Multifamily owners are having the same conversation everywhere right now. Rents have been flat for two years. Operating expenses keep climbing. The obvious levers — occupancy, unit upgrades, ancillary fees — have mostly been pulled. And yet one significant source of revenue sits largely untouched in nearly every building, hiding inside a contract most owners signed years ago and never revisited: internet service.
Elliot LaBreche came to that observation not as a property manager but as an investor doing due diligence on an unrelated acquisition. What he found in the numbers led him to co-found Vitalis Smart Communities, a telecom advisory platform that helps multifamily owners renegotiate their internet service contracts.
In most apartment buildings, internet works the same way it always has. Each tenant contacts a provider, signs their own contract, pays around $70 a month, and waits for an installation appointment. The owner has no involvement — and no income.
That model has an alternative. When a property owner signs a single bulk agreement covering all units, the economics shift entirely. The owner pays the provider a wholesale rate, charges tenants a marked-up but still lower-than-retail price, and keeps the difference. The provider, in exchange for guaranteed subscribers, covers the cost of upgrading the building’s infrastructure.
LaBreche points to a recent example at a 500-unit community in Orlando. Tenants were paying AT&T $72 a month. After Vitalis negotiated a bulk agreement, the new provider charged the owner $25 per unit. The owner charged tenants $50. Tenants saved $20 a month. The owner cleared $25 per unit, per month — $150,000 in new annual revenue. At a 5% cap rate, that income added $2.85 million to the property’s valuation. The owner spent nothing to make it happen.
“The internet provider covers the cost of upgrading the building’s infrastructure,” LaBreche says. “So the owner incurs no upfront expense.”
For a line item that most owners treat as a tenant’s problem, the upside is significant.
The timing is not incidental. In most U.S. markets, operating expenses have been growing at around 5% annually while rents have stayed flat. That gap compounds. Owners who can’t find new revenue aren’t just missing upside — they’re watching their net operating income (NOI) erode in real time.
Bulk internet is unusual as a solution because it doesn’t require owners to spend anything to access it. Most strategies for growing NOI involve capital: renovations, amenity upgrades, technology installations. This one inverts that logic. The internet service provider (ISP) funds the infrastructure upgrade in exchange for a guaranteed subscriber base. The owner’s only investment is running a proper negotiation.
Most owners think of bulk internet as a cost negotiation — getting a better rate on a service they were already going to buy. The actual opportunity is larger than that.
When a property owner runs a formal request for proposals (RFP) across the full range of providers that can service their building, they’re creating competition for guaranteed, long-term subscriber access — something internet providers will pay significant infrastructure costs to secure. The leverage sits with the owner. Most just don’t know to use it.
“A lot of times, multifamily owners just go to the national provider and don’t run a formal RFP process that brings the property to the 10 providers who could actually service it,” LaBreche says. “They don’t understand how much money they’re leaving on the table.”
The same owners who run competitive bids for landscaping, insurance, and property management routinely accept the first or second offer an internet provider quotes them. In a market where every margin point matters, that habit is expensive.
Bulk internet is, in one sense, a narrow operational story about telecom pricing and property valuation. In another, it’s an example of something more common: a financial decision that gets made by default because no one thought to revisit it.
LaBreche’s observation — that owners who negotiate rigorously on landscaping and insurance rarely apply the same scrutiny to internet service — points to a habit worth examining beyond this one contract. In a compressed market, the assumption that a line item is fixed is itself a decision.
About the Expert: Elliot LaBreche is the Founder and CEO of Vitalis Smart Communities, the nation’s leading AI-native telecom procurement marketplace for multifamily real estate. Vitalis operates as a full-service advisory platform and two-sided marketplace — giving multifamily owners, condo developers, and master-planned community builders free access to institutional-grade telecom procurement, while creating a competitive bidding environment where internet service providers compete for guaranteed subscriber access. With a background spanning a $250 million portfolio across medical office and multifamily assets, LaBreche built Vitalis around a single observation: that owners who negotiate rigorously on every other operating expense routinely leave six and seven figures on the table in telecom. Vitalis exists to close that gap — not by taking quotes, but by making markets.
This article is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or investment advice. The views and opinions expressed herein reflect those of the individuals quoted and do not represent an endorsement of any company, product, or service mentioned. Readers should conduct their own due diligence and consult qualified professionals before making any investment decisions.
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