4 Tips for Tenant Retention: How to Keep Good Tenants

4 Tips for Tenant Retention: How to Keep Good Tenants

Finding (and keeping) good tenants is an important part of maintaining cash flow as a Property Manager. But even the best tenants might end up leaving if you don’t make an effort to maintain positive tenant relations. That’s right: Tenant retention depends in large part on how you set the stage for your relationship with tenants.

As it turns out, communication is a huge part of maintaining a positive relationship with your tenants. In fact, a failure to respond quickly to tenant requests is the number one reason tenants give for being unhappy with their Property Manager: 35% of renters who report being unhappy say the reason for their dissatisfaction is that the Property Manager doesn’t respond to requests fast enough.

That can be frustrating to hear, especially when your response time expectations don’t line up with your tenants’ expectations. But regardless of whether you’re on the same page, these four tips can help you maintain excellent tenant relations and boost your tenant retention rate.

1. Agree on Communication Preferences and Respond in a Timely Manner

People are used to communicating through various channels — texting, phone calls, emails, and apps. And while our tenant survey found that texting is the most popular method for communicating with Property Managers, only 48% of tenants consider it best, which is fewer than half of tenants. Another 28% like email, 13% prefer phone calls, and 10% like in-person conversations.

To outline the best methods for communication, it’s a good idea to include communication preferences or guidelines in your welcome letter to tenants. Here’s an example:

To ensure the fastest possible response, please use the following communication channels for the given scenarios:

• Phone calls to report urgent information (e.g., water gushing out of a pipe).
• Text to ask non-urgent questions, especially late at night.
• Email to communicate information that multiple parties need to know.
• Portal to submit maintenance tickets or request changes to your lease.

It’s also a good idea to talk through your preferences with your tenant in person so they can ask questions about how you’d prefer various situations be communicated.

However, once you find out which communication method your tenant prefers, be sure to stick to that one to avoid confusion. It’s also essential that you respond to tenant requests in a timely manner. As outlined above, poor response times (or a lack of response) will damage your tenant retention success.

2. Set Up a System for Tracking Maintenance Requests

If you’re hoping to boost your tenant retention rates, look no further than your maintenance system. The No. 2 reason tenants cite for not renewing a lease is that the property isn’t well maintained — roughly 12% of tenants report moving for this reason.

Responding to and dealing with maintenance requests for your property is crucial if you want to keep tenants happy and maintain the value of your property. Avail offers a maintenance tracking tool to make the process of reporting issues and tracking their repair easy and transparent for both you and your tenants.

Tenants can submit maintenance requests with photos and details at any time from their account. You can respond, keep them updated on repair progress, and log finalized receipts and notes of the repair that took place for your records.

3. Let Tenants Pay Their Rent Online

Allowing your tenants to pay their rent online using a method of their choice makes the rent payment process easier and more beneficial for them. Mailing checks is a hassle, and tenants miss out on perks like credit card points or boosting their credit scores through rent payments when you collect rent checks.

Platforms like Avail allow tenants to pay their rent with a bank account, debit card, or credit card. Rent payments can be set up in advance and automated through Autopay, and Avail sends both rent reminders and rent receipts so both parties have a record of what’s been paid.

Plus, tenants can boost their credit scores by paying rent on time through CreditBoost — an added perk that helps them improve their financial health while renting.

4. Offer Lease Renewal Incentives

If you have great tenants in your property, offering incentives for them to renew their lease can be a helpful way to encourage them to stay. Offering to maintain the current rent rate, agreeing to make certain updates to the unit, or even waiving certain fees (like parking) or discounting a month of rent can help incentivize tenants to stay in your property.

Of course, any invectives offered should make sense for your property financially and should be weighed against the potential cost of finding new tenants and the possibility of a rental vacancy. If you do decide to offer incentives and a lease renewal to tenants, make sure that the incentives are outlined in the new lease and agreed to by both parties.