BIM is a growing topic in multifamily, but many owners and teams are still unclear whether they should adopt it, or whether they should stick with their existing processes for collecting property data and generating models and documents.
We wrote this piece to help multifamily owners understand what they are losing doing things the old-fashioned way, and why it’s a competitive advantage to adopt BIM — using the right software— before competitors do so first.
In this piece, we’ll explore:
Let’s get started.
If you’re running a multifamily portfolio today, you’re playing in one of the most competitive arenas in real estate. Every week, there’s another deal to win, another project to deliver, another budget to defend — and the smallest delays or inaccuracies can be the difference between beating the market and falling behind your competition.
Here are just a few of the common, painfully situations you have likely seen firsthand:
Everyone in multifamily has seen at least one of these scenarios, and yet they’ve been accepted as a cost of doing business.
From our perspective, this attitude of acceptance needs to change. These issues prevent you from moving quickly, making confident decisions, and delivering results faster than your competitors. You lose wins when acquisitions are too slow, construction isn’t accurate enough, and asset managers don’t have enough foresight.
This costs you time, money, and momentum. Bad projects and missed deals create a cumulative effect where every delay, budget overrun, and misstep in planning quietly widens the gap between you and the owners who have their data locked in, their workflows streamlined, and their decisions made in real time.
The question isn’t whether these issues are costing you. It’s how much they’re costing you — and how long you’re willing to let them chip away at your competitive edge.
When you step back and look at the common thread in all of these challenges, it comes down to one thing — property data is still being collected, modeled, and shared the same way it was 20, 30, or even 50+ years ago.
Here’s what that still looks like for most multifamily owners and teams:
The process is slow, repetitive, and filled with moments where data can be incomplete, outdated, or just plain wrong. Which means…
The result?
If you continue to follow manual and legacy data collection methods, you’ve been operating in a market that rewards speed, precision, and foresight — while being forced to rely on tools and processes that deliver the opposite.
When property data is slow, inaccurate, and scattered across teams it drains your bottom line. Every delay, every surprise, and every missed piece of information has a dollar sign attached to it.
The problem is those losses are known but considered the hidden costs of doing business. They show up as “standard” change orders, “normal” schedule delays, and “expected” budget swings and are rarely flagged as avoidable. But when you add them up and run the numbers, they create some big competitive losses.
Here are some of the most common issues caused by legacy data collection and modeling, and what they could cost you. (Note — these are not exact numbers, just rough estimates to get a sense of how unseen costs can add up. Feel free to use only some, or even just one, of the variables and mark "0" for the rest if they don't apply to you, or you don't know the value.)
Industry averages put change orders at 8–12% of total project cost. On a$5M renovation, that’s $400K–$600K you didn’t plan to spend.
In multifamily schedule delays can create lost rent. A 10–20% schedule overrun can mean $100K–$300K in income you never see for every month of delay.
±30% capex variance is common, which means a project $3M spend can easily end up costing $3.9+ million That’s $250K–$1M in unplanned spend per large project.
Acquisitions teams that need 3–4 weeks to collect data lose deals to competitors who can move in days. That can mean losing millions in portfolio growth over a few years.
The bad news?
These losses compound across your portfolio and the larger your portfolio the more these inefficiencies multiply. While one bad project might feel like an acceptable loss, a consistent drag across every deal and every budget will erode ROI over time.
The good news?
Once you realize what these issues are actually costing you, you can reclaim an enormous amount of lost value by correcting them — and if you do it before your competitors, you’ve just gained a significant edge over them.
Here’s simple way to see what this might be costing you:
Example:
That’s not theory. Even if your numbers are a fraction of this, you are still losing real, measurable value every year that you don’t address these root problems with manual property data collection and modeling.
By now, you can probably see the pattern.
The deals lost, the budget overruns, the schedule delays are all caused because you’re being forced to run your business with property data that’s slow to collect, hard to trust, and scattered across multiple systems and teams.
This is not an individual problem. The entire industry is still stuck performing site walks with clipboards, tape measures and floor plan markups, all while passing around old PDFs passed around like they’re gospel.
And yet, there’s a smarter, faster, lower-risk way to get this information — and it’s been quietly transforming other corners of real estate and construction for years.
That solution is BIM — short for Building Information Modeling.
BIM is much more than an architect huddled over a complex 3D model that only they can understand. BIM for multifamily is a much different beast that’s about creating a single, accurate, always-up-to-date digital version of your property that every team can access and use to make better, faster decisions across the property lifecycle.
When done right, BIM:
BIM for multifamily isn’t about adding complexity or replacing the tools you already rely on. It’s about fixing the broken step in your workflow — the moment when property data moves from the real world into your decision-making process.
BIM can automate that step, increase the accuracy and freshness of your property data, and centralize everything so that acquisitions move faster, renovations stay on budget, and capital plans become strategic roadmaps based on correct assumptions.
While multifamily has struggled to update its processes and adopt BIM software, making the switch doesn’t have tube a massive lift. You don’t need to overhaul your systems or retrain your teams from scratch. You just need the right BIM platform for multifamily plugs into what you’re already doing as smoothly as possible.
You just need the right BIM software —one that’s built for multifamily.
You’ve probably heard about the most common 3D architecture design software for BIM — platforms like Autodesk Revit, Navisworks, and Bentley Systems — and you’ve probably turned them away.
The fact is these tools weren’t made for multifamily owners that need to maintain or improve the value of their existing assets. They were primarily built for large ground-up construction projects and are primarily used by architects, engineers, and GCs.
These people and projects have different need than multifamily owners and teams, and it shows every time someone in multifamily tries to leverage them.
When you compare how these platforms work to what multifamily teams actually need, three big gaps appear:
Considering these issues, it makes sense that multifamily hasn’t widely adopted BIM yet. They haven’t had BIM software available to solve their specific problems.
A BIM platform built for multifamily owners, and operators need to be engineered from the start to fit the way you work and what you need data and models for.
Here’s what that BIM tool for multifamily would offer:
If a BIM tool was built this way, it would stop being an expensive, niche design tool and starts being a competitive advantage by filling the gap between the physical reality of your properties and the critical business decisions you make every day.
And that’s where the conversation shifts — from “Should we use BIM?” to “How quickly can we roll this out portfolio-wide?”
Tailorbird is an AI-driven platform that generates complete property data, 3D models, and multifamily docs like takeoffs and siteplans — and then feeds this data into workflows, views, and insights for capex projects and capital planning.
Tailorbird offers you:
1. Fully-automated, AI-driven BIM. Tailorbird replaces months of manual work, by capturing property data remotely and processing it into complete, accurate models in 3–6 days. That means no more site walks, scheduling delays, or endless measuring and drafting. Instead, you get the information you need when you need it— whether that’s making a winning offer or kicking off a renovation on time.
2. Accurate, standardized, centralized data. Tailorbird gives you models and data that are 98%+accurate from day one and automatically updated as work begins. Every property, unit, and project detail are stored in a persistent record you can trust — so there’s no more reconciling different “versions” across teams and decisions.
3. BIM software purpose-Built for Multifamily ROI. Tailorbird distills property data into exactly what your teams need — takeoffs, scopes, estimates, site plans, and dashboards — so acquisitions teams get the Capex insights they need to move first, construction teams get precise, ready-to-use data for bidding and project tracking, and asset management teams can create accurate multi-year capital plans
4. Portfolio-Wide Visibility and Control. Tailorbird gives you standardized data that lets you look at projects and properties side-by-side and prioritize investments based on factual comparisons. With Tailorbird you will see issues before they become surprises, and you can plan capital projects with confidence— whether you’re managing 5,000 multifamily units or 100,000+.
With Tailorbird, you can.
And because Tailorbird’s rollout is incremental and low-risk, you can start seeing results immediately — without disrupting your entire operation.
The multifamily owners who will dominate the next few years may not be the ones with the biggest budgets or the most properties. It may be the ones who can see their portfolio clearly, act decisively, and execute flawlessly. Tailorbird gives you that edge.
