Published on August 27th, 2025
By Marc Frenkiel

In property management, having the right tools has always mattered. But today, having too many tools — even the best ones — might be what’s holding your business back.

As the industry navigates increased complexity, rising resident expectations, and greater investor scrutiny, the old model of cobbling together multiple point solutions is showing its limits. It’s no longer enough to simply have best-in-class features. What matters now is how those tools work together — or don’t.

This is the difference between fragmented technology and a unified experience. And it’s one of the most important shifts operators can make if they want to close the performance gap and deliver real outcomes.

What Is Fragmented Technology?

Fragmented technology typically refers to a patchwork of disconnected tools used to manage different parts of your business — leasing, accounting and reporting, maintenance, and more. Each system might work well in isolation, but together they create friction:

Too many logins
Data doesn’t sync in real time
No single source of truth
Manual workarounds and duplicated effort
Inconsistent for residents and teams

This kind of setup often starts with good intentions: pick the best tool for each job. But over time, the lack of integration creates inefficiencies, operational blind spots, and added burden on your team — all of which prevent you from scaling effectively.

In fact, we’ve come to call this setup the Frankenstack: a tangle of systems stitched together by necessity, not strategy. And as the 20for20 Annual Survey recently observed, this kind of tech bloat has become one of the industry’s defining challenges. Leaders are spending more time wrestling with overlapping systems than improving performance, people processes, or resident satisfaction.

What Is A Unified Experience?

A unified experience is more than just software consolidation. It’s about delivering consistency, clarity, and performance across your entire organization — for your team, your residents, and your investors.

In a unified system:

Data flows seamlessly across functions.
Teams work within a single, integrated interface.
Context is preserved.
Everyone experiences the brand and service the same way.
AI can operate across workflows to drive intelligent action.

To this last point, in a fragmented stack, a maintenance request might require a resident to email the office, then your team must manually log the request, assign a maintenance technician, and track down a vendor if necessary. In a unified system, AI agents can automatically acknowledge the resident’s request, create a work order, dispatch the right technician, and follow up once the issue is resolved.

Rather than just doing the job, a unified platform enhances every part of the experience. Your team is more empowered, your residents receive faster, more consistent service, and your leadership gains real-time visibility into performance — not just process.

Why This Shift Matters Now

As pressure mounts across the industry — from economic uncertainty to increasing resident expectations — simply operating more efficiently isn’t enough. To truly deliver real performance, you need to operate holistically.

That means thinking beyond tools and focusing on outcomes:

Is your technology helping you respond faster to residents?
Is it giving you insight into property performance?
Is it reducing the cognitive load on your team?
Is it creating a consistent experience across your portfolio?

20for20’s Dom Beveridge points out that every technology decision comes with a trade-off. As Thomas Sowell famously said, “There are no solutions, only trade-offs.” In property management, that often means weighing the promise of additional functionality against the simplicity and clarity of an integrated experience. Too often, operators get distracted by the “better mousetrap” instead of asking the harder question: how does this technology affect the customer journey?

And as industry experts warn, according to Dom, many property managers no longer have a clear view of that journey. The sheer accumulation of overlapping tools has created incoherent, sometimes contradictory processes — a problem that a unified experience is designed to solve.

The Bottom Line

Choosing the right platform today isn’t about adding more features — it’s about choosing a unified experience that’s built for scale, intelligence, and performance. Fragmented systems might get the job done, but they leave your team stuck managing tasks instead of delivering impact.

Granite, with over 5,000 multifamily units and 11,000 student housing beds, exemplifies the benefits of a unified experience. John Rabold, President of the West Lafayette, Indiana-based company, explains:

“The reason we really like the consolidated approach of AppFolio is because we’re spread across different markets and geographic territories. We rely on our teams to execute in their markets on a daily basis with our corporate office, which sometimes is hundreds of miles away.

AppFolio is a single source of truth that we can reference to provide the best support possible to those markets. At any given time, we can check into the system and see how certain properties are performing, how we can add value to any respective market based on what we’re seeing, and what improvements we can work on as well.

Having consolidated property management software allows us to work more efficiently and effectively and also places more autonomy on the staff in those markets to work at a high level.”

If you want to close the performance gap and unlock true value for your business, your residents, and your investors, it’s time to shift from fragmented to unified. Granite did it, Chamberlin & Associates did it, and you can too.