A tenant portal is ultimately there to enhance the relationship between you, the property manager, and your tenants. A good tenant portal should encourage and facilitate communication. It should also make it easy for your tenants to keep in touch and stay up to date with everything happening on the property. Providing a convenient and accessible tenant portal is therefore the key to a great tenant experience.
While each tenant portal is different, there are some essential features every tenant portal needs for it to be effective. Below, we outline five important features every tenant portal must have to ensure seamless tenant communications.
A fundamental feature of a tenant portal is that it allows your tenants to reach out to you or the service providers on the property and ask questions.
Although some questions may be quite common, others are not. Each tenant is different, and you cannot predict every question they may have and cover everything with FAQs or with a chatbot.
So, your tenant portal must facilitate messaging so that your tenants can reach out and get the answers they are looking for.
Your tenant portal must allow your tenants to access all important information and documents pertaining to their rental agreement and the property. This includes, for example, a copy of the lease and any necessary information about rental terms. This information must be easily accessible by the tenant at all times.
Your tenant portal must enable your tenants to easily report issues to property management. Your tenants should also be able to report issues to the receptionist and service providers (such as maintenance, facilities management, and the security company) when necessary.
Note that it is not enough for your tenants to simply be able to report issues. Your tenant portal should also allow your tenants to track any progress made in response to the issues they have raised. Further, they should be able to follow up on issues.
A tenant portal should manage and track key and access rights. It should keep track of which individuals have access to what parts of the building. Moreover, your tenant portal should allow your property managers to log key and access rights orders as well as key returns or handovers.
Communication breakdowns often occur in the context of commercial real estate because tenants simply do not know who to contact about certain issues. They may reach out to the wrong person and important information can fall between the cracks.
Therefore, your tenant portal must enable your tenants to easily contact the right people in the property management organisation. This includes receptionists and service providers.
When done right, a tenant portal does wonders for tenant communication. In turn, this improves tenant involvement and elevates your property brand.
If you are considering to implement a centralised communications channel for all your tenants in a specific location, making sure that the portal you choose has at least the features listed above is a must.
If your organisation is looking for a 360° tenant experience tool to involve all employees, service providers and tenants to improve the quality of your operations, have a look at the 30-day free trial of Falcony Tenant Portal:
We are building the world's first operational involvement platform. Our mission is to make the process of finding, sharing, fixing and learning from issues and observations as easy as thinking about them and as rewarding as being remembered for them.
By doing this, we are making work more meaningful for all parties involved.
More information at falcony.io.