Why Ancillary Revenue Is Difficult to Benchmark
If you’ve ever asked “how does our ancillary revenue compare to similar properties?” and gotten a vague, unsatisfying answer, you’re not alone. Ancillary income from movers and packing services to insurance, utilities, and parking has become one of the fastest-growing levers for multifamily net operating income. Yet compared to rent, it remains stubbornly hard to measure against industry peers.
Here’s why this happens, and what it means for how you evaluate performance.
What Makes Multifamily Ancillary Revenue Benchmarking So Complicated
Unlike rent, which follows relatively standardized reporting across markets, ancillary income streams differ dramatically from one operator to the next. A property in a high-rise urban market may generate significant parking and storage revenue, while a suburban garden-style community may lean heavily on utility and internet partnerships instead. That variability alone makes apples-to-apples multifamily ancillary revenue benchmarking nearly impossible using generic industry averages.
Inconsistent Categorization Across Operators
One of the biggest obstacles is definitional. Some operators bucket renters insurance commissions under “other income,” while others separate it entirely from utility revenue-share or service marketplace fees. Without a shared taxonomy, two portfolios reporting “12% ancillary income” may be measuring completely different things. This inconsistency is a core reason multifamily ancillary revenue benchmarking data published by industry associations should be read with caution rather than treated as gospel.
The Move Lifecycle Isn’t Uniformly Captured
Ancillary income is heavily concentrated around a resident’s move-in and move-out window when movers, insurance, and utility activation naturally happen. But many portfolios still handle this process manually, through spreadsheets, emails, and disconnected vendor relationships. When the move lifecycle isn’t systematically tracked, a large share of eligible revenue simply goes uncaptured and unreported, further skewing any benchmarking exercise.
Portfolio Size and Technology Maturity Skew the Data
A 50-unit community managed with manual processes and a 5,000-unit portfolio running an automated resident onboarding platform will report very different ancillary performance not necessarily because of market conditions, but because of operational maturity. This makes it risky to compare a single property’s ancillary numbers to broad national benchmarks without adjusting for how much of that revenue is actually being captured versus left on the table.
What This Means for Property Managers and CEOs
Rather than chasing an industry-wide “average,” the more useful exercise is benchmarking against your own portfolio’s historical performance and identifying where revenue capture gaps exist. Standardizing how ancillary categories are tracked, and centralizing the resident move process into one system, gives leadership a much clearer, more comparable picture over time.
Wrap Up
Ancillary revenue will likely keep growing as a share of multifamily NOI, but reliable multifamily ancillary revenue benchmarking depends on consistent categorization and full capture of move-related transactions not industry-wide guesswork. Platforms like Moved are built to close that gap, turning the resident move lifecycle into a structured, measurable revenue system rather than a scattered set of manual tasks.
