We live in a world that is now fully on-demand. Groceries, alcohol, cleaning services and driving services can all be at your front door with a simple swipe on your phone. The bottom line is this all makes life easier.
However, in the residential real estate world, while it’s a customer-first industry, this culture is not as present as it should be. Sure, a property management team or landlord might be speedy in addressing maintenance issues, getting important emails out to tenants and moving through the leasing process, but all of that is expected with quality service. Tenants want their residential experiences to not only be high-quality, but also match the other life experiences. Giving tenants on-demand options is a great way to meet and surpass those expectations.
Changing The Residential Experience
Everyone wants to live the good life. However, maintenance problems, unresponsive management and complaints about other tenants are all problems that can really ruin tenant life. An on-demand approach to building management ensures that tenants get better experiences.
Take maintenance issues, for example. We can somewhat liken maintenance to trying to get the doctor on the phone: It’s often wrought with a lot of phone tag and follow-up, all leading to immense frustration. Many tenants also feel like they don’t have visibility into the maintenance process, often concerning themselves with questions about whether maintenance got their request and how much progress has been made. By incorporating a more on-demand feature, like a chatbot that automatically creates a work order and updates the tenant until the request is completed, into your maintenance equation, you can skirt the issue of having unhappy tenants. The last thing a tenant wants is to be absorbed in a maintenance issue while at work, so automating the process serves to take all the angst away and give them the visibility they want.
The collections process can also be a sore point for tenants if it’s not on-demand enough. People want paperless — the battle to get rent money in the mail in time is too much work, and people don’t want to do things manually anymore. Manual work also requires so much more lead time than digital processes. Find a solution that is right for your business, and set up an e-payment system, ideally with a mobile application, so that tenants can pay on the go, whenever they want. Most people, especially in the rental demographic, which tend to be the younger generations, pay their credit card bills online. Why should rent be any different? Digital collections make your tenants’ lives just that much easier.
Getting A New Lease On … Leasing
Property management professionals also need to think broader than just the tenant experience. In the rental market, even with high occupancy rates, there still exists steady turnover, so marketing vacant units and securing new and top-notch tenants is still a huge part of the focus for real estate professionals. Given that, it’s as important to give on-demand service to prospective tenants as it is to current tenants.
If people inquire about a vacant unit and don’t receive an answer in a timely fashion, what is keeping them from moving on to other units? This is especially a concern in a tight market, where renters may feel pressure to sign a lease for the first option that they like.
Look for solutions that help expedite the leasing process to make it faster for all involved. A great way to do this is to identify where you’re lacking in the leasing process. Are you great at marketing the unit and getting prospects in, but not great at getting people to commit to leases or turn them around fast enough? If that’s the case, implement digital leasing processes that can be completed on mobile with the click of a button. Taking this approach to let prospects sign and complete a lease agreement while potentially while still viewing the unit is not only great for them, but it also makes it less likely that they’ll walk out of the showing and look for other vacant units on the market.
Another difficulty prospects face in the apartment hunt is that so many of their queries on open units go unanswered. The fact of the matter is, depending on the size of a property management portfolio or the number of vacant units available, sometimes there is simply not enough time available to quickly respond to all queries or to keep track of them all. Unfortunately, that’s like losing money that’s right in front of you. Consider turning the query process over to technology, where human-augmented systems can automatically respond to queries around the clock. These are similar to chatbots, but respond much more like a human would so that the prospects may not even be able to tell they are not speaking with a person. Instant responses also make prospects excited to move forward, and they feel early on that their needs are being met.
Ultimately, there are a number of different ways in which property management teams can enhance the tenant/prospective tenant experience. Determine where you think your tenants will benefit most from on-demand additions, and then create a plan for implementation. The on-demand world is saturating every aspect of modern-day life. Don’t let residential real estate be the odd man out when it comes to this.