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 from the office, check a service request, and pay rent, all 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, and 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, which PMS each vendor connects to, and where Livly, Venn, Amenify, Community Boss, BuildingLink, Zego and SmartRent sit in the category.

Who buys it

The buyer is an institutional multifamily operator or REIT, usually a marketing or resident-services lead at a portfolio of several thousand units, and 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, 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.

Below the REITs, the segment tags in the database split the category four ways. Livly tags institutional and small multifamily, and its integrations page has a line for operators that prefer not to integrate with a PMS at all, which tells you it sells into small portfolios that run on a spreadsheet and a bank portal. Community Boss tags apartments, HOAs and student housing, and 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 as a payments vendor whose Mobile Doorman app carries the resident experience and SmartRent as a smart-home vendor whose Resident App ships with the locks and hubs.

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 one confirmed option in the database, Livly. An operator on Buildium, Propertyware or Rentvine has none confirmed and should ask each vendor directly before booking a demo.

How to evaluate it

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

Start with what the PMS already does. 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, and 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.

Next, adoption, because it 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.

Then 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, because 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.

Then fragmentation, which 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 and 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.

Then 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.

Then amenities and parking enforcement, which is 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, how an HOA board sees the data, and 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.

Then 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, because a second ticketing system is a second place for a request to go stale.

Then 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, whether the community’s staff is expected to handle that complaint, and whether a service purchase counts toward the adoption figure the vendor quoted earlier.

Last, ownership. 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.

Pricing models

No vendor in this category publishes pricing in our database. Every record says the same thing: 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 and 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, though neither publishes a figure and Community Boss’s pricing page returned nothing when we fetched it.

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 integration to your PMS if it is billed separately. Then compute the annual figure at today’s unit count and at the count you expect in two years, and compare it with the cost of turning on the portal your PMS already ships.

Integrations

The property management system decides the shortlist, and the database records confirmed integrations for three of the seven 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.

The other four name no PMS. Venn’s homepage mentions Engrain’s SightMap, which is a site-mapping product rather than a PMS, and its integrations page did not resolve when we fetched it. Amenify’s homepage says it has major PMS integrations and names none. Community Boss names none, and its integrations page did not resolve either. 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, and the second is whether the answer changes for a community-association ledger.

By PMS, that puts Livly, Zego and SmartRent on Yardi, RealPage, Entrata and ResMan; Livly alone on AppFolio; and Zego alone on MRI and Rent Manager. The Yardi, RealPage, Entrata and ResMan integration pages list every category that connects to each system, which matters when the resident app decision runs alongside an access control or payments decision.

The alternative to all of them is the resident portal inside the PMS. RealPage markets its portal as LOFT, and 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 this session, 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, and because operators with a mixed PMS estate 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.

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 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. The full vendor list compares all seven side by side.

What the Index shows

The AI Shortlist Index does not measure this category yet, so the snapshot above shows no ranking and this guide claims none; the category will be added when a prompt set is approved.

Inclusion criteria

The criteria block above states which vendors qualify: a vendor that sells a resident-facing app, portal, amenity or service layer to property managers 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 you manage single-family or small multifamily doors, the product you are looking for is a resident benefits package rather than a branded app, and 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.