What We Learned at FUTURE 2026: Key Takeaways for Real Estate Operators
FUTURE 2026 is a wrap. From September 28th to October 1st, nearly 2,600 operators, investors, and innovators filled the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego for 45-plus sessions, with over 90 speakers, hands-on trainings, and an evening performance by Grammy Award-winning artist Lenny Kravitz.
The theme of every session was the Property Performance Gap: the distance between the outcomes operators want and what their current technology allows. Benchmark data from ProfitCoach shows benchmark property managers are more than twice as profitable as the average company, while the average operator still spends two-thirds of their time on reactive, routine work. FUTURE 2026 was about closing that gap. Here’s what we heard, saw, and announced.
A Way to Measure Where You Stand: The RPM Model
The RPM Model, the framework behind Real Estate Performance Management (RPM), was a throughline at FUTURE 2026. It maps a property management business across 6 dimensions, and each dimension moves through three phases: Reactive, Structured, and Performing. The model gives operators a shared way to describe where their business stands and where it’s headed.
Three of the dimensions are systems the business runs on: the System of Record, the System of Action, and the System of Growth. Three are behaviors, where people experience systems at work: Team Impact, Resident Experience, and Owner Relationships. Teams can only move as fast as the systems underneath them. Proactive resident outreach requires connected data, and a forward-looking owner conversation requires catching variances early.
No business starts in the Performing phase. In the Reactive phase, teams address issues only after they've happened. In the Structured phase, there are systems in place that allow teams to address issues proactively, and everyone has a clear idea of where the business stands. This is where most businesses stall, because structure creates visibility, not performance. In the Performing phase, the system handles routine work and the team can focus on the things only people can do: making judgment calls, managing relationships, and planning the next move. Performing is a practice, not a finish line.
The point of the model is to provide a roadmap for the next phase of the business. AppFolio provides an RPM Assessment that scores each dimension and shows the one worth fixing next.
Innovations Unveiled at FUTURE 2026
The New Realm-X
The new AppFolio Realm-X handles multistep requests from start to finish, remembers conversations, and builds workflows and dashboards from prompts. New capabilities include:
Memory: Personalization based on previous conversations.
Knowledge Base: A repository of your documents and policies for added context.
Skills: Prompts users to create and share so they’re repeatable across teams. When a leasing agent calls in sick, a manager can use a “reassign showings” Skill to redistribute tours, with user approval.
Prompt-to-Flow and Prompt-to-Dashboard: Describe a workflow or dashboard in plain language, and Realm-X builds it.
Realm-X AI actions completed on AppFolio are up sevenfold year-over-year. The new Realm-X is available on all AppFolio plans, now including the Realm-X Connector for Anthropic's Claude, first introduced in June 2026.
A Growing Suite of Performers
Realm-X and the Realm-X Performer suite work from the same platform, business context, and governance, within the permissions and guardrails each customer sets, and with human oversight. Here are the results so far:
Leasing Performer boosts showings by up to 35%, a third of which are from after-hours leads.
Maintenance Performer resolves one in four work orders directly with the resident.
Resident Messenger Performer fully resolves over 30% of conversations on the spot, day or night.
Accounting Performer beta customers report saving an average of 17 hours per month.
The newest addition is Receptionist Performer, which answers incoming calls, handles simple questions, and routes everything else to the right person or Performer at any hour. Voice options are available at launch.
Accounting and Resident Experience
In accounting, AppFolio is expanding entity-based accounting, portfolio cash management, and credit card accounting. Realm-X Accounting Performer is now available and automates bill entry, financial close, and budgeting. Reconciliation is coming soon through an AppFolio partnership with Column.
In resident experience, a new partnership with Snappt adds document fraud detection inside FolioScreen™ Trusted Renter, catching fraudulent income documents before an application is approved. Online Certified Funds at Move-In lets residents pay move-in costs with guaranteed funds instead of a check or a trip to the bank. All of it runs through FolioSpace™.
Session Highlights and Takeaways
Opening Keynote: Dr. Maya Shankar
Dr. Maya Shankar kicked off FUTURE 2026 with the opening keynote. Shankar is a cognitive scientist, a former White House Senior Policy Advisor, and the host of A Slight Change of Plans. Her talk made the case that people aren’t just subject to change; they can get better at it intentionally by practicing new behaviors and habits.
AI Is Rewiring How Top Operators Work
Dom Beveridge, who studies and writes about technology in multifamily, drew a clear line between software that’s AI-enabled and software that’s AI-first: built from first principles to solve problems that couldn’t have been solved before AI. He also cautioned that AI analytics still depend on clean, consistent data and that asking a large language model questions doesn’t replace the shared dashboards everyone relies on. “AI does not provide an alternative to an enterprise data strategy,” he said.
He also shared that AI-first software is not a staffing plan. “AI-first does not mean AI with no people; that’s a really common misconception. AI-first means a first-principles view of what work needs to happen at all in an environment where we have AI, and what do we want our people to do?”
Maintenance: Fewer Trips, Faster Resolutions
Dan Teague, who leads maintenance products at AppFolio, moderated a panel with Sean Anselmo, Director of Operations at Young America Realty; Roberto Martinez, Vice President of Atlas Home Services; and Ray Hespen, CEO and Co-Founder of Property Meld.
The first lesson was that while AI scales existing processes, it doesn’t create them. “I wouldn’t say AI just fixed our chaos,” said Anselmo, who oversees maintenance for 4,100 units. After standardizing the process, his team used AppFolio Realm-X Maintenance Performer to scale it: Two dispatchers now handle work that 7 people used to split, and after-hours calls dropped from 15 to 30 a night to two to five. Active work order time is also down 39%.
Martinez described a similar result at Atlas: “We haven’t increased our team at all, but we’ve actually grown exponentially.” Anselmo advised to bring your team along when starting with AI. “You're not going to get anywhere without your entry-level employees embracing this technology,” he said.
From Managing Assets to Owning Them
Moses Kagan, CEO of Adaptive Realty, joined Quincy Oswald, a Product Manager for AppFolio Investment Manager, to make the case that property managers are among the best-suited professionals to become successful real estate investors. Their advantage is data they already have. “Amateurs are guessing at those things, but you already have in your AppFolio systems all the rent rolls and P&Ls,” Kagan said. “You're already miles ahead of anyone else when it comes to underwriting what these things are going to look like.”
Kagan’s approach to raising capital starts before any offer goes out: List everyone you know who might invest, hold informational meetings rather than sales pitches, and learn how much you could raise and on what terms. He also warned against letting projected returns drive the deal: “My strong advice is don’t max out the leverage.”
Rebuilding in Real Time
A year ago, Steven Rea had just joined Northpoint, a scattered-site single-family property management company, with a mandate to transform how it ran on AppFolio. He documented the rebuild on a podcast called Year One, and the story turned out to be less about brilliant ideas than about wrong assumptions. “Having the capability available to me and having an organization that was ready to adopt those capabilities are two very different things,” Rea said.
His team learned to watch people do the work before automating it, to understand why a workaround exists before removing it, and to keep first rollouts small. “AI is incredibly powerful, and it can allow you to automate, speed up work, and get things done a lot faster,” he said. “However, it also has the extraordinary ability to scale and speed up a bad assumption or a bad workflow.”
Northpoint started with a stack of roughly 30 tools. In less than a year, it cut more than $4 million in annual expenses and went from 80 to 280 doors per property manager in its single-family portfolio.
The 2026 State of Financial Performance
Brad Johnson, CEO of ProfitCoach, shared the latest benchmarks from his firm’s live financial data. The average property management company’s net profit margin has climbed from 6% in 2019 to 16.5% in 2025, while benchmark companies now run at 35%. “I can name 25 operators in our space who have between 400 and 5,000 doors who are healthfully sitting in the low-to-mid 30s in margin. It is definitely possible,” Johnson said.
His point was that improving on last year isn’t the same as performing at the top of the industry. “It's not good enough to just get better,” he said. Johnson walked through the 6 metrics that drive profitability, including direct labor efficiency, revenue per unit, and churn, and showed how small gains in each add up on the bottom line.
Closing Keynote: Andre Agassi
Andre Agassi gave the closing keynote. Agassi is a former world No. 1 tennis player, an 8-time Grand Slam champion, an Olympic gold medalist, the author of Open, and the founder of the Andre Agassi Foundation for Education. He spoke about being expected to be perfect on the tennis court as a child, falling from No. 1 in the world to No. 141 and climbing back to No. 1, what he learned from that, how he changed the game of tennis, and how he gives back through philanthropy.
See You Next Year at FUTURE 2027
FUTURE is where the real estate industry comes to connect, learn, and get inspired, and we’re already looking forward to next year. Join us October 3rd to October 6th, 2027, in San Diego to hear from leading operators, technologists, and industry thought leaders. Register early for the lowest rate of the year.
Want to learn even more about Real Estate Performance Management, the newest product innovations at AppFolio, and key takeaways from FUTURE? Register for our upcoming webinar “Inside FUTURE 2026: A Recap of the Ideas Shaping Real Estate” on October 22nd, 2026, at 11 am PT / 2 pm ET.
Key Takeaways
What did AppFolio announce at FUTURE 2026? AppFolio announced the new Realm-X, the new Receptionist Performer, and new accounting and resident experience capabilities at FUTURE 2026, held September 28th to October 1st, 2026, in San Diego.
What is the new Realm-X? The new AppFolio Realm-X handles multistep work, remembers business context, and builds workflows and dashboards from a prompt. It’s available on all AppFolio plans, and Realm-X AI actions are up sevenfold year-over-year.
What is the RPM Model? The RPM Model is the framework behind Real Estate Performance Management. It maps a property management business across 6 dimensions (System of Record, System of Action, System of Growth, Team Impact, Resident Experience, and Owner Relationships) and three phases (Reactive, Structured, and Performing).
What results are Realm-X Performers delivering? According to AppFolio, Leasing Performer boosts showings by up to 35%; Maintenance Performer resolves one in four work orders directly with the resident; Resident Messenger Performer fully resolves over 30% of conversations; and Accounting Performer beta customers save an average of 17 hours per month. Performers run on the AppFolio Performance Platform.
How profitable are property management companies? ProfitCoach’s 2026 State of Financial Performance in Property Management report found that the average net profit margin rose from 6% in 2019 to 16.5% in 2025, while benchmark companies reached 35%.
How much can AI reduce maintenance work order time? Young America Realty cut active work order time by 39% after standardizing its process and adopting Maintenance Performer, according to Sean Anselmo, Director of Operations. Two dispatchers now handle maintenance work that 7 people used to split across 4,100 units.
