The Belle of the Ball: Who Is Buying the Managers

Who Is Buying the Managers: fee managers running 630,000 units changed owners 2023 to 2026; the top 50 managers' share of US apartments rose from 15.9% to 23.7%; jobs at property management firms up 29% since 2016.

Since the start of 2023, third-party apartment managers running about 630,000 units have changed owners, and the buyers included a Canadian pension plan, a residential investment manager, three private equity firms and a life insurer. Pretium bought BH. Alpine Investors built Oakline out of four managers in nine months. In July, Sun Life paid $350 million for Bell Partners. The companies that run apartments for other people have become the asset the capital wants. The people who run them are what the capital is paying for.

The short version

  • Fee managers running about 630,000 units changed owners between 2023 and 2026, equivalent to about one in eight of the units on NMHC's top 50 list.

  • The top 50 managers now run 23.7% of all US apartments, up from 15.9% in 2019. On the same list, the fee managers grew 11.4% last year against 4.8% for the owner-operators.

  • Jobs at property management firms are up 29% since 2016. Jobs at owners grew 6.5%. The work moved.

  • The buyers say why in their own words: fees that recur with the rent, a market with thousands of small firms, and economies of scale that centralization has made real for the first time.

Who bought

Three kinds of capital have arrived in three years. In February 2023, Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, through Cadillac Fairview, bought the rest of Lincoln Property Company's residential business, 180,000 units and more than 4,500 people, and renamed it Willow Bridge that October. That July, The RMR Group paid $80 million plus an earnout for CARROLL, 28,000 units. RMR put the price at 11.4 to 13.3 times projected 2024 recurring EBITDA before synergies, the one multiple in this story that was disclosed. In May 2024, Pretium, a residential investment manager, closed on BH Management, about 114,000 units and 2,800 employees. Pretium's founder called it "a natural adjacency to Pretium's residential ecosystem."

Table of announced ownership changes at third-party multifamily managers, 2023 to 2026: Willow Bridge, CARROLL, BH Management, Proper, Village Green, Quarterra and RKW, Oakline, Bell Partners, Milhaus and SRG; about 630,000 units in all.

That June, TriSpan committed up to $100 million to Proper, a roll-up that has since bought six operators, reached about 20,000 units and renamed itself Collective Residential. In September 2024, CenterOak Partners carved Village Green, more than 40,000 units, out of its parent. Then the pace picked up. Alpine Investors launched Oakline Properties in September 2025 with Cirrus Asset Management and added Drucker + Falk, Four Star and ResidentialOne by June, more than 80,000 units in all. Alpine's founder said as much in the launch release: "We see tremendous opportunity in the property management space." In March 2026, Sun Life agreed to buy Bell Partners, about 70,000 units and 1,800 people, for US$350 million, and closed in July. The buyer wanted "vertically integrated property management capabilities."

Managers have been combining with managers as well, and two of those are in the count. Alfred and Lennar's Quarterra merged RKW Residential and Quarterra Living, 52,000 units, in June 2025, and Milhaus took on SRG Residential's 46,000 units in a merger completed this July. Asset Living, now second in the country, went from 288,665 units to 446,427 in a year, the largest one-year climb on the list. Transactions no party has confirmed are left out of the count altogether.

Set the count against the rest of the property business and the fee managers stand out. By our tally of announced platform deals since 2023, multifamily management drew 15 of them, against 12 in homeowner-association management, six among senior living operators, three in single-family rental management and three in commercial property management. Capital still spends far more buying apartments outright, about $18 billion in the same period, led by Blackstone's purchase of AIR Communities. But among the businesses that run property for other people, the apartment managers were the ones getting asked to dance.

Why the managers

The money is arriving at a business that has been consolidating for a decade. NMHC's 50 largest managers ran 3.0 million units in 2016 and 5.25 million on January 1, 2026, a 72% increase (NMHC Top 50, 2026). The national stock, about 23 million apartments, grows by a few hundred thousand units a year. The top ten doubled. The top 50's share of all US apartments went from 15.9% in 2019 to 23.7% this year. Greystar became the first manager past one million units.

Line chart of units managed by NMHC's 50 largest managers and by the top ten, 2016 to 2026: top 50 from 3.0 to 5.3 million, top ten from 1.3 to 2.8 million.

And still the business is fragmented, which is the point. About half of properties with 50 or more units are run by a management company, compared with 46% in 2015, within the survey's wide margins, and more than four in five are professionally managed (Census Rental Housing Finance Survey, 2024). Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies counted 11,919 management companies running properties of that size, and 40% of them manage a single property (JCHS, June 2026). The 107 companies that manage 100 or more properties run 34% of the units. Greystar, at a million units, has about 4% of the country. Roland Berger called residential property management "a next-generation private equity platform play" and "a rare window for private equity to build market leaders from the ground up" (Roland Berger, July 2026). The same report names Greystar, Asset Living, Willow Bridge and RPM as the multifamily leaders.

The list also answers the obvious objection, which is that list totals measure mergers, not demand. Take 49 of the 50 largest, the ones that reported units in both 2025 and 2026. The 30 that are not also on NMHC's owners list, the fee managers, grew 11.4%. Take Asset Living out and they still grew 6.2%. The 19 owner-operators on the same list grew 4.8%. Thirty-eight of the 49 added units. Two caveats belong next to that. Owner-operators grow by buying properties, which 2025 cap rates discouraged, while fee managers grow by winning contracts, so the gap measures the capital markets as well as demand. And 11 of the 49 shrank, including the two largest corporate- or fund-owned platforms, BH and Cushman & Wakefield, a reminder that a sale buys a platform, not the contracts on it.

Bar chart of one-year change in units managed, January 2025 to January 2026, for the 49 NMHC top managers reporting both years: fee managers +11.4%, fee managers excluding Asset Living +6.2%, all 49 firms +8.5%, owner-operators +4.8%.

The fee is the first reason the buyers give. A manager earns a percentage of what the property collects, so revenue moves with rent. NexPoint Residential's 10-K puts its fee to BH at "approximately 3% of the monthly gross income" collected, plus construction supervision and other fees (NexPoint, February 2026). NMHC's survey of 2,573 properties put management fees at 3.1% of gross potential rent, a different base (NMHC, 2025). The attraction, in Roland Berger's words, is a business that earns "a percentage of rental income" without owning the real estate.

Scale is the second reason, and it is newer. For most of the industry's history, a manager with 100,000 units ran 100,000 units' worth of leasing offices. Centralization changed the math. BH's chief executive said at the Pretium deal that the plan was to "further invest in our centralized services platform." Greystar's Mike Clow described the advantage the same way: "I have economies of scale, which allows me to be more effective" (Multifamily Dive, 2024). Brad Hargreaves of Thesis Driven put the shift in one line: centralization and automation are "giving multifamily managers true economies of scale for the first time" (Thesis Driven, January 2026).

Owners are the third reason. Some of them keep handing the work over. Wood Partners moved 38,000 units to Greystar in February 2024 and Grand Peaks moved nearly 11,000 in September 2025. H&R REIT announced in January that it would move Lantower's portfolio, 7,895 units, to Greystar, telling shareholders it expected about US$5 million a year in savings (H&R REIT, January 2026; Greystar, February 2026). Security Properties exited management this year and sent about half its portfolio to Bozzuto. Among the 25 largest managers, the Harvard study found, 81% of properties are owned and managed by different companies.

The work moved

The jobs tell the same story the deal table does. Employment at residential property management firms rose from 424,084 in 2016 to 548,505 in 2025, up 29%, while employment at owners of residential buildings grew 6.5%, from 349,355 to 372,237 (BLS QCEW, annual averages). Average weekly pay at the managers went from $850 to $1,284. Part of that is owners getting leaner through centralization, which our last issue covered. Part of it is the work moving. For a growing share of the people who lease, maintain and run apartments, the employer of record is a fee manager, and more often each year, the fee manager answers to a fund.

Line chart of US employment indexed to 2016: residential property management firms up 29% by 2025, owners of residential buildings up 6.5%.

What the money has not fixed

Fees have compressed. A 200-unit property paid close to 5% twenty years ago, 4% ten years ago and 3% by 2019, in one executive's recollection (Multi-Housing News, 2019). Thesis Driven asked last November whether AI would drive fees toward zero. The buyers' answer is scale, which is why every release above mentions a platform.

Some owners have gone the other way. Capital Square took 14,000 owned units in-house, and Lakeland Capital launched an in-house manager in 2025. Roland Berger itself notes that the number of investments "remains modest compared with other business services sectors." The ball has barely begun.

What this means for hiring

For a fee manager, a buyer's model now prices the people. Centralized services, the regional bench, the site leads who keep residents through a change of ownership, the share of contracts that survive a sale. Each is a line in the underwriting. Each is a hiring decision made years before the deal. The contracts themselves are thin protection. Two Bell Partners agreements in Bluerock's SEC filings, dated 2012 and 2015, pay 3 to 3.5% of gross receipts and can be ended without cause on 30 to 90 days' notice. FirstService Residential reports the same notice terms across its contracts. What a buyer is really paying for is the relationships and the bench that keep those agreements renewing.

For an owner choosing a manager, the interview has a new question. Ask who owns the platform and what their hold period is, because the manager's incentives now include its own exit. Then ask what happened to the last portfolio's site team when ownership changed.

For regional managers and site leads, both sides of the industry are rebuilding the job. Wider spans, pods instead of leasing offices, specialist roles, and pay bands set by an owner that has modeled the cost of turnover. The fee managers are doing it with new owners and on a clock. Ask any candidate who has been through a change of ownership which clients stayed and what they did to keep them.

Percy's take

  • Every buyer says platform. A platform is a centralized services team, a regional bench and a site leadership profile. All three are hired.

  • A sale changes who signs the paycheck before it changes the job. The teams that keep their people through a transaction keep the contracts. Eleven of the 49 largest managers shrank last year; the buyer's model assumes the regionals stay.

  • Pick a manager the way a buyer would. Before you sign a 2027 management agreement, get the platform's owner and hold period in writing and meet the regional who will run your assets. The bench, not the brochure.

  • The platform is the people.

What to watch next

  • Late January to February 2027. Fourth-quarter calls at the self-managed owners. Listen for headcount per unit and centralization, and set it against the fee managers' growth above.

  • April 2027. NMHC's 2027 Top 50 lists, the first to show Oakline and Collective Residential as platforms. Collective's stated goal is to be a top 50 manager by then.

If either changes the picture, it is the kind of thing we would want to write about.

Notes on the numbers

Every change of ownership in the table comes from the buyer's or seller's own release, with the trade press as a second source, and the two manager mergers from the trade press. Transactions reported but not confirmed by any party are left out. Units managed are from NMHC's Top 50 lists, which are self-reported and include build-to-rent and student housing. The one-year comparison uses only the 49 firms that reported both years, and "owner-operators" are the 19 that also appear on NMHC's Top 50 Owners list. The platform-deal tally by category is our count of announced transactions, 2023 to November 2026. The Census shares are our tabulation of the survey's public-use files; 9% of 2024 properties did not report a manager type. Employment and pay are Bureau of Labor Statistics census counts of residential property managers and residential lessors, both residential only; the manager series includes association, single-family and student managers. Where a figure is a vendor's or an advisor's claim, we say so.

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Percy recruits regional managers, community managers, service managers and maintenance supervisors for fee managers and owner-operators across conventional, affordable and student housing. If your platform has just changed hands, or you are building one, we should talk.

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