Every Resident Buys Internet Every Month. None of It Touches Your P&L.
Why connectivity belongs on the revenue side of the multifamily underwriting model.
Here is a strange fact about the average apartment community.
There is a product that essentially every household in the building purchases, every single month, without exception, at a price comparable to a covered parking space. Nobody skips it. Nobody negotiates it down. It renews automatically, and it survives every recession.
And in most buildings, not one dollar of it appears anywhere in the owner's financials.
That is the structural oddity of how multifamily has historically handled internet service. The demand is universal and inelastic, the building is the delivery mechanism, and the revenue accrues entirely to a third party. Meanwhile, the owner absorbs the downside: the leasing objection when service is poor, the review that mentions dead spots in the gym, the maintenance calls, and the resident who spends move-in week waiting on an installation window.
A growing number of owners have decided that arrangement does not make sense. Here is the case, and the places where it goes wrong.
Start with what residents have already told you
This is not a speculative amenity. It is one of the most thoroughly measured preferences in the industry.
90% of renters were either interested in or would not rent without high-speed internet, placing it among the very highest-ranking apartment features in a study covering more than 80 features and amenities. Only air conditioning and an in-unit washer and dryer ranked higher.
Source: 2024 NMHC and Grace Hill Renter Preferences Survey, based on more than 172,000 renter responses
Two other findings from the same survey matter more than the headline number:
● Community-wide coverage is now a majority expectation. Interest in Wi-Fi that follows a resident from the unit through corridors, amenity spaces, garages, and outdoor areas rose from 54 percent in 2022 to 59 percent in 2024, with interest increasing across every income bracket.
● Pre-installed connectivity is climbing. Roughly 67 percent of respondents reported interest in pre-installed Wi-Fi, up from 62 percent two years earlier.
And a finding that should be uncomfortable for anyone relying on the incumbent provider: while a majority of renters said they were satisfied with their community's internet quality, a similar share reported that the service they currently have does not fully support their needs.
THE GAP WORTH NOTICING
Satisfied and adequately served are not the same thing. That gap is the opportunity.
The three ways it shows up in the model
1. Direct revenue
When the property owns the network and controls the billing relationship, connectivity becomes a lease charge like any other. It can be structured as a bundled utility, an itemized technology fee, or a base-speed-plus-premium-tier arrangement where remote workers and heavy streamers opt up on their own.
The economics of bulk purchasing are what make this work. A property buying bandwidth for hundreds of units procures it at a materially lower cost per door than any individual resident can, which is what creates room for a fee that is at or below what the resident would otherwise pay while still producing margin for the asset.
Be careful with the numbers here. Per-unit revenue figures circulating in this space vary widely and most of them come from vendors selling the service. Underwrite your own property with your own market's ISP pricing rather than a category average.
2. Operating efficiency
The second effect is quieter and easier to overlook. Under the incumbent model, on-site teams absorb a steady load of connectivity friction they cannot resolve: move-in scheduling, dead spots in amenity spaces, complaints about a service the property does not control. Under an owned-and-managed model, that support routes to a partner whose job it is.
Instant-on connectivity at move-in also removes one of the more irritating steps in a resident's first week, which is a small thing that shows up in reviews and renewal conversations more often than its size suggests.
3. Valuation
This is the part that changes the conversation with an investment committee, and it is simple arithmetic rather than a claim anyone needs to source.
Commercial multifamily is valued on capitalized NOI. Any recurring net income added to the property is multiplied by the inverse of the cap rate at disposition. At a 5.5 percent cap rate, every additional $100,000 of annual NOI corresponds to roughly $1.8 million of value. Run whatever per-door assumption your market actually supports through that relationship and the result is usually larger than people expect, because connectivity revenue is contractual, recurring, and does not decay.
KEEP THE DISCIPLINE
The arithmetic is reliable. The input is the thing to argue about.
Where this goes wrong
Owners who have had a bad experience with connectivity usually had one of these four experiences.
● The network was designed for a floor plan, not for density. Hundreds of devices competing in close proximity, through walls and floors that attenuate signal, is a different engineering problem than covering a house. A properly designed deployment starts with a site survey and coverage modeling, not with an access point count per corridor.
● The bulk agreement outlived its usefulness. Long-term agreements with auto-renewal provisions can lock a property into pricing and service levels that stopped being competitive years ago, and can complicate a sale. Read the term, the renewal mechanics, and the assignment language before signing anything.
● The vendor installed and disappeared. Hardware on a wall is not a service. The question to ask is who answers when a resident's connection fails during a work-from-home day, how fast, and whether that is a contractual commitment or a hope.
● The fee was not defensible. Residents will pay a technology fee when the value is visible: real speed, real coverage everywhere they go on the property, and service that works on day one. They react badly to a fee attached to the same experience they had before.
The attach opportunity most owners underuse
Once a property has a real network and an owner who controls it, the in-unit device conversation becomes much easier, and renter interest is already there. The same 2024 survey found majority interest in smart thermostats, keyless smart locks, and video doorbells, with renters attaching a willingness to pay to the features they consider essential.
Those devices also do operational work. Thermostats reduce vacant-unit energy waste. Leak sensors turn a catastrophic loss into a work order. Smart locks eliminate rekeying and make turns and vendor access dramatically simpler. The resident experiences an amenity. The operator gets a tool.
None of it functions on a network that was not built for it, which is why the sequencing matters: the infrastructure decision comes first, and everything else attaches to it.
THE SHORT VERSION
The only thing every resident buys, every month, at a predictable price.
In most properties, the owner captures none of it while absorbing all of the complaints.
Fixing that is not an amenity upgrade. It is a revenue line, an operating improvement, and a valuation input, and it is one of the few capital decisions in multifamily that touches all three at once.
Run the numbers on your property
GreenMarbles designs, deploys, and supports managed connectivity, in-unit smart technology, video monitoring, access control, and EV charging for multifamily, build-to-rent, and student housing communities nationwide, with U.S.-based support and a single accountable partner across the full lifecycle.
If you want to see what the connectivity model looks like on a specific asset or across a portfolio, we will survey the property and build the case with your numbers rather than a category average.
Andrew Gulick, PGA
Vice President, Commercial Services
andrew.gulick@greenmarbles.com
General inquiries: Sales@GreenMarbles.com
SOURCES
● National Multifamily Housing Council and Grace Hill, 2024 Renter Preferences Survey Report, including NMHC research analysis on renter connectivity preferences
● National Apartment Association and NMHC regulatory comment filings citing 2024 Renter Preferences Survey connectivity data
