Dive Brief:
- In an announcement billed as giving “customers greater choice,” Realpage and Funnel are partnering to integrate Realpage’s screening, payments, pricing and availability capabilities into Funnel's application workflow, according to a press release shared with Multifamily Dive on Tuesday.
- Funnel, a front-office-only artificial intelligence platform, brings renter-facing workflows together from inquiry through renewal, according to its website. Realpage, which provides screening and payments solutions, also offers its own front-office platform.
- The Funnel partnership is the second recent development involving Realpage integrations with third-party applications. Last week, the Thoma Bravo-backed company paused new integrations with EliseAI while it reviews concerns about the firm’s conduct and obligations under the Realpage Exchange agreement.
Dive Insight:
In today’s announcement, Realpage and Funnel said the partnership would give operators more control of the renter experience and “the freedom to build the technology stack that works best for their business.”
Tyler Christiansen, CEO of Funnel, said the Realpage partnership is part of Funnel Fabric, “which orchestrates your teams, AI, and external tools across the renter journey,” in the release.
“The future of multifamily will be built by best-in-class platforms working together to give multifamily operators interoperability in their tech stack,” Christiansen said.
Funnel doesn’t offer a traditional property management system with accounting functions; rather, it manages the renter-facing process from lead capture through lease execution. Realpage's screening, payments, pricing and availability capabilities will serve as the source of truth in Funnel's application workflow.
“In the AI world, you have to have a source of truth,” technology consultant Josh Siddon told Multifamily Dive. “You've got to be able to have one place to manage the source of truth because all that data never matches up 100%.”
Realpage President and CEO Dirk Wakeham told Multifamily Dive that the agreement with Funnel has been in the works for more than three months.
“Several of our top 10 customers are Funnel customers,” he said. “They pioneered the centralization capabilities where these large owner-operators can centralize a lot of their resident service functions. Their platform is simply better at that than ours is right now.”
Wakeham said customers were asking for the ability to use Funnel and Realpage’s products together. Richardson, Texas-based Realpage also has a formal agreement with Conservice, which competes with its utility billing system, according to Wakeham.
Realpage said in the release that it supports a broad integration ecosystem, including more than 800 integrated applications and nearly one billion API transactions each month. The firm vets and certifies third-party applications before they connect, according to the notice sent to customers last week.
Partners “test in a sandbox before they touch live data, and their agreements define exactly what they can access and how they use it,” Realpage said in the notice about EliseAI.
Realpage’s integration framework helps customers keep their data secure and prevents it from ending up on the dark web or being used to train AI models, according to Wakeham.
“These systems store highly sensitive information,” Wakeham said. “You’ve got paycheck stubs and Social Security numbers and credit reports. We have to protect our customers from this data breach and data infiltration.”
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