancillary services, it is more important than ever to have a customer centric transaction process than enables you to collect revenue in the form that your customers expect. Join this group to help shape the future of payments and transactions in real estate. The relevant MITS standard may be found here.