Bilt has bought the technology platform behind Livly, the multifamily software company whose access control, package-room and smart-home tools run inside thousands of apartment units, and has signed a separate agreement to run resident experience across the communities managed by Collective Residential.
The company announced both deals Sept. 15 from New York. Terms were not disclosed.
The purchase moves Bilt from the payments-and-rewards layer of an apartment building into the hardware layer. Livly was built by FLATS, a multifamily operator that is now part of Collective Residential, to solve problems inside buildings its own teams were running — door access, package handling, self-guided tours — and later added smart thermostats, leak detection and EV charging. Bilt is folding those capabilities into a platform that until now handled leasing, rent payments, resident engagement and merchant offers.
What Bilt is assembling
Bilt describes itself as a hospitality platform for housing, and its pitch to owners is that a single system should follow a resident from the first property tour through renewal. The Bilt Alliance, its network of partner properties, spans more than 7 million homes nationally, according to the company.
Founder and Chief Executive Ankur Jain framed the acquisition as an argument about what property software is for.
"Most property management software was built to run buildings, not grow businesses," Jain said. "We’re giving operators a merchant network that drives real demand from the neighborhood economy around the property, and AI agents that work across the systems they already have. That’s revenue for the operator and a reason for residents to stay engaged 365 days a year, well beyond their four walls. Livly is a foundational piece of this."
Livly’s three co-founders — Alex Samoylovich, Brian Duggan and Adam McCombs — said in a joint statement that the company had always been built on the premise that resident experience would be shaped by a single operating platform.
"What began as an operating system for the building can now extend into the neighborhood, connecting where people live with the financial, digital, and experiential infrastructure that surrounds them," they said. "We believe this convergence represents the next architecture of residential real estate, and Bilt brings the scale, ecosystem, and distribution to define the next generation of residential real estate."
Bilt said it has a transition plan intended to keep existing Livly-powered communities running on the capabilities they use today while migrating them onto the wider Bilt platform, which includes housing payments, an AI-powered concierge service, rewards and neighborhood offers.
The other half of the announcement
The Collective Residential partnership is the distribution side of the same deal. Collective Residential is a national property management platform that buys and partners with regional management firms, keeping their local teams in place while supplying shared back-office infrastructure and technology. Under the agreement, those communities will run their resident experience through Bilt.
Because FLATS — Livly’s original developer — is already part of Collective Residential, the two announcements are two halves of one relationship: Bilt takes the software, Collective keeps managing the buildings and puts Bilt in front of their residents.
A buying streak
This is the latest in a run of acquisitions. Bilt bought the travel-advisor platform Sion for $30 million in March 2026. In July 2025 it raised $250 million in primary funding at a $10.75 billion valuation in a round led by General Catalyst and GID with participation from United Wholesale Mortgage; at that point the company said it had signed roughly one in four U.S. apartment buildings into its network and partnered with more than 40,000 merchants.
The wider pattern is worth noting. Resident-facing apartment software is consolidating quickly, with the largest vendors racing to sit between operators and renters — Yardi put an AI leasing agent in front of 40 million apartment hunters on RentCafe this summer, and Zillow’s rent-reporting program has pushed further into turning rent payments into credit history.
On our reading, that concentration is the thing for owners to weigh. A single platform spanning tours, leases, payments, door locks and thermostats is operationally simpler and commercially attractive, but it also means one vendor holds the resident relationship and the building’s access infrastructure at the same time. Multifamily’s last decade of software consolidation has already drawn legal scrutiny in a different corner of the stack, where two landlords agreed in September to pay $9.3 million to settle District of Columbia rent-fixing claims tied to revenue-management software. Nothing in the Sept. 15 announcement touches pricing software, but the direction of travel — fewer systems, more of the building inside each one — is the same.
More coverage is on the Technology & AI page.
