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How Turnkey Tenant Communication Can Revolutionize Your Property Management

Excellent property management is all about balancing costs to keep a property profitable and ensuring residents have a safe, comfortable home they love. Sometimes, it can feel like these two motivations are at odds. But nowhere is there stronger alignment between reducing costs and increasing tenant satisfaction than when it comes to reducing turnover.

According to HousingWire, “Turnover is one of the most costly aspects of the property management business, with the average turnover costing more than two thousand dollars. It can wreak havoc on your profits and negatively affect your vacancy rate especially if it happens frequently.” 

The more strategies you have in place to make your residents feel welcome, appreciated, and happy with their homes, the longer they’ll stay and the more often they will renew their leases.

In this guide, we’ll look at critical factors that determine whether someone will love where they live, the growing importance of communication, and why modernizing your high-end apartments with turnkey tenant communication should be your priority in 2023.

Today’s Top Concern for Property Owners and Community Managers: Tenant Satisfaction

While compliance with local regulations and maintaining top-level safety and aesthetic conditions may be top-of-mind for your property management team, these concerns—and countless others—all feed back to one core concern: tenant satisfaction. 

Related: Millennial Trends | What Makes a High Rise Building a Home?

Not only does this factor tie directly to retention and positive feedback on review sites, but it’s also a key predictor of tenant turnover. By surveying your residents about their satisfaction, for example, you can gauge the likelihood of turnover and plan accordingly; you can also intervene before scores hit a critical low point to salvage the relationship. 

5 Factors That Lead to Enhanced Tenant Satisfaction

Whether you want to survey your residents or you simply want to make improvements, it’s important to know what drives high scores and happiness in your apartment communities. When you’re planning improvement projects or looking holistically at your high-end properties, these five factors matter:

1. Communication Regarding Building Maintenance

According to Prescriptive Data, building management is the top consideration for surveyed apartment residents. This comes as no surprise: people want to know that their plumbing, heating, and lighting are always functional and will be repaired before any real inconvenience. 

But it’s not just prompt service and high-quality construction that matters here; it’s the feeling of how quickly they could reach management and how smoothly the communication went that matters, too.

For luxury apartment dwellers, especially, there can’t be communication breakdowns, annoying delays, or interruptive maintenance. People who pay a premium to live in luxurious buildings expect everything will work and be pristine. They also expect their community manager to be responsive to issues on top of providing proactive maintenance.

2. Multiple Communication Channels

Many of your residents will be overloaded by day-to-day tasks and concerns, but capturing their attention is essential for effective communication. Attention metrics like viewability, appeal of the medium, and, ultimately, the focus and attention a specific message can secure all determine how well your tenants interact with and retain the information you’re sharing with them. 

As a result, vibrant displays, attention-getting messages, and multiple different channels can all increase the attention your communications receive. In fact, by surrounding your building messages with entertaining, relevant, curated content that residents care about and want to engage with, you can gain maximum attention on your own communications.

Paper flyers, voice messages, or a quick face-to-face conversation are forgettable, outmoded forms of communication for many residents. Paper flyers can be missed and must be updated often. Voicemail messages are often ignored, forgotten, or deleted. 

There’s also no efficient way to ensure you can chat with your tenants in person, especially if they have busy schedules. Instead, you can improve tenant satisfaction simply by increasing the number of communication channels you provide (and by making most of them digital). Winning options involve multifaceted options, including:

  • SMS messages
  • Emails
  • Updates on your website or in your tenant portal
  • Digital displays in your building’s hallways, elevators, and lobbies

These methods are convenient and ensure better coverage. Multiple channels also ensure your residents get plenty of reminders about key issues in whatever way they prefer.

3. A Focus on Lifestyle and Community

The last thing you want is to make communication from you or your team all business, turning residents off to your delivery method. With the right digital media partner, you can ensure that great, curated content is mixed in with operational notices and reminders, giving your property an appealing, modern feel. 

With the right digital media partner, curated content might include national and local news, stock updates, weather updates, local transportation information, uplifting stories or art, upcoming events (both in the apartment community and in the larger local community), and more. The right partner will select just the right content that the demographic trend of residents in your building is interested in, requiring no extra work from your property management team.

4. A Modern Environment

Outdated amenities can have a cooling effect on satisfaction. The more conveniences you can provide, the more your tenants will be comfortable with their living arrangements and the more likely they’ll want to renew their lease agreements.

Modern conveniences in their homes could include smart lights, remote-enabled appliances and thermostats, and video doorbells. In the public spaces, consider adding modern fixtures, digital displays at fixed points for providing a modern element along with curated entertainment and informational content, and in-building services like coffee shops.

5. A Feeling of Community

Apartment-dwellers don’t just choose their homes for reliable maintenance and location (though those factors matter a lot, with 45% of renters willing to pay more based on location). They care about the community they live in. This is shaped by apartment-sponsored events, the ability to chat and form connections with neighbors, and even group resources like fitness gyms and pools. Instead of passively waiting for the feeling of community to grow organically, building owners, community managers and landlords can foster that feeling with:

  • Invitations to apartment-sponsored events (especially during the holidays or vacation seasons!)
  • Information about civic and entertainment events around town
  • Opportunities for tenants to come together and discuss improvements or building changes
  • Highly visible content that is relevant to all residents

Again, modern communication channels and the ability to display information in pleasing digital formats are crucial for making that community grow stronger. This content can start conversations. For example, strangers in an apartment elevator might find common ground discussing a sports news clip being shown on the digital display  instead of riding awkwardly up or down several floors. 

After that icebreaker, those tenants are more likely to say hello to each other and feel a stronger sense of community. Interactions like these, triggered by the right content on your building’s digital displays, can strengthen your tenants’ connection to their residence as a long-term home.

Related: Three Tips on Creating Community During the Holidays

What Does Turnkey Tenant Communication Look Like?

Turnkey tenant communication is a vital part of ensuring tenants have up-to-date and helpful information so they can more conveniently plan their daily lives within your building. Along with SMS messaging and a mobile-friendly tenant portal, we encourage community managers of high-end apartments to find ways to get the attention of their tenants without interrupting their lives.

With a network of digital displays throughout the public areas of your portfolio of buildings, your tenants can see curated news and entertainment from trusted sources, as well as your own building messages. 

With the right digital media network provider, you won’t have to curate the content yourself. Instead, you can rely on the media partner to handle content curation, provide you with visually engaging templates for your building messages, and ensure the content is relevant, interesting, and up-to-date.

In just minutes, you can fill these screens with ready-built content that will interest the residents of your building, and you can easily add your own announcements, videos, and reminders that help residents enjoy their stay and create roots in the community. This might look something like the following:

  • Notices about maintenance or improvement projects that tenants may want to plan around
  • Apartment-wide events and celebrations
  • Weather reports
  • Property directory
  • Sports scores
  • Stock market data
  • Entertainment news
  • National news 

These layers of communication show that your team is actively involved in the community and is proactive about ensuring your tenants’ expectations are exceeded whenever possible. 

Great Communication Is Key to Retaining Your Tenants and Increasing Their Satisfaction

Today’s premium multifamily buildings are more about community than ever before, and you need a strong communication strategy to ensure all of your residents enjoy a modern experience and have up-to-date, conveniently posted information. 

Digital displays go beyond building messages to inform, entertain, and connect with your residents. At Captivate, we can help you modernize your communications with curated content tailored to your residents. Contact us today to learn more about our services and how we can help revolutionize tenant satisfaction and elevate your property’s amenities.

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