Blueprint 2026 Sessions: The Seven That Show Where Multifamily AI Buying Is Headed

The seven Blueprint 2026 sessions worth your time run September 22 to 24 in Las Vegas, and they share one theme: AI is now a cost, consolidation and ownership question, not a capability question. Start with "What We Deleted This Year" (Tuesday, 12:45pm, Palazzo C), which is about retiring tools rather than adding them.

A conference agenda is a leading indicator. Not of what an industry is doing, but of what it has finally admitted it is worried about.

Read Blueprint 2026 that way and the shift is hard to miss. Of the seven sessions below, not one names an AI capability. Four name money: value, dollars, ROI, NOI. One names subtraction. One names owning the whole chain. One names teaching a system your own property data. Zero name a feature. That distribution is the story.

The seven sessions, at a glance

Bookmark this table. It is the whole guide on one screen, and the last column is the part worth having in your pocket when you sit down.

When and where	Session	Speakers	The one question to ask in the room
Tue 22 12:45 to 1:20 Palazzo C, Track 2	What We Deleted This Year	Chelsea Kneeland, Multifamily Insiders Carol Enoch, Bridge Partners Dalia Kalgreen, Unified Residential Steve Boyack, JVM Realty Devang Patel, Morgan Properties	What did you delete that you had championed yourself?
Tue 22 1:25 to 2:00 Palazzo D, Track 1	Underwritten: How to Value Technology in SFR	Reshma Block, Compass Consulting Joe Polverari, Pure HomeRiver Mahesh Shetty, ILE Homes CJ Halabi, Pretium	How do you underwrite a platform that has not shipped its roadmap yet?
Tue 22 3:15 to 3:50 Palazzo C, Track 2	From Data to Dollars	Melissa Fagan, RET Ventures Bobbi Steward, Revyse Danny Bin, Principal Asset Management Scott Pechersky, ECL Prop Solutions	What share of the insights your systems generate is ever acted on?
Tue 22 3:50 to 4:25 Palazzo C, Track 2	AI in Action: Turning Operational Data into Real ROI	Mariana Estrada, RPM Living Jameson Hartman, RET Ventures Paul Seifert, Continental Sorin Michnea, SuiteSpot	What ROI did you expect and not get?
Wed 23 9:30 to 9:50 Marcello, Main Stage	The Vertically Integrated Bet	Christopher Yip, RET Ventures Steven DeFrancis, Cortland	What would you not integrate?
Wed 23 2:00 to 2:10 Palazzo D, Track 1	Teaching AI What the Property Actually Looks Like	Saharsh Chordia, Cortland	What did the model get wrong before it was taught?
Wed 23 2:00 to 2:35 Palazzo C, Track 2	What Does "AI-First" Have to Do With Multifamily NOI?	Dom Beveridge, 20for20 Douglas Pearce, Waterton Aaron Ross, Birge & Held Jeremy Voigtmann, Harbor Group	What changed about how work is assigned, not about your software?

Three things to plan around

Tuesday afternoon is one block, not two sessions. From Data to Dollars and AI in Action run back to back in Palazzo C. Take a seat at 3:10 and stay in it until 4:25. No room change, no gap.

Tuesday lunchtime is a five-minute turnaround. What We Deleted ends 1:20 in Palazzo C, Underwritten starts 1:25 in Palazzo D. Doable if you sit near an aisle and do not stop to talk on the way out.

Wednesday at 2:00 you have to choose, but you can partly cheat. Both sessions start at once in different rooms. Teaching AI runs only ten minutes, so you can take it in full and walk to Palazzo C, at the cost of missing the opening of the NOI panel. Technical, take the ten minutes and walk. Commercial, stay put.

Why each session earns its slot

"What We Deleted This Year": which Blueprint 2026 session covers retiring software and consolidating platforms?

Tuesday 22 September · 12:45pm to 1:20pm · Track 2 · Palazzo C

Speakers

• Chelsea Kneeland, Innovation Insider, Multifamily Insiders
• Carol Enoch, Asset Manager, Bridge Partners
• Dalia Kalgreen, VP, Unified Residential
• Steve Boyack, Chief Operating Officer, JVM Realty
• Devang Patel, SVP, Head of Technology, Morgan Properties

This is the single most important session on the agenda, and it is on at lunchtime on day one, which tells you the industry has not yet worked out how important it is.

The framing in the official description is unusually direct. For years the industry focused on adding technology. Leading owners are now asking what they can eliminate: retiring legacy software, consolidating platforms, reducing logins, cutting costs, and building internal solutions instead of buying another product. That last clause is the one to sit with. It is a build-versus-buy statement made by owners, on the record, on a main-track stage.

What makes it credible is the composition of the panel. An asset manager, a chief operating officer, a head of technology and a residential leader are four different accountabilities, and they usually disagree about software. An asset manager cares what the line item does to the model. A COO cares what a rollout does to the field. A head of technology cares what the integration debt looks like in three years. When four seats that normally pull in different directions are booked into one room under the word "deleted", the disagreement has already been resolved somewhere, and this session is where it becomes public.

The question to ask in the room: ask them what they deleted that they had championed themselves. Anyone can retire an inherited tool. The interesting number is how many of the things they switched off were things they had personally signed for, and what it cost politically to admit it.

"Underwritten: How to Value Technology in SFR": how do you put a value on technology in single-family rental?

Tuesday 22 September · 1:25pm to 2:00pm · Track 1 · Palazzo D (SFR/BTR track)

Speakers

• Reshma Block, Principal & Founder, Compass Consulting
• Joe Polverari, Co-Founder & CEO, Pure HomeRiver Property Management
• Mahesh Shetty, CEO, ILE Homes
• CJ Halabi, Managing Director and the Head of Digital Product, AI & Business Innovation, Pretium

Sitting on the single-family track means most multifamily attendees will skip it. That is a mistake, because single-family rental is where the technology valuation question gets asked most honestly.

The reason is structural. Scattered-site portfolios cannot hide a bad technology decision behind on-site staffing the way a dense multifamily asset can. If your systems are poor across six thousand homes in nine markets, there is no property manager standing in a leasing office absorbing the difference. The cost surfaces immediately. So single-family buyers were forced into rigor about what a platform is actually worth earlier than the rest of the industry, and the word in the title is "Underwritten", not "evaluated". That is a specific claim: that technology now shows up in the model, defended, rather than in an operating expense line nobody interrogates.

The mix of seats matters again. Two chief executives, a founder-principal and a managing director whose remit explicitly spans digital product, AI and business innovation. That is a valuation conversation, not a product conversation.

The question to ask in the room: ask how they underwrite a platform that has not shipped its full roadmap yet. Every honest answer to that question is really an answer about how much they trust the vendor, and it is worth hearing said out loud.

"From Data to Dollars": how do you turn operational insight into value you can actually bank?

Tuesday 22 September · 3:15pm to 3:50pm · Track 2 · Palazzo C

Speakers

• Melissa Fagan, Vice President, RET Ventures
• Bobbi Steward, CEO, Revyse
• Danny Bin, Principal Asset Management, Head of Private Market IT
• Scott Pechersky, Founder, ECL Prop Solutions

The word doing the work in this title is "Immediate". Not eventual, not at scale, not in year two. The industry has spent a decade building dashboards that produce insight nobody acts on, and the honest version of that failure is that an insight which does not change what somebody does on Thursday morning is a cost, not an asset.

Notice the venture seat on the panel. Capital allocators sit on the other side of this question from buyers, and they see the pattern across a portfolio of companies rather than one estate. When investors and buyers are put on the same stage to argue about the gap between insight and value, you get a better conversation than either group has on its own, because the investor knows which claims did not survive contact with a real portfolio.

The question to ask in the room: ask what percentage of the insights their systems generate are ever acted on. Almost nobody measures this. The people who do measure it are the people worth listening to.

"AI in Action": how do you get real ROI from operational data?

Tuesday 22 September · 3:50pm to 4:25pm · Track 2 · Palazzo C

Speakers

• Mariana Estrada, Chief Strategy Officer, RPM Living
• Jameson Hartman, Industry Principal, RET Ventures
• Paul Seifert, EVP Operations, Chief Legal Officer, Continental
• Sorin Michnea, CTO, SuiteSpot

This runs immediately after the previous session, in the same room, and the pairing is deliberate enough that I would treat the two as one ninety-minute block rather than two sessions.

The seat worth watching is the combined operations and legal role. Those two accountabilities are rarely held by one person, and when they are, the AI conversation gets sharper, because the same individual owns both the upside of moving faster and the exposure of getting it wrong. Most ROI panels are staffed entirely by people who own only the upside. This one is not.

The word "Real" in the title is doing defensive work. It concedes that a lot of the ROI claimed in this category over the past three years was not real, and it invites the panel to say why. That concession is progress.

The question to ask in the room: ask them to describe the ROI they expected and did not get. The delta between the business case and the outcome is the most useful number in the room, and it is the one almost never published.

"The Vertically Integrated Bet": is vertical integration the answer to a fragmented resident experience?

Wednesday 23 September · 9:30am to 9:50am · Main Stage · Marcello Ballroom

Speakers

• Christopher Yip, Partner & Managing Director, RET Ventures
• Steven DeFrancis, Founder & CEO, Cortland

Twenty minutes, main stage, two people. That format is a signal on its own. Main-stage slots that short are booked when the organizers believe a single argument is worth hearing without a panel diluting it.

The word in the title is "Bet", which is more honest than most main-stage framing. Vertical integration is a capital-structure decision before it is a resident-experience decision, and "wall to wall" is a claim about owning the whole chain rather than assembling it from vendors. Whether or not you think that bet is right for your own balance sheet, it is the same question as the deletion session asked from the opposite direction. One asks what you can stop buying. This one asks what you should own outright.

If you attend only one session on this list, and you sit on the investment side rather than the running-the-portfolio side, make it this one.

The question to ask in the room: if there is audience question time in twenty minutes, ask what they would not integrate. The boundary of the bet is more instructive than the bet.

"Teaching AI What the Property Actually Looks Like": how do you teach AI your own property data?

Wednesday 23 September · 2:00pm to 2:10pm · Track 1 · Palazzo D

Speaker

• Saharsh Chordia, Vice President, Strategy and Analytics, Cortland

Ten minutes, one speaker. It is the shortest thing on this list and, for anyone technical, possibly the most interesting.

Almost every AI conversation in this industry assumes the model arrives already knowing what a property is. It does not. A model that has never seen your unit mix, your amenity naming, your maintenance categories or the way your teams actually describe a problem in free text will produce answers that are fluent and wrong. Closing that gap is not a procurement exercise. It is the work of teaching a system your own context, and whoever does that work ends up owning the resulting capability.

That is the "who builds it" leg of the agenda's argument, and it is the leg most buyers have not thought about yet. If a vendor teaches its model using your data and the capability stays theirs, you have funded someone else's product. If you teach it and the capability stays yours, you have built an asset. The session title is about property data. The subtext is ownership.

The question to ask in the room: ask what the model got wrong before it was taught, and what the teaching actually consisted of. Specifics here separate real work from a slide.

"What Does 'AI-First' Have to Do With Multifamily NOI?": does an AI-first operating model move NOI?

Wednesday 23 September · 2:00pm to 2:35pm · Track 2 · Palazzo C

Speakers

• Dom Beveridge, Founder, 20for20
• Douglas Pearce, EVP, IT, Waterton
• Aaron Ross, President, Birge & Held
• Jeremy Voigtmann, Managing Director, Harbor Group

The title is phrased as a challenge rather than a claim, and the quotation marks around "AI-First" are not accidental. They put the term itself on trial, which is the right instinct. "AI-first" has been used loosely enough over the past two years that it now needs defending before it can be used.

The panel is built to test it. A president, a managing director, an EVP of IT and an independent industry analyst is a combination that will not let a vague answer stand. And the connection the title proposes is the hard one: not whether AI is useful, but whether an operating model organized around it produces a different NOI than one that is not. Those are genuinely different questions. Plenty of companies have useful AI and an unchanged operating model, which is precisely why their NOI looks the same as it did before.

The question to ask in the room: ask what they changed about how work is assigned, not what they changed about their software. An operating model that has not changed who does what has not changed.

What this agenda tells you about how AI gets bought next year

The 2024 pattern was additive. Find a discrete problem, buy a tool aimed at it, integrate it, repeat. It produced real wins, and it produced the condition every one of these sessions is now responding to: a stack of narrow tools, each defensible on its own, that collectively cost more than anyone modeled and cannot answer a question spanning two of them.

The 2026 pattern, read off these titles, is subtractive and ownership-led. Establish what a technology is worth on the model before you buy it. Ask what it replaces, not only what it adds. Judge an insight by whether it changes what someone does. Decide deliberately what you own and what you rent. And treat teaching a system your own context as capability you are building, not a service you are consuming.

That is a portfolio-management argument that happens to have technology as its subject, which is why these panels are staffed with asset managers, presidents and chief operating officers rather than product leads. If you want the longer version of two of these threads, we have written them up separately: the structural case for an AI platform versus point solutions in multifamily, and a practical framework for how to evaluate an enterprise AI platform for real estate that covers the underwriting and build-versus-buy questions sessions two and one put on stage.

The useful thing about going to Blueprint with this frame is that it changes what you do on the exhibition floor. If your list of questions is "what does it do", you will have thirty pleasant conversations and remember none of them. If your list is "what does this replace, what does it cost fully loaded, and who owns the capability once my data has taught it", you will have four difficult conversations and come home with something you can take to your investment committee.

The full programme is on the Blueprint agenda.

If the deletion question is the one you leave Vegas with, start with the two pieces linked above and bring the answer to your next investment committee rather than your next demo.

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