Managing properties efficiently requires property and facility managers to stay on the ball at all times. It’s essential that they have easy access to information and changes regarding the property. This allows them to deal with issues and maintain a stellar property and tenant experience.
But, with many properties in their portfolios and even more tenants per building, clear communication can be a major challenge. Here’s how you can address it.
The Challenges Of Property Management Communication
There are many factors that may complicate communication between property managers and tenants. Central in most of these factors is the kind of channel you use to communicate with tenants. A lot of property companies opt for email communication (or multiple channels) and that’s where many challenges arise.
It’s easy for tenants to miss communication when you share updates via email. They likely use the same email for business or work, social activities, and their personal lives. As a result, your emails get mixed up with everyone else’s.
The same goes for the property manager or owner. You may find your inbox gets inundated with tenant emails, potential clients, service requests, communication with service providers, and more. And that’s for all the properties you manage!
Having all communications on one, unorganised channel makes it difficult for both tenants and managers to keep track of information. Both parties can miss track of important updates and responses or requests. As a result, it’s difficult to ensure you address all matters around the tenant’s experience.
It also makes it hard to keep track of what’s happening on the property, communicate about different issues and topics, and follow up with the right people.
A Centralised, Clear Communication Solution
The challenges highlighted above can harm your relationship with your tenants and other partners like service providers. In turn, it will impair your reputation as a competent property manager.
An ideal way to handle communication and eliminate the issues that arise from messy, mixed-up email management is to use a dedicated communication portal.
Rather than handling all your business’ management from one email, which can be overwhelming, a communication portal would be solely for your property management communication.
With a dedicated portal, you can start chats with tenants, reception services, and service providers. It should also provide notifications for respective chats so you never miss a response. Emails can act as notifications but then messages can get lost in the hundreds of other emails you have in your inbox. A portal helps you organise and maintain clear communication.
A centralised solution doesn’t just simplify your communication. It can include all the important information that tenants need to know about the property and upcoming renovations or other property updates.
Tenants should be able to use the portal to contact you about service requests, access rights to the building, etc.
These capabilities of a tenant portal help you address the main challenges of email communication. You can organise communications more effectively and never lose sight of updates and changes. The portal also acts as a central space to track engagements and make sure you address all issues from tenants and other stakeholders. Nothing gets lost in the mix.
Important Features In A Tenant Portal
Here are some of the features you should look for when deciding on a tenant portal for your facility:
- Two-way communication
- Bulk announcements in one click
- Mobile tenant guides to help tenants navigate the portal
- Engagement of service providers
- Building portfolios with analytics
- User-friendly, mobile interface
- Updated tenant information
- Real-time updates and notifications
- Mobile and offline use
- Key and access management
- Space inspections
- Reporting and analytics
These help you manage your portfolios more effectively and maintain consistent and clear communication.
The Benefits Of A Clear View Of All Communications
Great tenant experience starts with effortless communication. These are some of the areas that improving your communication can enhance.
Improved Tenant Satisfaction
Good communication ensures your tenants remain satisfied and happy. Property managers spend about 40% of their time addressing tenant issues. Each touchpoint with a tenant must be positive in order to ensure a positive tenant experience.
Swift and efficient channels make sure that you can address concerns before tenants get frustrated. It minimises conflict and disagreements between tenants and your team, too.
Happy Staff & Partners
Tenants’ satisfaction has a direct impact on the happiness of your facility employees or staff. Disgruntled or dissatisfied tenants can affect your staff’s satisfaction with their work. This can impact your property management company’s turnover rate and employee retention.
Considering the high cost of employee turnovers, it can put a sizeable dent in your profits. Clear communication can improve how your staff do their work and, in turn, their dynamic with the tenants.
Better Tenant Retention
It’s not just employee retention that you should worry about. Enhanced communications also improve tenant retention and lifetime value.
The more satisfied your tenants are, and the better the service you provide to them, the higher the chances they will stick with your facility.
Swift, easy and clear communications can encourage your tenants to stick around for longer.
Increased Referrals
Referrals are a huge part of the property game. If tenants enjoy your facilities and service, they will tell their contacts about it. If they know someone looking for a space or property management services, they will draw from their experience with you.
Your relationships with your current clients have a direct bearing on your potential future clients. So, you should also view your communication efforts as a tool in your marketing, client attraction and brand strategy.
Enhanced Efficiency
Overall, mastering your communication will boost productivity and efficiency. It will bring issues to your attention quickly and ensure you never miss anything from tenants or other partners.
You will also have better control over issue tracking so you can guarantee all problems get resolved.
Final Thoughts
Keeping tenants, service providers and other stakeholders in the loop is vital in property management. Clear communication impacts the tenant experience and tenant satisfaction. It affects your reputation and the longevity of your tenant relationships. That’s why it’s important to stay organised and communicate clearly with the aid of a good tenant communication channel.
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:
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.
