What’s the main reason renters renew their lease? It’s not the appearance or condition of their unit, or more parking. And it’s not perks and parties.
If you said service and maintenance, you win!
Jen Piccotti, senior vice president of education and consulting at SatisFacts Research, said maintenance plays a critical, yet often overlooked role in the lease renewal process, according to Property Management Insider.
Piccotti, who has over a decade of experience in customer loyalty, quality assurance programs and process efficiency, explained that successful property management teams can improve retention by suggesting ways residents can solve common problems on their own.
Indeed, there’s a growing trend in the residential property business, especially at high-end properties, in which financially-sophisticated and internet-savvy residents are demanding to do more of the property management functions themselves.
No, they’re not willing to mow the lawn or clean out the gutters. But they do want the ability to go online and make a payment, make a service request, look at their lease renewal and validate their payment history.
We call that the “self-service tenant.” And the more they’re willing to do themselves, the more that reduces your operational costs.
Property managers are now answering that call. They’re making it easier for their tenants to make payments and service requests online. SKYLINE Property Management Solution for Residential and Multi-Family Properties from Anton Systems helps you do just that.
SKYLINE is used by thousands of residential property managers and owners to control cash flow from operations and streamline operations and reporting, so it’s perhaps better known for its financial accounting and reporting capabilities.
But it has other powerful features that enable tenants to do more themselves.
“SKYLINE has other powerful features that enable tenants to do more themselves.”
SKYLINE includes a facilities maintenance and work order processing function with tenant web-work requests, enabling tenants to submit requests online. Property managers can easily create detailed work orders and schedule and track routine preventive maintenance tasks. The module dispatches both in-house and contracted service calls and records and tracks all job activity, including time and material expenses.
Once the order is completed, the system identifies whether the job needs to be billed to the resident or to the property owner. Billable service calls and fees are automatically posted into SKYLINE accounts receivable and accounts payable.
Additionally, SKYLINE’s Tenant Relations Management (TRM) module tracks and manages all past, present and future tenant interactions, which are automatically date and time stamped.
While perks aren’t the No. 1 reason tenants renew their leases, they are important. SKYLINE can help you there, too.
It can help you build an amenities value package to help you stand out against the competition. It includes a built-in amenities-based pricing tool, which enables you to highlight the features your property offers rather than hiding them in your pricing. Select the amenities you feel are important to your market, then assign a value to each amenity. SKYLINE automatically adds this to the base rent for each unit.