Resident Experience & Amenities for Property Managers

Resident experience and amenities software is the app a resident opens to book the pool, register a guest’s car, read an announcement, check a service request and pay rent. It all runs under the property’s brand rather than the property management system’s. The vendors describe it as an “all-in-one resident app,” a “resident hub,” or “one hub for teams, one branded experience for residents.”

In institutional multifamily it is the umbrella for what single-family managers call a resident benefits package. The buyer judges it on three things: how many residents use it, whether renewals move, and how much of it the property management system already does.

This guide covers who buys it, the questions that decide the demo, the pricing shapes and which PMS each vendor connects to. It also shows where Livly, Venn, Amenify, Community Boss, BuildingLink, Zego and SmartRent sit in the category.

Who buys resident experience software?

The buyer is an institutional multifamily operator or REIT, usually a marketing or resident-services lead at a portfolio of several thousand units. The purchase is often portfolio-wide rather than community by community. The clearest example in the research is Bozzuto, which is rolling out Venn under its own brand as myBozzuto across 120,000 or more units.

That is the shape of the deal at the top of the market. One branded app for every resident, the operator’s name on the app store listing, and the vendor’s name nowhere the resident can see it.

One caveat before the segments. The research behind this guide came from vendor product and integration pages, because manager forums and trade press turned up nothing on resident apps in the session. The ordering below reflects how vendors position themselves and the scale they claim, not how managers rank them.

Segments below the REITs

Below the REITs, the segment tags in the database split the category four ways. Livly tags institutional and small multifamily. Its integrations page has a line for operators that prefer not to integrate with a PMS at all.

That tells you it sells into small portfolios that run on a spreadsheet and a bank portal.

Community Boss tags apartments, HOAs and student housing. Its client list on the homepage runs from Associa to Cushman & Wakefield and Willow Bridge: an association manager, a commercial services firm and a multifamily operator in one sentence. BuildingLink is built, in its own words, for boards, property managers and staff of HOAs, condominiums, multifamily and co-ops, and its scale claim is 7,000 or more communities.

Zego and SmartRent arrive at the category from the side. Zego is a payments vendor whose Mobile Doorman app carries the resident experience, and SmartRent is a smart-home vendor whose Resident App ships with the locks and hubs.

The PMS narrows it first

The PMS narrows the field faster than the segment does. The confirmed integration lists cluster around Yardi, RealPage, Entrata and ResMan. An operator on AppFolio has two confirmed options in the database, Livly and Carson.

An operator on Buildium, Propertyware or Rentvine has none confirmed and should ask each vendor directly before booking a demo.

How do you evaluate a resident experience app?

The pain points in the research turn into demo questions. Ask them in this order, and ask the PMS rep the first one too.

What the PMS already does

Start there. RealPage’s own portal, marketed as LOFT, covers amenity, parking and storage reservations, payments, maintenance requests, a community feed, an AI resident assistant, loyalty rewards and move-in checklists. That is most of the category’s feature list before a third-party contract exists.

Ask each vendor to name, feature by feature, what its app does that the portal inside your PMS does not. Ask whether the answer is the same on Yardi’s RentCafe or Entrata’s portal as it is on RealPage. If the vendor’s answer is branding and a better interface, price that against the per-unit fee and decide whether it is worth it.

Adoption

Adoption is the number every vendor leads with. Venn’s site claims 98 percent app adoption. Ask how adoption is counted: downloads, accounts created, monthly active residents, or residents who paid rent in the app last month.

Those are four different numbers, and only the last two predict whether the app changes anything. Ask for the figure at a community that has been live for a year, not one that launched last quarter with a move-in incentive.

Renewals

Venn’s site claims a 4.3 percent renewal increase in six months. Ask what the comparison was, which communities, and what else changed in the same period. Renewal rates move with rent growth, staffing and the local market before they move with an app.

A vendor that has run a controlled comparison will say so; the rest offer a testimonial.

Fragmentation

Fragmentation is the problem Livly quantifies. Its homepage puts the cost of running rent, packages, amenities and messaging in separate systems at 15 to 20 percent of staff time per task. It claims $30,000 in annual savings per property.

Ask what tasks are in that estimate, what hourly rate it assumes, and whether the community that produced it replaced systems or added one.

If your PMS already handles rent and service requests, the saving shrinks to packages and amenities.

Packages and the front desk

BuildingLink’s site counts 4 million or more packages logged, and Livly claims a 20 percent time cut in package management. Ask what “logged” means at your buildings.

Does a staff member scan each carton, does the app read carrier notifications, does it talk to a locker system, and what does the resident see? At a high-rise with a front desk, this feature alone may justify the product. At a garden community with no desk, it may not apply.

Amenities and parking

Amenities and parking enforcement are Community Boss’s whole product. Its Parking Boss and Amenity Boss lines handle bookings, pool passes, guest parking and enforcement. Ask how a guest registers a car, what the tow or violation workflow looks like, and how an HOA board sees the data.

Ask whether the pool pass or the amenity booking has a capacity rule you control.

Dense communities and HOAs feel this more than a suburban garden site does.

Maintenance status

Zego’s Mobile Doorman page sells the promise that residents can submit and track requests and are never left in the dark. Ask whether the status the resident sees is read from the work order in the PMS or from a ticket that lives only in the app. A second ticketing system is a second place for a request to go stale.

Services and commerce

Amenify sells cleaning, handyman, grocery and food delivery through the resident app and is listed as a partner inside Livly. Ask who earns on each service, who the resident calls when a cleaner does not show, and whether the community’s staff is expected to handle that complaint. Ask whether a service purchase counts toward the adoption figure the vendor quoted earlier.

Who owns the residents

For a white-label app, ask who owns the app store listing, the push-notification tokens and the resident accounts if the contract ends, and what the export looks like. If the accounts cannot move, the switching cost at renewal is the whole resident base, and that belongs in the price you compare.

What does a resident experience app cost?

Almost no vendor in this category publishes pricing in our database. The exception is Flamingo, which lists a free Resident Event Marketplace and paid tiers from $300, $900 and $1,500 on a 12-month term, without stating the billing unit. Every other record says pricing is not published.

Ask for the per-unit and minimum figures, the contract term, and what the resident pays.

The shapes you will meet are four.

• Per unit per month is the base for a branded resident app, and it stacks on top of the PMS fee and any payments or smart-home contract you already carry.
• Resident-paid is the model behind Amenify’s credit packages, where the resident buys credits for services. The vendor notes it has more options for enterprise customers, which usually means the operator can subsidize or bundle.
• Bundled is how Zego and SmartRent arrive, with the resident app priced inside a payments or smart-home agreement. Ask for the app’s line item on its own so you can compare it with a standalone product.
• Per community is the shape to expect on the HOA and condo side, where BuildingLink and Community Boss sell to boards and association managers. BuildingLink publishes no figure, and Community Boss prices Parking Boss by unit count from $195 a month on its multifamily page.

Five numbers to get in writing

Whatever the shape, ask for five numbers in writing before the demo ends. The per-unit or per-community rate, the monthly minimum, the term, the resident’s cost if any, and the price of the PMS integration if it is billed separately.

Then compute the annual figure at today’s unit count and at the count you expect in two years. Compare it with the cost of turning on the portal your PMS already ships.

Which PMS platforms do resident apps integrate with?

The property management system decides the shortlist, and the database records confirmed integrations for most of the vendors. Livly lists Yardi, RealPage, Entrata, ResMan and AppFolio on its own integrations page, along with its own portal for operators that run without a PMS. Zego lists Yardi, MRI, Rent Manager, ResMan, Entrata and RealPage.

SmartRent lists Yardi, RealPage, Entrata and ResMan.

Two more name systems on their own pages.

Venn’s connectors page lists Yardi, RealPage, Entrata and Rent Manager. Community Boss’s parking integrations page names Entrata, RealPage and Yardi. That page covers its parking product, so ask whether amenity bookings sync the same way.

ElevateOS lists MRI, Yardi, Entrata, RealPage and ResMan, and Flamingo lists Yardi, RealPage, Entrata and Rent Manager. Carson lists Yardi, AppFolio, MRI, Entrata and RealPage, and Cobu lists Entrata and Yardi.

Amenify’s homepage says it has major PMS integrations and names none. BuildingLink refers to accounting, payment, package and access integrations without naming a property management system. For each of these, the first demo question is which PMS the vendor writes to today, in which direction, and with which fields.

The second is whether the answer changes for a community-association ledger.

By PMS

By PMS, the confirmed lists come out like this.

• Yardi, RealPage, Entrata and ResMan: Livly, Zego, SmartRent and ElevateOS.
• AppFolio: Livly and Carson.
• MRI: Zego, ElevateOS and Carson.
• Rent Manager: Zego, Venn and Flamingo.

The Yardi, RealPage, Entrata and ResMan integration pages list every category that connects to each system. That matters when the resident app decision runs alongside an access control or payments decision.

The portal inside the PMS

The alternative to all of them is the resident portal inside the PMS. RealPage markets its portal as LOFT. Its page lists amenity, parking and storage reservations, payments, maintenance requests, a community feed, an AI resident assistant, loyalty rewards and move-in checklists.

Buyers who know the RealPage product as ActiveBuilding should ask whether LOFT is the same product under a new name.

Yardi’s equivalent is RentCafe, and Entrata has its own resident portal. We did not verify either feature list, so pull each one up in the demo and ask the vendor to mark what its app adds. The third-party vendors in this category exist because the PMS portal carries the PMS’s brand and interface.

Operators with a mixed PMS estate also want one app across all of it.

Both are real reasons, and both carry a per-unit fee that the portal inside the PMS does not.

Who are the resident experience 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. Buyers replacing BuildingLink can start with the field set against BuildingLink.

Read the list as five groups.

• Livly and Venn are branded resident apps with a staff-side hub, the product that sits on the PMS and carries the operator’s name.
• Zego and SmartRent bundle a resident app with something the operator already buys from them, payments in Zego’s case and smart-home hardware in SmartRent’s.
• Amenify is the services and commerce layer that plugs into those apps rather than replacing them.
• Community Boss is the amenity booking and parking specialist for apartments and HOAs.
• BuildingLink is the portal for condos, co-ops, HOAs and the multifamily buildings that run with a front desk.

Newer records, ElevateOS, Flamingo, Cobu, VTS Activate Multifamily, Carson and Hello Alfred, are sorted by buyer on the BuildingLink alternatives page. The full vendor list compares every vendor side by side.

What does the AI Shortlist Index show for this category?

The snapshot above shows the current edition; these figures are from 2026-09. That edition holds 25 ChatGPT runs for this category, one per prompt, captured from the ChatGPT app on 3 October 2026.

Livly was named in 68% of runs, ElevateOS in 44%, Zego in 43% and BuildingLink in 42%; Flamingo and Cobu followed at 32% each. ChatGPT named 41 vendors from our database across the set, and 18 of them were named in 4% of runs.

Livly was the first vendor named on 7 prompts, including all 3 integration prompts, for Yardi, Entrata and RealPage. On the prompt asking which platforms large operators actually use, ChatGPT opened with Entrata’s Homebody and RealPage LOFT, which the Index does not rank. Bilt was the first ranked vendor it named.

Of the 191 citations in the category, livly.io was the most cited domain with 28, followed by gozego.com with 16. ChatGPT cited webpossible.com once in this category; WebPossible publishes the Index, so that citation is flagged in the source map.

Our reading is that much of the long tail comes from prompts that drift into neighboring categories, rather than from a large number of resident app vendors. Examples are access control vendors on the two comparison prompts and parking vendors on the amenity prompt. This is one run per prompt from one engine, so treat it as a first reading.

Which vendors does this page include?

The criteria block above states which vendors qualify. A vendor is listed if it sells a resident-facing app, portal, amenity or service layer to property managers or associations. It also needs a verifiable source for its description and integrations.

If you sell into this category and want to know how the Index measures it, AI visibility for proptech companies explains what we run each month. It also covers why the source map matters more than inline citations, and what the work costs.

Where to go next

If you manage single-family or small multifamily doors, the product you are looking for is a resident benefits package rather than a branded app. The resident benefits platforms guide covers that category and how the fee bills through the PMS. If SmartRent is on your list because of its locks rather than its app, the multifamily access control guide is where that comparison belongs.

Amenity access, package room and resident benefits package are defined in the glossary. The rest of the stack a multifamily operator buys is on the property management software hub, one category at a time.