One of the sessions I found most thought-provoking at Realcomm IBcon 2026 was Rightsizing Multifamily Technology: Marrying Commercial Discipline with Customer-First Innovation, presented by Thano Lambrinos, Senior Vice President of Digital Buildings at QuadReal Property Group.
What stood out wasn’t a new technology or product. It was the idea that, as residential communities become more connected, the conversation needs to shift from individual technologies to the infrastructure that supports them.
For years, multifamily technology has evolved one solution at a time. Resident internet, access control, security, package management, and building systems were often deployed independently, each solving a specific problem at the time. That approach worked because these systems largely operated on their own.
Today, however, they don’t.
The same infrastructure is now expected to support resident connectivity, building systems, security, IoT devices, operational technology, and the technologies residential communities will rely on in the years ahead. As these systems become increasingly interconnected, the digital backbone behind the building becomes just as important as the technologies themselves. That was my biggest takeaway from the session, and it’s a shift I believe more residential property owners should be thinking about.
The Backbone Is the Investment Most Residential Owners Never See
The most valuable layer of any building’s technology stack is rarely the most visible one. Resident-facing apps and smart devices get the attention. But without a reliable, converged infrastructure underneath them, none of it performs the way it should.
What changes when you get the backbone right? QuadReal ran the analysis themselves, comparing the economics of their existing US residential mix of bulk Wi-Fi and carrier-delivered services against converting to a managed PON approach. The result: a $3.27 million stabilized NOI increase per year, a 365% NOI lift versus the prior approach, a $59.5 million value lift at a 5.5% cap rate, and $0 CapEx required.
That managed PON approach is already deployed across QuadReal’s Canadian residential portfolio. At Immix Residences in Toronto, a ground-up luxury development, we built a single converged PON network to run elevators, security, access control, parking, smart lockers, and lighting alongside a neutral host fiber network delivering 1.5 Gbps to every suite, scalable to 3 Gbps. One network. Multiple outcomes. A new passive revenue stream for the owner.
At Discovery Pointe in Calgary, the starting point looked like most existing residential buildings: aging HVAC, a legacy network with no room to grow, and an incumbent ISP offering no revenue share and no fiber to the suite. A converged PON deployment changed all three. Future-proofing alone eliminated an estimated $30,000 to $40,000 in recurring upgrade costs for that building, on top of the NOI and revenue upside.
Both properties are part of a broader national rollout that has since grown well beyond the initial pilot.
A Different Way to Think About Residential Infrastructure
What commercial real estate figured out, and what we’re applying in residential, comes down to a simple shift: stop thinking about connectivity as a cost to manage and start thinking about it as infrastructure to own.
That means open architecture so systems can talk to each other without vendor lock-in. It means long-term thinking, because infrastructure built right should support a 15 to 20 year lifecycle, not a 5 to 6 year refresh cycle. And it means building for flexibility, so when the next generation of building technology arrives, your infrastructure can absorb it rather than fight it.
The residential owners getting this right aren’t waiting to see which vendor wins. They’re setting their own strategy first.
That’s the lesson commercial real estate learned. Residential is learning it now.
