The Benefits of Receiving Feedback from Tenant Surveys

If you want to operate a successful property management or real estate business, you should always want to know what is working for your business and what you need to improve. You can have all of the information you need to run a successful business, but you need to know how your clients feel.Online client surveys are one of the easiest ways to discover what your clients think.

In order to improve, you need to know what the people who pay your bills think about your brand. Surveying your clients gives them with the chance to make their voice heard. With their feedback, you then have the opportunity to make changes. Online surveys can help you to build, maintain and even repair your brand.

A client satisfaction survey helps you discover how your clients feel about the level of service that your company provides. If you ask the right questions, you can learn what it will to get your tenant to renew their lease agreement.

Have you ever calculated the annual expenses associated with your tenant turnover? Obviously, keeping a tenant costs way less money than finding a new one. Lower tenant turnover equals higher profits. Tenant turnover also costs you money for repairs and to market the property.

Advice for creating tenant surveys

It's a bad idea to ask yes or no questions without providing the opportunity to elaborate on each response. Keep survey lengths to a minimum and consider a rating scale for some questions, such as 1 – 10.  A few free tools and resources to create surveys are SurveyMonkey, SurveyPlanet and Zoho.

To help you get started, some client survey ideas are for move-ins, move-outs, maintenance follow ups, annual satisfaction surveys, lease renewals and possibly new services you are considering in order to gauge interest.

You should also consider asking questions about the following topics:

1. Your company & staff: Responsiveness, accessibility and professionalism

2. Maintenance: Requests, repairs and follow ups after maintenance is completed

3. Leasing: Is the tenant considering renewing their lease or property management contract? What are their reasons for not renewing?

The key to guaranteeing that you receive candid feedback is to offer a high level of confidentiality. You will then be able to gather the data compiled from a survey and your clients have no fear of any retaliation for their candor.

What happens after the survey?

When you create a survey, you need to carve out time to evaluate the answers provided. The best advice that a business owner may get can sometimes be information that initially angers or hurts them. You should have an open minded approach when analyzing the results. Keep in mind that your clients pay your bills, so fundamentally, you work for them. If necessary, make recommended changes based on the feedback you receive. It can be detrimental to your property management business to send a survey and then simply ignore the results.

By requesting your client’s feedback and making necessary adjustments, you will ultimately increase your company’s bottom line and competitive market position. If you are responsive to your client surveys, this also creates a positive word of mouth and buzz on the street.

So why are you not doing surveys? My question to you is this, is there any reason you should not be conducting satisfaction surveys?

Something as simple as a client survey can quickly help you increase your profitability.

Jimmy Warlick works in the sales department at Propertyware and has been with RealPage for seven years. He has worked in the property management industry for 12 years. Before joining Propertyware, Jimmy served in the United States Air Force in Europe and also worked for the U.S. Justice Department. Jimmy is a University of Texas at Dallas graduate and calls the DFW area his home, where he lives with his wife and two daughters.