Tenants experience your building and its facilities in a way that you can’t. They know when issues come up that affect the functionality of your property and what changes could improve the facility for them and others.
But how can you access this insight if tenants do not report issues or share their concerns? What do low reporting rates mean for you and how can you improve them?
What Do Low Reporting Rates Mean?
Low reporting rates could point to three challenges faced by tenants in sharing their concerns.
The first is that your tenants don’t know how to report issues, feedback or questions to you. Have you set up clear methods for them to share their concerns?
The second challenge is also linked to the reporting channel. Often, property managers opt to use email for all tenant communication. Tenants can find email reporting tedious as it makes it hard to follow the report's progress.
Lastly, tenants may feel like their reports are going into a “black hole”. They don’t see the progress of the issue or they find email unresponsive or sluggish, especially as you can easily miss reports in the large volume of emails you receive. As a result, they don’t see a point in reporting.
How To Fix Low Reporting Rates
Fixing reporting issues isn't a quick thing to do. However, you can start by implementing measures that will encourage your tenants to start taking up a more active role in reporting what they see.
Here are 5 ways to make make your tenants feel heard:
1. Meet Your Tenants In Tenant Meetings
Building a direct relationship with your tenants is key. Holding effective tenant meetings helps build this personal connection and develops trust and recognition. As a result, tenants may feel more comfortable reporting issues as they feel like they can speak more openly.
Meetings also have more immediacy than email communication, which assures tenants that you’re aware of the issues.
2. Conduct Surveys
Conduct regular surveys to gauge tenant satisfaction. These can be anonymous, allowing tenants with more reservations about reporting to do so freely.
Regular surveys also keep you updated on recent or current issues.
3. Listen To Feedback
Both the meetings and surveys are wonderful platforms to receive feedback. When tenants share, do not go on the defensive or ignore their reports. Listen, ask questions, and give your tenants enough space and time for feedback.
4. Take Action
From the feedback you collect, you need to make improvements. Tenants will become frustrated and disillusioned with reporting if they don't see results.
Implement actions to improve on the points they make. As you take action, share your progress with tenants to show them that you take their reports seriously.
5. Adopt A Channel
A centralised tenant portal can make all the above steps easier to do. With your channel, you can send out announcements, collect survey forms, and create transparency around the reporting progress. This makes it easy and convenient for tenants to report any issues and therefore will improve reporting rates.
Final Thoughts
Tenants represent a pool of usable knowledge and perspective. Your role as a property manager is to leverage their experiences and input by creating ways for them to share both with you. With their insight, you can improve your facilities for the best tenant experience. And all this can be done by making reporting processes easier.
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.
