A generation ago, an apartment owner's amenity decisions ran to countertops and pool decks. Those decisions still matter, but a bigger one now sits underneath them: who delivers the internet to every unit.
Plenty of owners never made that choice on purpose. They inherited it from whichever carrier reached the building first, and it has become one of the more consequential calls on the asset.
Residents treat internet as a utility
The 2024 NMHC/Grace Hill Renter Preferences Survey found that 90 percent of renters were interested in high-speed internet or would not rent without it, and renters ranked it among their top three desired apartment features.
Parks Associates, in a white paper produced with Xfinity Communities, found that 41 percent of apartment renters expect service to be working the moment they move in. Nearly half rated having internet access at move-in as a top consideration when searching for a home.
Nobody asks whether a building has running water, because everyone assumes it does. Renters have started to hold internet connectivity to the same standard, and they judge a property by how well it works on the first night and every night after.
The distance between expectation and experience
Parks Associates also reports that among the more than 30 percent of Americans who live in apartments and other multifamily housing, half experience network problems. Those problems tend to land on the leasing office.
When each resident holds a separate contract with a carrier, the owner receives the complaints without any of the controls. The carrier has little reason to prioritize a single building, and the property team spends staff hours on a problem it has no power to fix.
The same logic carries into student housing, senior living, build-to-rent and HOA communities. Residents arrive in each of them with the same expectation, and the owner is the one they hold responsible.
What owning the network changes
Managed WiFi puts one network across every unit and common area, designed and maintained by a single provider, with a real, responsive person answering when something breaks. The owner moves from watching the resident experience to being accountable for it, which is a stronger position to hold when renewals come due.
Parks found that 60 percent of multifamily owners and operators have managed WiFi in at least part of their footprint, and 13 percent have it across the entire portfolio. That spread suggests most owners are comfortable with the model and relatively few have made it their standard.
A portfolio sitting between those two numbers has some properties where the owner controls the resident experience and others where a carrier does.
The math that lenders and buyers run
Anyone who underwrites multifamily knows how much weight NOI carries. Buyers capitalize it, so every dollar of recurring revenue added or operating cost removed shows up in the value of the property.
At a 5.5 percent cap rate, an extra $100,000 of annual NOI is worth roughly $1.8 million of value. The figure is only arithmetic, and each property's numbers will differ.
Connectivity touches both sides of that ledger. Managed WiFi can create a recurring revenue line, and it can remove the staff time and service calls that come with unmanaged internet. It also bears on renewals, since a resident who has stopped fighting with the internet has one fewer reason to leave.
What owners should ask a provider
An owner who starts treating connectivity as a purchasing decision should begin with plain questions.
Who owns and controls the network? Can service be live on move-in day? When something breaks at night, does the resident reach a person or a queue? And how does the arrangement flow through to revenue and operating cost on the property?
Providers who answer these directly are worth a conversation. A provider who deflects has already told the owner something useful about how the relationship will go.
Deciding on purpose
Every property already has a telecom strategy, even if nobody chose it.
As chairman of Elauwit Connection, I watch this market from the operator side, and my view is that connectivity belongs on the same footing as roofing and insurance: a standing item in the capital plan with a named owner and a review date.
Residents have already decided that internet is a utility. Owners who make the same decision and act on it will find that the conversation about NOI and asset value follows from there.
