Tenant experience can make or break the durability of your assets. Find out how to nurture a positive tenant experience that secures a healthy ROI, and how technology can help you achieve that.
Tenant experience describes the way tenants interact with your properties. The quality of those interactions can have a major impact on business.
Negative tenant interactions can lead to high churn and losses for your portfolio; positive ones have the opposite effect: boosting retention and improving lifetime value.
A range of tenant experience software exists to help you meet various goals within your portfolio. But do you really need this software?
Read on to find out some benefits of using a tenant experience app.
Engagement is the bedrock of tenant experience. Whether you’re announcing a fire drill, or organising a seasonal event, keeping your residents informed encourages community engagement.
When engaged in their community, tenants attach more value to it. This situation benefits both parties. Tenants gain a greater sense of belonging and an attachment to their environment, while landlords and asset managers enjoy higher tenant retention across their portfolio.
Put simply, engaged tenants are happier tenants, and happy tenants are less likely to churn. Moreover, they’re more likely to pay a premium for additional services.
At least, that’s the ideal picture. But it’s not always that easy.
If you’ve ever managed a property (and if you’re reading this, we can assume that you have), you’ll know the challenges of keeping tenants informed.
More often than not, the information needed to maintain a smooth tenant experience is scattered, inconsistent and confusing.
Worse yet, the process of reporting maintenance issues, booking amenities or requesting services is rigid and stressful.
This leaves tenants alienated, uninformed, disengaged and more likely to churn.
One way to make your tenants more engaged is ensuring that they have a voice within their community.
How do you do that? By providing them a means to organise events, voice concerns, resolve issues and request assistance without having to contend with faceless and dehumanising customer service processes.
If you want to enhance tenant experience, feedback is crucial. It helps managers identify blindspots and gauge the needs and desires of tenants.
Moreover, it shows tenants that they’re being listened to and helps to lower churn rates.
Tenant surveys enable you to collect tenant feedback, gauge the mood within your properties and collect data you can act on.
Many asset managers are using tenant communication apps to send surveys to their entire tenant ecosystem in just a few clicks.
They can keep their finger on the pulse of their properties, and get a clear sense of tenants' thought and feelings. 
Communicating with tenants is the key to a quality tenant experience. However, it’s rarely done right—scattered instead across WhatsApp groups or emails.
Ideally, communication should be consolidated into one full service platform. That way, staying informed simply requires tapping into one intuitive source of truth instead of several disorganised ones.
That 'one intuitive source of truth' could be a tenant experience platform that helps you communicate with your tenants in an easy, fast and consistent way.
Most tenant experience apps let you target communications: select which audiences see which messages, so residents don’t get overloaded with messages that aren’t relevant to them.
Say you’re doing maintenance work on the east wing of your residential property. Instead of messaging the entire property with messages that are only relevant to a small part, you can select to send only those tenants living in the affected area.
No one wants to be bombarded with stuff that’s not relevant, avoiding it helps improve the tenant experience.
Tenant experience software declutters tenant-landlord communication.
Any tenant can post a message, which enables dynamic communication through comments and nested replies.
Create fluid channels that your tenants can follow or unfollow based on their interests. Not only does this ensure that you’re sending relevant messages to the right audience, it also prevents burdening your tenants with ‘notification overload.'
When you’re busy chasing emails, pushing projects to their finish line or drowning in a mountain of paperwork, it’s easy to become detached from the more fulfilling and productive aspects of your work.
Aspects like enhancing net operating incomewhile increasing profitability, or simply ensuring you’re delivering the best possible experience to customers. 
Tenant communication apps can free you from operational bottlenecks that stop you doing the best job you can do.
For example, a platform that streamlines your issue reporting workflow can greatly improve satisfaction for tenants and landlords alike by getting leaks, faulty escalators, defect heating systems or any number of issues resolved quickly and without friction.
Moreover, important documents like lease contracts and health and safety protocols can be stored securely on the app so you don’t have to rely on paper copies and document management becomes easier.
Once you’ve fixed things like communication and engagement, your tenants will start to see more value in your product.
That’s a great opportunity to open up new revenue streams by offering extra, high quality services that deliver convenience. 
Think cleaning services, bike rental or resident discounts for businesses within mixed-use properties. You can also offer amenities like co-working spaces and gym memberships.
Any decent tenant experience software will feature a booking module whereby tenants can book services and pay for them directly in the app. This takes the weight off of property managers, since they don’t need to spend a lot of time processing payments and bookings.
Not only does this improve the tenant experience, it also nurtures a more vibrant tenant ecosystem where both residents and local businesses benefit.
Tenant experience is important in today’s real estate landscape, where tenants look not only at the quality of the property on offer, but the services that come with it, and the value those services create.
Why not get ahead of the curve and embrace tenant experience platforms today?
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