Old-Smart Renewal Community is a crucial agenda for urban renewal and urban governance. Successful implementation of old-smart renewal communities requires the active participation of residents in smart city development. The residents’ sense of gain is a critical metric for evaluating the success of old-smart renewal communities. From the institutional and utilitarian perspectives, institutional elements and technical values significantly influence residents’ perceptions of gain in the smart renewal projects for older communities. Drawing on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), this study investigates the impact of the institutional environment, facilitating conditions, perceived usefulness, and perceived ease of use on residents’ sense of gain in the old-smart renewal communities. A questionnaire was crafted to gather data, yielding 384 valid responses for path analysis. The results indicate that residents’ objective gains directly shape their subjective feelings. Facilitating conditions and institutional environments influence objective gains through the mediating role of perceived ease of use. Perceived ease of use and objective gains are identified as a sequential mediating link affecting the relationships between facilitating conditions, institutional environments, and residents’ subjective feelings. Additionally, institutional environments are found to influence community residents’ subjective feelings through the sequential mediation of perceived usefulness and objective gains. Our findings enrich the literatures on urban governance by identifying the antecedents of community residents’ sense of gain in old-smart renewal communities. It also enriches the TAM by expanding the relationships between institutional environment, convenient conditions, and community residents’ sense of gain. Meanwhile, it offers insights for formulating the governance mechanisms in the old-smart renewal community development.