Community Engagement Apps for Property Managers

Community engagement apps are what a resident-services lead buys when the goal is residents who know their neighbors, rather than residents who can pay rent on their phone. The product is a feed, an event calendar with RSVPs, polls and surveys, a neighbor marketplace, announcements from the office and, in most cases, amenity booking and maintenance requests bundled alongside. The vendors describe it as a “community social feed,” a “bulletin board for residents to post about events or items for sale,” or, on the HOA side, a way to “stay in constant communication with neighbors.” It is bought for renewals and reviews rather than operations, and a buyer judges it on three things: how many residents install and open the app, whether it duplicates the resident portal already inside the property management system, and who moderates what neighbors say to each other. This guide covers who buys it, how it differs from the operator’s branded resident app, the questions that decide the demo, the pricing where it is published, which PMS each vendor connects to, and where Livly, Flamingo, Zego, BuildingLink, ElevateOS, Cobu, Henri, TownSq, Condo Control, HOA Start and Alosant sit.

Who buys it

There are two buyers, and they rarely look at the same shortlist.

The first is a marketing or resident-services lead at an institutional multifamily operator. The scale claims tell you who the multifamily vendors are selling to. Flamingo claims 400,000 or more units. Cobu claims 200,000 or more apartment homes across 40 states and Canada, and nine of the top ten NMHC leaders. Livly claims 1,000 or more properties. ElevateOS positions for Class A, with a line on its resident-app page that people who live in luxury communities are looking for much more than a place to live. Henri sells to multifamily property management companies and opens its features page with an instruction to get rid of archaic electronic bulletin boards.

The operator voices in the research come from a Multifamily Dive article on centralization, and they explain why this buyer exists. Allyson McKay of Embrey Partners said the residents want to interact and want to know who is in the office, and that the on-site teams are the ones putting on the community events. Woody Stone of Cushman & Wakefield said that walking up to a kiosk, or not having a relationship with the people managing your home, is not for most residents. The engagement app is how an operator keeps that relationship visible while the leasing and payments side gets centralized.

The second buyer is an HOA or condo board, or the community association manager who runs many boards at once, and the need is a resident channel beyond email. BuildingLink claims more than 7,000 residential communities. TownSq claims 3 million or more active users and 1 million or more events created. Condo Control claims 3.5 million or more residents. HOA Start claims thousands of HOAs and sells to condos and POAs as well. Alosant is a narrower case, a white-label lifestyle app for master-planned communities, sold to land developers and the lifestyle directors they employ, and it claims 140 or more community partners.

One caveat before the evaluation questions. The research behind this guide came from vendor product and pricing pages, three vendor-authored roundup articles, and one trade article with operator quotes. No manager forum thread was available, so the buyer language is mostly vendor-framed and the ordering here reflects how vendors position themselves, not how managers rank them.

How this differs from the resident experience category

The resident experience and amenities guide covers the operator’s branded app: the one that wraps or replaces the PMS resident portal, carries the property’s name on the app store listing, and handles rent, packages, service requests and amenity booking. That category is judged on whether it can replace the portal.

This category is judged on whether residents talk to each other in it. The multifamily vendors here lead with the feed, the events, the interest groups and the rewards for showing up, and treat the operational features as table stakes. Cobu makes the split explicit. It calls itself PMS-agnostic and partners with resident apps such as Homebody, so it sits next to the operator’s app rather than replacing it. Flamingo says its app integrates with existing resident portals. The HOA vendors are a different product again: a board does not have a PMS portal to duplicate, so TownSq, Condo Control and HOA Start sell the announcement, forum, voting and event channel that email cannot be.

Livly, Zego and BuildingLink appear in both categories because their apps carry both jobs. Livly has a private Community Feed, full-service Resident Events run with Circuit Living and other event providers, and Polls and Trivia under what it calls Experiential Management. Zego Mobile Doorman has a community bulletin board for events and items for sale, live and virtual event RSVPs, and a Marketplace. BuildingLink has Announcements, an Event Calendar, Surveys and a bulletin board called Neighbornet where residents post items for sale, ask questions and share local recommendations.

How to evaluate it

Every pain point in the research turns into a demo question. Ask them in this order.

Start with adoption, because the MRI guide to selecting a resident engagement app leads with resident adoption rate, the percentage of eligible residents actively using the app, and the vendors answer with totals instead. BuildingLink publishes 3 million or more resident portal logins and 195,000 or more amenity reservations booked. TownSq publishes 3 million or more active users. Alosant publishes 500,000 or more active platform users and 40 million or more personalized interactions. None of those is a per-property adoption rate. Ask for one at a community that looks like yours, ask how an active resident is counted, and ask what adoption looked like in month one against month twelve.

Next, duplication. The Alosant roundup article puts the requirement as one login for everything, so residents do not feel fragmented. Ask the vendor to open your PMS portal next to its app and mark what the app does that the portal does not. Ask which direction the resident record flows and whether a move-out in the PMS closes the app account without manual data entry, which is the second criterion in the MRI guide. Ask whether the open APIs are available and documented, the MRI guide’s third criterion, and whether the features you want ship without custom development.

Then moderation. The Alosant article is the only fetched source that states the risk in full: without oversight, neighbor forums can spread misinformation, negativity or personal disputes. No vendor page we fetched describes moderation tooling. Ask who can remove a post, whether posts can be held for review, how resident-to-resident messaging is controlled, and what the office sees. Henri’s feature list includes a neighbors and dating feature and pet play dates, which is exactly the kind of thing a resident-services lead should ask about before a board or an owner does.

Then the renewal claim. Zego’s engagement page says residents are 47 percent more likely to renew their leases when they know seven or more people. Flamingo says residents earn rewards for attending events. Cobu’s homepage says three to four incremental signed leases cover its annual cost. Each of those is a claim about outcomes, and none of the fetched pages shows how it was measured. Ask which communities were compared, over what period, and what else changed.

Then event labor, because the app does not run the event. Embrey’s quote makes the point that the on-site team puts on the events. Livly’s answer is to resell full-service events through Circuit Living and other providers. Flamingo’s free tier is a Resident Event Marketplace. Alosant sells resident-led programming. Ask who plans, staffs and pays for the event calendar the app will display, and what the app does when nobody on site has time.

Then amenities. The Alosant article says many amenities were under-utilized simply because residents did not know about them, and every vendor in the category bundles amenity discovery or booking with the feed. Ask whether booking writes to the same reservation system your front desk uses, or creates a second calendar.

For an HOA buyer, add the channel questions. HOA Start’s mobile-app page says HOAs struggle with communication with residents, and its feature set is the answer: real-time announcements, emergency notifications, newsletters, discussion forums, event registration, online voting, a boardroom and a resident directory. Condo Control adds surveys with e-voting and proxy voting. TownSq adds pet registration, document archives and community websites. Ask how announcement delivery is tracked, whether voting meets your bylaws, and what a text message costs, because HOA Start bills text bundles at $25 per 1,000 and that line grows with every emergency notice.

Last, ask what else the vendor earns. Flamingo takes a revenue share on its concierge marketplace and renters insurance. ElevateOS sells a pet and lifestyle concierge. Zego runs Marketplace discounts. Cobu sells the resident activity itself as content for AI search visibility. None of that is disqualifying, and all of it changes who the vendor’s customer is. The MRI guide’s last piece of advice, to pilot before a long-term contract, applies to every vendor here.

Pricing models

Three vendors publish something. Flamingo publishes four tiers: a free tier that is the Resident Event Marketplace, Engage from $300, Attract & Retain from $900, and Simplify & Automate from $1,500, with the billing unit not stated on the page, a 12-month term that then runs month-to-month, and a revenue share on concierge and renters insurance. HOA Start publishes Professional at $39 per month, Premium at $49 per month and White-Glove at $149 per month, billed annually and priced by the number of homes in the neighborhood, with a native mobile app at $500 one-time on the lower tiers, text bundles at $25 per 1,000 and a free trial. Condo Control publishes three plans, Standard, Modern and Premium Living, tiered by unit count from 0 to 99 up to 500 or more for self-managed associations and 0 to 49 up to 5,000 or more for management companies, without figures; amenity booking, packages and the AI manager assistant are paid add-ons.

Everyone else is quote-based. Livly, Zego, BuildingLink, ElevateOS, Henri, TownSq and Alosant publish nothing. Cobu publishes no price and frames the cost as three to four incremental signed leases per year.

The shapes you will meet are per unit per month on the multifamily side, per community per month by home count on the HOA side, a one-time fee for a native app where the base product is a mobile web app, add-ons for amenity booking or packages or the assistant, message bundles for SMS, and a revenue share on whatever the vendor sells residents. When pricing is not published, ask for the per-unit or per-community rate, the monthly minimum, the contract term, which features are add-ons, and what the vendor earns from your residents. Then compute the annual figure at your unit count and again at the count you expect in two years.

Integrations

The property management system decides the multifamily shortlist. Every integration below carries a source URL and a last-verified date in the vendor record.

Yardi is listed by Livly, Zego, Flamingo, ElevateOS and Cobu. Entrata is listed by the same five. RealPage is listed by Livly, Zego, Flamingo and ElevateOS. ResMan is listed by Livly, Zego and ElevateOS. MRI is listed by Zego and ElevateOS. Rent Manager is listed by Zego and Flamingo. AppFolio is listed by Livly alone. Zego’s integrations are sourced from its resident benefits package page rather than its engagement page, so confirm they apply to Mobile Doorman in the demo. Flamingo’s resident-app page also names package systems and Dormakaba virtual keys and says it can integrate with almost any system. ElevateOS’s integrations page goes well beyond the PMS, with Salesforce, roughly twenty access-control brands, Quext, Arize, package lockers, HappyCo and SightPlan.

The other six name no PMS. Henri’s features page names Bilt Rewards and ButterflyMX. TownSq’s homepage shows partner logos for Yardi, CINC Systems, Caliber Software, ATG, VMS and CoreLogic without integration detail, which is a logo wall rather than a claim; ask what each connection does. Condo Control refers to the tools you use to run your business and names none. HOA Start refers to generic property management software, payments and access control, and offers an open API. BuildingLink and Alosant name nothing. For an HOA buyer the question is whether the app reads the owner roster from the association’s accounting system, and every one of these vendors should answer it with a named product.

The Yardi, Entrata, RealPage, MRI and Rent Manager integration pages list every category that connects to each system, which matters when the engagement decision runs alongside a payments or access control decision.

The alternative to all of them is the engagement module inside the PMS or the HOA suite. The MRI guide that leads the search results for this category promotes MRI Engage, the PMS’s own product, and the other large systems carry a portal with announcements and a feed. On the HOA side, the accounting-led suites carry a resident module of their own. Those are out of scope for this guide, and they are the thing every vendor here has to beat. The vendors in this category exist because the built-in module carries the PMS’s brand and stops at announcements, and because a board or an operator wants residents to open the app for a reason other than paying.

The vendors

The table below is generated from the vendor database and shows each vendor’s description, pricing model where published, PMS integrations and segments, each with its source and last-verified date.

Read the list as three groups. Flamingo, ElevateOS, Cobu and Henri are engagement-first multifamily apps, with Flamingo the only one that publishes tier pricing, ElevateOS aimed at Class A, Cobu sitting beside the operator’s existing app, and Henri the smallest and the most social. Livly, Zego and BuildingLink are resident apps whose community features earn them a row here and in the sibling category. TownSq, Condo Control, HOA Start and Alosant are the HOA and community side, from a $39-per-month mobile web app to a white-label lifestyle platform for master-planned communities. The full vendor list compares all eleven side by side.

What the Index shows

The Index does not measure community engagement apps yet, so the snapshot above carries no ranking and this guide claims none; its 25-prompt set is approved and the category is registered, so a ranking appears here after the first edition that runs it.

Inclusion criteria

The criteria block above states which vendors qualify: a vendor that sells a resident-facing community app, feed, event or announcement channel to property managers, boards or associations and has a verifiable source for its description and integrations is listed, and nothing else is.

If you sell into this category and want to know what the Index will measure once a prompt set is approved, AI visibility for proptech companies explains what we run each month, why the source map matters more than inline citations, and what the work costs.

Where to go next

If the app you are evaluating has to replace the PMS portal as well as run the feed, the resident experience and amenities guide is the page to read next, since it covers the portal comparison and the vendors that sell the whole branded app. If you manage single-family or small multifamily doors, the product you want is a resident benefits package rather than an engagement app, and the resident benefits platforms guide covers it. Amenity access, resident portal and the rest of the vocabulary are defined in the glossary. The rest of the stack a property management company buys is on the property management software hub, one category at a time.