Park Associates, along with Xfinity Communities, recently conducted a big survey of multi-dwelling tenant landlords to explore the issue of offering WiFi to tenants. This differs from offering broadband inside of apartments or condominiums units and explored the issues associated with offering WiFi in community spaces or across an entire property. You can download the full whitepaper here. The conclusion of the study was not surprising – tenants like access to WiFi, but many building owners are reluctant to tackle it for various reasons.
The report notes that there are 29 million apartments and almost 10 million condos in the U.S., so there is a huge potential market for ubiquitous WiFi.
One part of the survey asked residents to rate the factors that are important for choosing an MDU. The most important attribute was good soundproofing, but broadband was number two. Broadband was more important than covered parking, a community pool, availability of office space, an on-site gym, or electric vehicle charging stations. 54% of apartment tenants and 61% of condo tenants said that low-cost broadband was important, and just slightly less wanted broadband that was available immediately after moving in. There was interest in having more than one ISP (40% and 53%) and having gigabit speeds (35% and 48%). The demand was less for ubiquitous WiFi, with the importance of WiFi in common areas at 32% and 52% and the ability to roam on WiFi at 29% and 49%.
The surveys of building owners uncovered some important trends. Landlords reported a lot of reasons to want ubiquitous WiFi that are unrelated to providing WiFi for tenants. A lot of landlords are now using smart technology throughout a building to manage a range of devices such as temperature controls, security cameras, security access, and monitoring devices like water leak detectors. Landlords operating multi-story apartment buildings noted that they can get a substantial discount on insurance rates if they have reliable leak detectors in place, since a water leak can be devastating in a multi-story building.
Building owners reported a huge difference in dealing with WiFi and broadband in newer buildings versus those that are more than ten years old. 82% of landlords reported having trouble maintaining device connectivity in older buildings compared with only 13% of new buildings. 77% of landlords reported having trouble connecting to the Internet in older buildings versus 19% in new buildings. These differences must stem from having new buildings that were prewired with fiber and designed with WiFi in mind compared to older buildings where this is an add-on.
Landlords that don’t offer WiFi to residents claimed a number of reasons for not doing so. 69% said that managing WiFi is a hassle. 64% said it costs too much. 53% said that residents don’t want to share a WiFi connection that is available to other tenants. 50% said that WiFi is not reliable. Any ISP or vendor that wants to sell a WiFi solution to landlords should be prepared to address these reservations.
Another issue noted by landlords is that they expect that any technology solution will last at least ten years. That’s been a problem in recent years as WiFi routers having improved dramatically year after year as modem technology gets better and as we see new WiFi standards.
Landlords also expressed a lot of concerns about smart home devices. They want devices that automatically work with existing administrative systems. They are always leery about bringing in different brands for different applications. They are naturally concerned with the cost of smart home devices. There is a lot of concern about the data security practices of smart device makers.
For a while I was a landlord who put in shared wifi for my tenants and my conclusion was that it certainly wasn’t worth the trouble. All complaints and little net profit.
Internet is already commodified so it wouldn’t be a slam dunk that there’s a huge advantage for being a middle person (the landlord). If there was some service that did the maintenance and operation that’s going to cut into any financial benefit for the landlord.
The landlord doing maintenance and operation? With the contemporary system that has, probably, the most opaque moving parts this side of chatgpt? Probably not fodder for a great Harvard Business School case study.
What would make sense might be some kind of MDU bandwidth coop where somebody buys a fiber connection, sets up a router in the basement, and runs wires to every apartment where the tenants manage their own damn wifi box.
I’ll push back on the tradeoff of cutting into financial benefit. There is a huge and growing market for this where a Managed Service Provider handles all operational activities, even supporting integration into the property owner’s billing system. The market speaks for itself, the financial benefit is definitely lucrative enough.
yeah, I don’t think this is great for the property management to get into, they should hire it out to somebody that does this.
The main benefits is that you can charge more for rent because connectivity is included, as well as having a planned wifi system dramatically reduces wifi noise and so increases typical performance.
put a half decent QoE setup at the head end and most people will have a better, more consistent experience.
Well, we’ll see. My main points are, (a) it’s not that expensive to get broadband for yourself –fully commodified– which makes it hard to charge a premium to supply it and (b) it’s a total pita to deal with they myriad problems and it’ll be harder to ditch service and hide behind a FAQ if you’re the rental agency… charging a premium.
Sanity check: what would *you* pay over a normal cable / fiber subscription because your landlord assured you it was going to be built in and a really high quality experience, much better than you could get for yourself?
I would actually argue that it’s harder to get resellable broadband that you suggest. Typical residential services would put this sort of thing as a clear ToS violation and if it caught on would cause a lot of problems. A few here and there slips through the cracks or doesn’t raise alarm bells, but losing dozens of subscribers in an MDU to a single service in the office will.
Getting resellable fiber to many MDUs is pretty tough. This problem is far from solved.
Fully managed bulk-connected Wi-Fi can be far,far less expensive to tenants than retail direct subscriptions and deliver higher performance along with increased NOI for property owners. There are many excellent MSPs that do this with very high customer satisfaction scores.
I do ‘basically’ agree, but some of the cost savings will be come an issue if it becomes more popular. The spectrums and comcasts of the world wont be allowing resale and these things slipping through the cracks wont last. That means more premium services need brought in to make this model viable on the upstream.