Your 2027 capital plan might skip the amenity residents check first
It's budget season. Somewhere on your desk - or on your team's spreadsheet - is a list of next year's capital projects: roof sections due for replacement, a parking lot resurfacing, maybe a clubhouse refresh that's been deferred twice already. It's a reasonable list. It's also missing the one amenity your residents interact with every single day.
Internet is the number one amenity renters evaluate before they ever schedule a tour, and 89% say they won't move into a unit without reliable high-speed internet access. Compare that to how often a pool gets resurfaced (once a decade, if that) or a roof gets replaced (every fifteen to twenty years), and the mismatch is obvious: the thing residents use constantly is usually the thing that rarely makes it into a capital conversation at all.
Why connectivity gets left off the list
It's not that owners don't know WiFi matters. It's that internet gets filed under "utilities" - an operating expense, not a capital decision - so it never competes for capital dollars the way a visible amenity does. That classification made sense when internet was a convenience. It doesn't make nearly as much sense when it's a deciding factor in whether a prospect tours at all, and a quiet driver of which residents renew and which ones don't.
What it actually costs you to leave it off
A property with unreliable internet doesn't usually get a formal complaint. It gets a resident who doesn't renew, a prospect who reads one bad WiFi review and never books a tour, a leasing agent who spends an afternoon on router tickets instead of showing units. None of that shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it's easy to keep deferring.
There's a second layer of value easy to miss here. Lower churn is the most direct return - keeping a resident who renews costs far less than finding one who doesn't, and that savings shows up immediately. But when the upgrade is structured as a capital improvement rather than a month-to-month service, the network infrastructure itself becomes an owned asset on the property: the fiber runs, access points, and wiring built into the building add to its physical plant, not just its operating budget. That's value that stays with the property at refinance or sale, not value that disappears the moment you switch vendors.
There's also upside most owners haven't tapped yet: bulk internet agreements and revenue-share models. Structured well, these turn connectivity into a return-on-investment rather than a pass-through cost - the property shares in the proceeds of the service agreement itself, alongside rent and other ancillary income, instead of simply covering an internet bill every month. For a lot of operators, that's revenue sitting on the table that a 2027 capital conversation is the natural place to bring up.
The budgeting objection, and why it doesn't have to apply here
The honest reason most owners don't add connectivity to the capital plan is that it sounds like a large, disruptive project competing with the roof for the same reserve dollars. That's true of a lot of infrastructure upgrades. It doesn't have to be true of this one. Managed connectivity providers can amortize the infrastructure cost into a service agreement, turning what used to be a capital draw into a fixed, predictable monthly line - planned into next year's numbers instead of fought over mid-year.
Putting it on the list for 2027
Budget season is exactly the window to change this, because the plan is still open. Once it's finalized, connectivity goes back to being next year's problem - which, for most properties, means another year of the same renewal risk and the same reviews that mention WiFi before they mention rent.
If your 2027 capital plan doesn't have a line for the amenity your residents use the most, it's worth 20 minutes to find out what one would look like.
