A new generation of renters is quietly reshaping everything about the apartment experience, from how they discover a building and sign a lease to how they live in it day to day. And they’re doing it largely on their own terms. For Gen Z, digital-first isn’t a preference so much as it is a baseline assumption about how the world should work. They’ve grown up in an environment where nearly every interaction, whether that’s ordering food, managing finances, or booking travel, happens through a screen, and they see no reason their apartment should be any different. For multifamily operators, understanding what this generation expects isn’t a forward-looking exercise anymore. It’s an urgent one.

The Numbers Behind the Shift

The scale of this generational transition is hard to overstate. Gen Z and Millennial renters already make up the overwhelming majority of the multifamily market, and the trajectory is only accelerating. Research from Arbor Realty Trust shows that Gen Z is currently the only generation still actively adding rental households, and is projected to become the largest renter demographic in America by 2030.

What makes this cohort particularly significant for operators is that their relationship with renting looks fundamentally different from prior generations. An Inman analysis of Gen Z renting trends published in September 2025 found that 72% of Gen Z renters believe renting is smarter than buying, and the reasoning goes well beyond economics. Flexibility, mobility, and the freedom to direct money toward experiences rather than possessions are all driving forces. This isn’t a generation marking time until they can afford a down payment. For many of them, renting is the plan, and they expect the experience to be designed accordingly.

Self-Service as the Default

Whitney Kidd, VP of Innovation at Preiss and Iris, works closely with Gen Z residents in the student housing space and has watched this shift play out in real time. What she’s observed goes beyond a preference for technology. It’s a fundamentally different orientation toward independence.

“I have not seen a generation like Gen Z before that wants to drive the majority of their decisions on their own. If they don’t want to ever speak to a human being, they want the ability to not only rent their apartment, but move in and then self-service as they go.” — Whitney Kidd, VP Innovation, Preiss / Iris

That desire for autonomy isn’t a sign of disengagement. It’s an expression of control. Gen Z grew up managing nearly every aspect of their lives through apps and interfaces, and they carry that same expectation into the places they live. When an apartment building requires a phone call to submit a maintenance request or a visit to a leasing office to ask a simple question, it doesn’t just feel inconvenient to this generation. It feels broken.

The 2024 NMHC and Grace Hill Renter Preferences Survey, the industry’s most comprehensive renter study with over 172,000 respondents, reinforces this clearly. The three factors driving leasing decisions today are comfort, convenience, and connectivity. Self-service isn’t a nice-to-have for a generation that has never known a world without on-demand everything. It’s the minimum viable experience.

Access Over Ownership: How Gen Z Actually Consumes

The self-service mindset extends well beyond leasing and into how Gen Z interacts with their living space on a daily basis, and it connects to something much larger than multifamily. This is a generation that has fundamentally rewritten the relationship between consumption and ownership.

Look at how they already spend. They rent clothes from Nuuly and Rent the Runway instead of buying new wardrobes every season. They buy secondhand on Poshmark, ThredUp, and Depop before ever stepping into a retail store. They thrift not because they have to, but because it aligns with how they think about value, sustainability, and flexibility. The through line across all of it is the same: access matters more than accumulation. Use matters more than possession.

That mindset doesn’t stop at the front door of their apartment. These renters are highly mobile. They move cities for jobs, relationships, and lifestyle shifts. The last thing they want is to accumulate a garage full of appliances and tools they’ll have to move or discard in 18 months. Shared access models aren’t just attractive to this demographic. They’re increasingly preferred, because they mirror the way Gen Z already lives the rest of their life.

This is exactly the model that platforms like TULU are built around. Rather than expecting residents to buy, store, and maintain every household item they might occasionally need, TULU provides on-demand access to everyday essentials, from household tools and kitchen appliances to gaming equipment and e-scooters, all available through an app inside the building. It’s the Nuuly model applied to apartment living: use what you need, when you need it, and don’t worry about the rest. For a generation that already rents its wardrobe, the idea of renting a vacuum or a projector for movie night doesn’t feel novel. It feels obvious.

Rethinking What “Amenities” Even Means

This shift in consumer behavior is also reshaping what “amenities” means in a multifamily context. For years, the industry has responded to shifting renter preferences with an increasingly familiar playbook: build bigger, build flashier, build more. Rooftop cinemas, virtual golf simulators, pickleball courts, wine storage. But the research tells a different story about what actually keeps residents around. The AppFolio 2025 Renter Preferences Report found that satisfied residents are 73% more likely to renew their lease, and that satisfaction is driven not by showpiece amenities but by consistent, daily quality of life. The things that make a resident’s Tuesday morning a little easier matter more than the things that look impressive on a brochure.

Gen Z doesn’t want a building with a flashy amenity they’ll use once a year. They want a building where everyday life just works. That’s why the amenity models gaining the most traction with this generation aren’t the ones adding more square footage. They’re the ones adding more utility. TULU’s approach, providing a fully managed ecosystem of rentals, in-building retail, mobility, print services, and home services through a single app, is designed around exactly this principle. It treats the building itself as a platform for daily life rather than a collection of underused amenity rooms.

Marketing to a New Audience

Guillaume Deri at Greystar France is adapting his marketing strategy to match the way Gen Z actually discovers and evaluates places to live, and it looks nothing like what worked five years ago.

“Our target is definitely Gen Z. A lot of social media… a day in my life as a resident to show what really happens in the residence. That’s definitely the way you market now.” — Guillaume Deri, Greystar, France

Glossy brochures and perfectly staged photos are giving way to authentic, user-generated-style content that shows what living in a community actually looks and feels like on any given Wednesday. For Gen Z, credibility comes from relatability, not polish. A shaky iPhone video of a resident grabbing a scooter from TULU Ride on the way to class or renting a projector for a watch party carries more weight than a professionally lit photo shoot of a lobby ever could.

This tracks with broader observations from the National Apartment Association, which notes that purpose-driven engagement around sustainability, inclusivity, and mental wellness matters deeply to Gen Z, and that communities aligning with these values are more likely to keep this generation engaged well beyond the initial lease term. The marketing that resonates isn’t just showing the apartment. It’s showing the life that happens inside it, and proving that it’s real.

Sustainability Isn’t a Perk. It’s a Filter.

One of the most significant ways Gen Z is reshaping building offerings is through their environmental expectations. According to the same Inman analysis, 50% of Gen Z renters now expect their landlords and property managers to demonstrate genuine ESG commitments, including energy efficiency, sustainability practices, and transparency, not just talk about them in a lobby poster. The NAA goes further, identifying sustainability as the new amenities race, with Gen Z consumers actively distancing themselves from brands and buildings that don’t align with their environmental values.

This is the same instinct that drives Gen Z to shop secondhand on ThredUp instead of buying fast fashion, or to rent formalwear from Rent the Runway instead of purchasing something they’ll wear once. It’s not just about saving money. It’s about reducing waste and aligning spending with values. When that same consumer moves into an apartment building, they bring those expectations with them. A shared-use amenity model like TULU’s, where one high-quality item serves dozens of residents instead of each unit buying its own, maps directly onto the sustainability logic this generation already lives by.

For operators, this means sustainability can no longer live in a marketing bullet point. It needs to be embedded in the building’s actual operations, from shared-use models that reduce individual consumption to energy-efficient systems and transparent reporting on environmental impact. Gen Z will look into it. They’ll check. And Gen Alpha, the generation growing up even more immersed in climate-conscious culture, will likely be even more exacting when they start signing leases of their own.

The Multi-Generational Challenge

Kidd is quick to point out that serving Gen Z doesn’t mean ignoring everyone else. In student housing particularly, there’s a dual customer dynamic that complicates the picture considerably.

“While Gen Z wants to self-service, the parents still feel very differently. They want to talk to someone. They want to go and have an official tour. We have multiple consumers in very different generations.” — Whitney Kidd, VP Innovation, Preiss / Iris

This creates a real design challenge for operators. The winning approach isn’t choosing between high-tech self-service and high-touch personal engagement. It’s building infrastructure that defaults to digital autonomy while never removing the option for human interaction when a resident, or their parent, wants it. The systems need to flex in both directions simultaneously, which is harder than committing to just one.

Expectations Are Universal

One of Kidd’s most important observations is that these technology-driven expectations aren’t confined to major metros or coastal markets. They’re everywhere.

“People still have the same expectations, even if they’re living in Mooresville, North Carolina, that they do in New York City. Technology breaches all areas of the world today.” — Whitney Kidd, VP Innovation, Preiss / Iris

The NMHC and Grace Hill survey reinforces this point with hard numbers: 92% of renters who work remotely consider free building Wi-Fi essential, and 63% of renters factor mobile connectivity into their leasing decision when touring a property. These aren’t expectations that only show up in gateway cities. They’re universal. There is no market, regardless of size or geography, where operators can afford to lag on digital experience. Gen Z expects the same seamless, self-directed living experience whether they’re in Manhattan or a mid-sized city in the Carolinas. And they expect the same access-driven amenity experience too, which is why TULU now operates across more than 60 cities, in markets ranging from major metros to emerging secondary markets.

Gen Alpha Is Already Watching

It’s tempting to treat this as a Gen Z conversation and leave it there. But the generation right behind them, Gen Alpha, born from 2010 onward, is growing up in an even more app-native, sustainability-conscious, and self-directed world than the one Gen Z came of age in. These are kids who have never known a world without same-day delivery, subscription everything, and on-demand access as the default mode of consumption. They’ll never understand why someone would buy a power drill they’ll use twice a year when they could just rent one from their building’s app. They’re the residents who will start signing leases in the early 2030s, and everything Gen Z is demanding today will be their bare minimum. The operators who are building for Gen Z right now aren’t just solving a current challenge. They’re laying the foundation for the next two decades of renter expectations.

The Takeaway

Gen Z is not a niche demographic to plan for eventually. They are the current and growing majority of new renters, and their expectations are quickly becoming the standard the entire industry is measured against. The amenity strategy that wins the next decade of multifamily leasing isn’t about adding more to a building. It’s about adding smarter, identifying the friction points that exist in residents’ everyday lives and solving them in ways that are actually used, actually valued, and actually drive the kind of loyalty that shows up in renewal rates.

The broader consumer world has already figured this out. Nuuly, Rent the Runway, Poshmark, ThredUp, and dozens of other platforms have proven that this generation will choose access, flexibility, and sustainability over ownership every single time. The buildings that bring that same logic indoors, through platforms like TULU that turn the apartment itself into an on-demand service layer, are the ones that will win this generation’s loyalty and their rent checks for years to come.

Sources

Arbor Realty Trust, Gen Z Rental Household Research, Inman, Gen Z Renting Trends Analysis, September 2025 (inman.com), NMHC / Grace Hill Renter Preferences Survey, 2024, AppFolio 2025 Renter Preferences Report (appfolio.com), National Apartment Association, Gen Z & Sustainability Research