Building positive relationships with your tenants is an important part of working as a property manager. There are a lot of ways that you can do this, where you can build trust and cultivate satisfaction, but one that you might consider is holding tenant events. This is one of the easiest (and, ideally, the most fun) ways to have your team mingle with the people that work in your building.
Consider Seasonal Tenant Events on Your Property
Tenant events bring everyone from the property together (literally). It’s a sort of gift from you to them, presenting something outside of everyone’s routines in order to have a good time and socialize. Of course, before everyone can enjoy your event, you need to actually set it up… which requires some thought and consideration.
What kind of event does your budget allow? You don’t want to overspend, after all, particularly if money is a little tight. However, you also don’t want to spend so little that the occasion is forgettable. Find a happy medium by consulting the rest of your team for fun, but affordable, ideas. After determining your costs, you should nail down a date where most people will be available to attend. Steer clear of any holidays and perhaps even poll your tenants to determine the highest possible turnout.
Once all that is decided, you need a focus for the occasion. “In more ways than not, you’re trying to network,” so don’t advertise the gathering as anything except what it is. You want your tenants to feel as if they can trust and rely on you, and that will develop even in a more relaxed setting. This extends into your promotion of the event. In your efforts to circulate information, “communicate the event details early, regularly, and often” using whichever regular method of communication you and your tenants have. The last thing you want is to speak with tenants later and to hear them say that they didn’t realize there had even been an event!
Finally, in terms of the planning of tenant events, you need to decide ahead of time how you will be able to determine whether or not you were successful. You may consider sending out survey following the occasion in order to get feedback in peoples’ own words. Of course, this is just one method of many, so consult your team to see what they think (about this step and all the others) before making any final decisions.
Now that the more ‘technical’ details have been ironed you, you need to decide what the actual theme of the gathering will be. A big part of this depends on the time of year, since you obviously wouldn’t want to host an outdoor event in the middle of winter. This would be a better season for something like a cocktail hour, where you provide food, drinks, and changes to meet and mingle with other tenants and management alike. Also, if it’s around or before the holidays, providing some kind of charity drive will show that you are generous and will help to foster positive vibes within the property.
In warmer weather, consider a barbecue in whatever outdoor space you have to offer. People love to be outside, and particularly if you or one of your staff are good chefs, you can offer delicious morsels for those who work on your property. It’s a great way to highlight amenities like a rooftop deck or a pool, if you have something like those to offer. If not, then consider inviting a handful of food trucks to gather outside, so that you get a similar feeling of a social function without having to provide the snacks yourself. Food trucks are still very popular these days and will surely delight your tenants.
To put it simply, there is a wide variety of options in how you can run successful tenant events. The most important thing to keep in mind is that you’re doing this for them, so make sure to keep that focus while planning and implementing. You want to provide the most efficient property management services possible for these people. Part of that is the less-fun, business aspects of your job. To make all this easier, consider investing in SKYLINE Property Management and Accounting Software. This system will manage the nitty gritty of your tenant information so that you can focus more easily on building interpersonal relationship with them.