How to Better Engage Tenants for Improved Business Performance

There’s good reason to visit this topic of the ideal tenant experience regularly. Building a culture of tenant satisfaction serves all your business needs – supporting cash flow, keeping tenants leased and improved asset care.

And are your tenants ignoring you with late responses and lots of phone tag?  Are they late with rent payment, missing scheduled maintenance visits, speaking with a negative tone, or are complaining too much?

Is your tenant churn higher than local averages? These all indicate poor relations with your customer.

What better time of the year than summer to engage your tenants and build better relations?  From organizing tenant parties and pleasant HOA meetings, to summer property inspections, your efforts alone will show tenants and association members that you care.  Caring has business value, but often landlords don’t have a strategy to communicate it. Let’s look at how today.

Businesswise:  Happy customers are always a great asset.

Today, we’re investigating the tenant experience and the landlord/tenant relationship and how it might pave your path to improved cash flow, higher rents, greater profit, reduced operations costs, and lower tenant churn.

Tenant Relationship Optimization

Building better tenant engagement is about helping them better enjoy their lifestyle and living comfort, and powering up a happy life.

An increased focus on resident satisfaction can be done in a manner that’s natural and fun for them.

Let’s consider using the word optimization.

Tenant engagement is a common sense action which focuses on optimizing tenant relations with an eye to building a stronger picture of value delivered, pain points solved, and improved lifestyle satisfaction for better bottom line returns.

So What Exactly is Tenant Engagement and what does it Accomplish?

This definition provided by Chainels cites the relationship benefits:

«engagement is the various ways in which you can connect with and involve your tenants in the life of the property… tenant engagement helps foster positive relationships between property managers and tenants, leading to increased satisfaction and loyalty.»

Chainels Tenant Experience Solution.

A One Year Project to Assess Results:  What if you managed this as a project with benchmarks established, KPIs to monitor, and revenue growth analyzed, and other changes observed over a one year span?

Which Engagement KPI’s would you Monitor?

• fewer negative communications from tenants
• lease renewals
• churn rate
• turnover costs
• unsolicited positive feedback from tenants
• satisfaction surveys
• damage reports and maintenance service calls
• greater participation rate in community activities
• greater acceptance/use of digital services

Surely, after one year, the collective data would reveal vital information about your tenants or association.

What Should You be Trying to Achieve?

The first step might be to reflect on what you might achieve. A post from Linkedin offers some good tips on preparing to engage: https://www.linkedin.com/advice/0/how-do-you-adapt-your-tenant-engagement-strategies

«How will you communicate and interact with your tenants, and which channels are most effective and convenient for them? You can use a variety of channels, such as email, phone, text, social media, newsletters, flyers, or posters, to deliver your messages and invitations. You can also use digital platforms, such as apps, websites, or portals, to provide information, services, and feedback options for your tenants. You should also consider the frequency, timing, and tone of your communication, and ensure that it is consistent and relevant.»

With ManageCasa you’ll enjoy professional level communication tools, including if you choose, a marketing website. Integrating with social media, you can engage tenants, avoid alienation, resentment, and prevent negative emotions to fester.

Tenant Satisfaction Surveys Can Help

Here’s an example of a communications device from South Liverpool Homes in the UK. They’ve created a YouTube video to show how their tenants feel about their service.

8 Key Factors that Affect the Performance of your Tenant Relations Optimization Project

1. tenant selection (high quality well selected tenants will be willing to establish and keep a great ongoing relationship despite turbulence and disappointments; poorly selected tenants may never be good tenants you can grow with)
2. transparency (being easily seen as reputable, fair and honest in valued delivered)
3. quality of your communications with tenants (are your communications direct, explicit, understood, responsive and helpful?)
4. easy 24/7 availability of helpful online resources they can access anywhere as they’re interested to know something, such as their lease and obligations or unit maintenance
5. how you express yourself in person or online (the tone, phrasing and words you use overpowers anything you say)
6. level of satisfaction they feel in renting from you (are you monitoring how they feel and move to remedy disappointments, and confirm good relations with them?)
7. experience with your staff and maintenance contractors (is their interaction with all staff positive, professional, with a tone of good customer service?)
8. whether you show genuine appreciation for them as your valued customers (do you honor, thank, and reward them for being your customer?)

Don’t forget to read our posts on tenant management tips, what tenants want, tenant selection tips, tenant property manager communications, tenant party ideas, tenant retention tips, how to cheer up tenants, and how ot make tenants happy.

What Intent is Behind Your Communications?

As you can see, tenant satisfaction and the tenant experience often does correspond to good communications. Tenants will know your intent by how you communicate with them.  It’s instinctive with people.  But even good communications has to be backed with real and demonstrated value.

Which means, if you’re delivering good value, it’s important to convey that subtly in your communications (avoid too much saying or bragging, but rather reveal in real life accounts how your service has improved tenants lives.

And this is where the engagement topics come into play.

Engagement with tenants, owners and the public can happen many ways — via word of mouth, advertising, direct communications via text, email, property management portal or your website. Engagement is also happens via staff in how they’re trained to make tenants feel special and wanted.

Active engagement then is proof that tenants are valued. When a landlord or property management company ignores tenants or association members, it denotes disapproval and rejection.

14 Ideas for Landlords to Become More Engaging

Here’s some ideas to help you become a more engaging and positive. These will help with better tenant mood, cooperation, community spirit and lease renewals at higher rent prices. Yes, inevitably, the bottom line gets a boost.

• create events that build positive engagement and interaction (breaking the ice, help them relax and enjoy their lifestyle, help them feel good about themselves as renters, and enjoy interactions with others).
• publish positive comments, news, and insights about rental living and their community/neighborhood (help them let go of negative attitudes about where they live)
• publish blogs or newsletter pieces as though you were a new development manager who offers a special experience
• build or offer new amenities and services that show you’re progressing and are trying to create greater comfort for them
• use a digital management platform to automate your work, including accounting and rent payments (most renters love automation and digital service delivery)
• put an emphasis on maintenance and eliminate the worst aspects of your house, apartment or development (sore spots that damage your brand)
• infuse your communication quietly and subtly with phrasing that encourages them to participate and want a better living experience (the only thing they’d be willing to pay a higher rent price for)
• infuse your communication quietly and subtly about the value of staying in your unit, building, neighborhood (marketing your value proposition so they don’t think about leaving)
• be involved in social media to show you’re modern and progressive and are looking for ways to improve your tenants comfort and experience
• keep all messages via any channel simple, clear and positive
• use visuals (photos, videos and nice illustrated graphics make a huge emotional impace, far beyond words) to convey your message of happy living, community, inclusiveness, and other positive values.
• hold tenant parties with giveaways — your generosity is a certain indication of how much you value them. Valued things such as gift cards, movie/gallery/zoo tickets make a stronger and healthy emotional message.
• make mentions of your company mission statement to show you’re aligned with your professional aims as a landlord (that you’re not in it just for a profit, yet do make them aware that you’re fighting to stay profitable). Good, well-chosen tenants respect the profit motive, while poorly selected tenants don’t).
• train maintenance staff and other contractors/vendors to speak well of you and your company – tenants do pay attention to the small talk and whether the people you hired feel good about you — big impact which means you’ve been validated and will get more cooperation in future.

Build your company brand — it colors everything you do in the tenant’s eyes.  Your brand needs development and marketing effort. Your brand is your reputation and value offer which needs to be thoughtful and well executed.

See these insightful posts on the topics of tenant engagement and communications: Good Tenant Management | What do Tenants Want | How to Select Great Tenants | How to Improve Tenant Property Manager Communication | How to Retain Tenants | Increase tenant lease renewals | How to Improve the Renter experience | Tenant Experience Strategy | SaaS Tenant Screening Tools | Toronto Property Management | Improve Property Maintenance