“For most businesses, integrations are a box. They’re a requirement. They’re not differentiated.” – Remen Okoruwa

Remen Okoruwa didn’t grow up in property tech. He walked into it sideways, after stints in consulting, private equity, and a detour through HubSpot. But that winding path led him to a massive, underappreciated truth in multifamily: no matter how compelling your product is, if you don’t integrate with the big players—Yardi, RealPage, Entrata—you’re not in the game. That bottleneck was the seed for Perpexo, a unified integration layer that’s quietly becoming the backbone of innovation in real estate software.

“You can’t even get in the door unless a customer agrees to vouch for you. And you have to pay to pitch.” – Remen Okoruwa

The complication? Integrations aren’t just technical, they’re political and financial. Remen broke it down like a bootcamp: before any startup can integrate, they need a client to vouch for them, a fee to pay, and months of patience for API approval. It’s pay-to-play before you even get to sell. I saw it too: this isn’t just plumbing, it’s a go-to-market strategy by default. If you can only afford one PMS integration, you’re limiting your total addressable market based on your wallet. That isn’t innovation, it’s inertia.

“Property managers are voting with their feet when a PMS won’t integrate with the tech they love.” – Remen Okoruwa

That was the turning point for me. I’ve long heard the complaint that property management is stuck in the past. But Remen showed me why: the people who control the pipes are holding back the water. Innovation gets choked not because there’s no good tech, but because the integrations are gated, expensive, and outdated. And when the pipes clog, users suffer. When I hear PMs say, “That integration doesn’t really work,” I now understand: it’s not the proptech’s fault, it’s the pipeline’s. And platforms like Perpexo are trying to fix that.

“If your API goes down, every one of your customers suffers. That’s your job now, to manage their risk too.” – Remen Okoruwa

I had never really considered how much overhead we carry by owning our integrations. When Remen described how Perpexo automatically retries failed pushes and visualizes what broke where I realized we were operating on borrowed duct tape. Our dev teams juggle point-to-point integrations, and every change forces QA across every system. Perpexo abstracts that pain away. And maybe more importantly, it eliminates that quiet fear we all have: what happens when something breaks and we don’t know it did?

“You’ve got to be T-shaped. Deep in one skill, but broad enough to speak the language of everyone you work with.” – Remen Okoruwa

Remen’s career is what happens when you move through the org chart, not just up it. He’s been in strategy, product, and sales which it shows. His perspective is rooted in empathy, and that made me rethink how I approach sales conversations. It’s not enough to be right. You have to understand what the other side fears, what they control, and what would get them fired. A head of integrations might block your deal not because of logic, but because you threaten their relevance. And the only way to navigate that is curiosity.

So what did I learn from this?

• If you’re selling into multifamily, your product’s success might hinge on whether you can afford an integration, not just build one.
  
• The true competition isn’t another startup, it’s the system of fees, QA gates and outdated permissioning at the PMS layer.
  
• Middleware isn’t a nice-to-have. For many of us, it’s how we get our product in front of users before our runway runs out.
  
• Every integration comes with management overhead. If you’re not paying someone like Perpexo, you’re paying with developer time, support costs, and opportunity loss.
  
• And finally: gatekeepers don’t just keep competitors out. They also keep the future out.
  

In an industry with rigid gates, the first “Hell Yes!” you get might not be from a buyer but from the system that lets you reach one.