AIM 2025: White-Label vs. Native Apps

White-Label vs. Native Apps: Navigating the Multifamily Mobile App Maze

In a session led by Lydia Zaragoza and Jules Flesner, attendees explored the vital yet often overlooked impact of mobile app strategy on branding, compliance, and resident experience. The session dissected how decisions around white-label, native, and custom-built apps can create either seamless resident experiences or logistical nightmares, especially during management transitions.

Kicking off with a chilling hypothetical—what happens when your community app suddenly disappears or malfunctions—Lydia set the tone for a conversation rooted in real operational risk. Residents don’t distinguish between a technical glitch and a property management failure. In their eyes, the brand is the app—and vice versa. Jules reinforced this idea by showing how app reliability influences trust not only with residents but also with investors and ownership stakeholders.

A powerful metaphor guided much of the session: apps as water bottles. A native app is like an already manufactured bottle you just fill up; a white-label app adds your branding like stickers. Custom-built apps, on the other hand, require building the water bottle from scratch—a time- and resource-intensive path that only the most resourced companies, like Irvine Company, can afford.

Using real-world examples and a candid storytelling style, Jules shared how her team pulled off a smooth tech transition for five Texas properties involving 1,300 units overnight. The secret? A centralized tech stack, a standardized native app platform, and early involvement of marketing and tech teams—sometimes up to a year in advance of a handoff. Residents continued using the same app to pay rent or submit work orders without disruptions, a testament to how quiet continuity can be a major brand win.

Conversely, Lydia shared a cautionary tale of a takeover gone wrong, where her team inherited a 100% cloud-based property with no access to digital records and had to manually recreate 650 leases. The issue wasn’t just operational—it became a reputational risk. The team had to start from scratch, while residents blamed the brand for the disruption, not the software provider.

The conversation shifted into technical territory, with Lydia walking through how app compliance with Apple and Google works—and why it’s so easy to get rejected. From broken links to metadata mistakes, mobile apps face constant scrutiny from app stores. Updating apps every 30 to 60 days is not a suggestion—it’s a necessity. Yet many multifamily teams don’t even know how to check update frequency in their app stores. Lydia urged attendees to pull up version histories on their mobile apps and investigate how regularly they’re updated.

White-label apps, while attractive for branding consistency, introduce their own challenges. Because they are essentially clones of a base app with minor branding tweaks, they risk getting flagged for duplicity by app stores. True integration is also rare—many so-called “integrations” are just iFrames or redirects. Lydia emphasized that marketing teams should vet mobile app partners not just on aesthetics but on how deeply and authentically their software integrates with third-party tools like access control or package delivery.

The session also tackled the strategic trade-offs between property-level and portfolio-level apps. Property-level apps offer a hyper-localized feel but are harder to manage and update at scale. Most operators favor a single app across a portfolio to ensure faster updates, centralized oversight, and reduced compliance risk—especially during property sales or transitions.

Attendees were encouraged to push their leadership teams to view marketing as a tech function. Mobile app strategy isn’t just about pretty logos and colors—it’s about system reliability, trust continuity, and financial efficiency. The speakers advised marketers to talk to ownership teams in the language of numbers: how consolidating apps reduces duplicate spending, improves efficiency, and builds resident loyalty.

Closing the session, Jules and Lydia stressed the importance of forming strong vendor relationships early, including knowing when reps are on vacation during transitions. And if your app provider isn’t pushing updates regularly or including your white-labeled version in those updates, that’s a red flag.

Ultimately, the session reframed the mobile app not as a supplement to the brand, but as the brand itself. Whether during daily operations or chaotic management transitions, the quality of your app experience directly reflects on your reputation, retention, and revenue.