The beginning of the year is a great time to recharge your professional life by taking a look at what’s working and what can be improved with your rental business. One of the most convenient ways to accomplish this task is to provide satisfaction surveys to your staff and your tenants.
Tenant Satisfaction Surveys
Tenant surveys reveal what your renters really think about your property and management style. You can discover their perception of the community and neighborhood, amenities, customer service, maintenance, and management.
When you ask and listen to your renters’ feedback provided on a tenant survey, you will be able to increase renewal rates and improve occupancy at your properties. You will also have to opportunity to build your reputation in the community.
What To Ask on a Tenant Survey
Your renters will have the chance to provide anonymous feedback about your property and management.
As a property manager or landlord you will have the chance to examine and change or maintain your behavior to improve your tenants’ rental experience based on their feedback.
You can ask questions about the leasing experience, the interior and exterior of the property, management team, maintenance staff, and maintenance.
Consider asking questions to help you answer the following topics:
The Lease Experience
- How did you find the rental vacancy?
- Was the staff helpful in explaining lease terms and conditions?
- Did you feel like your personal information and money was handled securely?
- How could the leasing process be improved?
The Property
- How do you feel about the appearance and condition of the following areas of the property:
- Interior rooms
- Exterior features
- Common areas
- Safety features
- Community features
- Parking
- Are there any in-unit amenities that you wish you had but don’t?
- Would you be willing to accept a rent-increase in exchange for this in-unit feature?
Management Team
- What is your perception of the management team in the following areas:
- Availability
- Responsiveness
- Problem resolution
- Communication
- Friendliness
Maintenance Staff
- What is your perception of the management team in the following areas:
- Availability
- Responsiveness
- Problem resolution
- Communication
- Friendliness
Maintenance
- Do you feel like maintenance and work orders are handled well?
- Ease of submitting work orders
- Work orders handled in a timely manner
These are just some topics you can cover in your tenant survey. It is important to remember length when conducting a survey. The longer the survey, the less likely it will be completed.
It might be tempting to ask every question you have ever wanted to know in regards to your property and management but it could be more effective to keep it simple.
Tenant Survey Format
Yes and no questions are the most straightforward to answer, but they won’t be much help when you are looking for how you can improve problem areas.
Consider a mix of open-ended questions and a rating scale for your tenant survey format.
A rating scale gives your tenants the option to select a single rating along an equally spaced continuum of possible choices, in fact, a lot of customer satisfaction surveys use this type of rating scale to evaluate customer experience and opinions.
What Time of Year is Best for conducting tenant surveys?
Asking your tenants to participate in an annual tenant survey, gives you an opportunity to administer multiple forms at once and compile all the data at one time.
How To Conduct Surveys
Online surveys let you reach multiple tenants at once and are great for annual surveys at multifamily properties.There are several tools online that provide easy ways to conduct inexpensive surveys. Theses services offer useful reporting features to better analyze responses and take action.
Companies like Survey Monkey give great advice on types of questions to ask, which responses are the most useful for your industry, and even have a free version to create and administer online surveys.
Other options include paper surveys that are returned to you via mail in or drop off.
Tenant Participation
A great way to get your tenants to provide valuable feedback on your tenant survey is to offer an incentive or reward to tenants who anonymously participate.
Types of survey incentives could be rent discounts, gift cards, or raffle drawing for a new TV or tablet. You also need to properly promote the survey and your incentive to get the best return on responses.
The key is to keep responses anonymous so you still get honest feedback from your tenants. Whether you have a physical form that tenants fill out or use an online platform, you should be able to get anonymous participation. You can provide participants with a code after participating that lets them confirm involvement without revealing their specific answers so they can be included in the reward
What To Do With The Information
The time and energy you put into conducting your survey will only pay off if you actually use the feedback to improve your rental management, property and business. Surveys can help you evaluate your performance as a manager, landlord and property in order to stay competitive and keep occupancy high.
Related Reading For You:
What Owners Want to Know – FAQ From Rental Property Owners
By asking more open-ended questions, you’ll receive more honest, helpful opinions on which to base your decisions.
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