Month: May 2021

Proactive Ways to Improve Resident Retention

You and your residents have been through an awful lot the past year. Many of them have been facing difficult situations personally, in their living arrangements and financially. Fortunately, well managed communities and their staffs have been with them every step of the way. 

This is something worth reminding them when it comes time to renew. 

Retention can and should be more than just reporting on renewed leases; your software should allow employees to chronicle activities by its staff members at the individual resident level that improve resident satisfaction. 

Is the past year a blur? Probably. Residents might only remember what’s been happening with them since that morning, or maybe just the past week. So, it’s important for your team track all those positive moments. 

Imagine. While on a service call, the maintenance tech notices a beeping smoke detector so they go ahead and take care of it much to the resident’s delight. Or maybe on the walk to the office, an onsite team member helps a resident clear snow on their windshield or help them manage packages. 

I know, these kinds of nice deeds happen all the time, but wouldn’t it be great if what your employees did to make their residents’ lives more pleasant was recorded in your property management software instead of being written on a note that was left in a drawer in the office somewhere and forgotten? 

When it comes time for residents to renew, have that documentation out and ready to show them. Not in an obnoxious way, but as a reminder. Residents often forget all the little things you might have done for them. 

During this past 15 months, you’ve built up a lot of emotional credit with them. 

This is a simple thing. It works. And while tracking these types of events, if the onsite team notices that some residents’ “good deed” files are empty, then those are the residents you should target. Look for ways to engage with them and to do something special. Really, retention efforts start the minute they first walk into their new apartment. 

This is something worth reminding them when it comes time to renew. 

Retention can and should be more than just reporting on renewed leases; your software should allow employees to chronicle activities by its staff members at the individual resident level that improve resident satisfaction. 

Is the past year a blur? Probably. Residents might only remember what’s been happening with them since that morning, or maybe just the past week. So, it’s important for your team track all those positive moments. 

Imagine. While on a service call, the maintenance tech notices a beeping smoke detector so they go ahead and take care of it much to the resident’s delight. Or maybe on the walk to the office, an onsite team member helps a resident clear snow on their windshield or help them manage packages. 

I know, these kinds of nice deeds happen all the time, but wouldn’t it be great if what your employees did to make their residents’ lives more pleasant was recorded in your property management software instead of being written on a note that was left in a drawer in the office somewhere and forgotten? 

When it comes time for residents to renew, have that documentation out and ready to show them. Not in an obnoxious way, but as a reminder. Residents often forget all the little things you might have done for them. 

During this past 15 months, you’ve built up a lot of emotional credit with them. 

This is a simple thing. It works. And while tracking these types of events, if the onsite team notices that some residents’ “good deed” files are empty, then those are the residents you should target. Look for ways to engage with them and to do something special. Really, retention efforts start the minute they first walk into their new apartment. 

A Fresh Look at Four Walls 

When trying to make up for move-outs, it’s too easy to just try to buy occupancy. You don’t have to. During my property management days, our goal was a 60 percent retention rate. That’s high, but it was our bar. If we fell behind, we’d know it and try to fix it. Dropping rents does not have to be the answer. 

Some say, during good times, if you’re 98 percent occupied, your rents are too low. But wait: You can be 98 percent occupied and also lead your market in rent if you do everything right. You have to remember that this is your residents’ biggest investment. It’s the place they call home. Doing the little things will add up to make that difference. 

In 2021, we could see big swings when it comes to year-over-year numbers. Many residents, at this point, are sick of staring at their same four walls and will want to move. 

When you meet with them, ask them what you can do for them. Don’t underestimate the emotional credit they help to build between you and your residents now – after everything you’ve both been through the past year. 

If you listen to what it is about their apartment home that has become stale in their eyes you might stumble upon ways to improve the environment.   Be supportive by offering alternatives to another month looking at those walls. Offer them a new environment. It might mean suggesting that they move to a different apartment in your community, or to a nearby sister community.  

Maybe there are some furniture discounts you can offer so they can make a few changes in their place. You have to get creative.  Maybe they want a view that is a little greener, so you let them pick from a catalog of patio plant options, plants that not only enhance their home they can take them with them.  If they now office from home, and are using their only bedroom due to space, you could purchase a murphy bed (a nice one not the cheapest one) that makes the room multifunctional but with space.  You can save money when you set up a corporate account with suppliers like wayfair.com.  

At the same time, you also have to do the math based on if you are a short-term property holder or a long-term one.  Incurring the turn and remarketing expense in the current year for a marginal effective rent increase could be the right call if you are looking to position the asset and need the rent growth.  If you are planning a long-term hold, getting a marginal rent increase but avoiding the turn and remarketing expense could be the right call for your cash management.  

If you budgeted for flatlined rent growth or a slight increase by unit type, now is the time to start paying close attention to your value propositions and the demand for individual units. No two units are exactly the same; otherwise, they would have the same unit number on the door. 

So, utilize unit-level demand and occupancy reporting to identify rent growth opportunities at the unit level. 

Your software should provide you with real-time visibility into the retention efforts along with rent growth analysis and forecasting at the unit type and the unit level.    

Good news: ResMan can help with this. 

Managing Lease Expirations

When it comes to lease expirations, the need to look more than 90 days out is crucial. Disregard for long-range lease expiration planning can result in a financially destructive situation for well-intended apartment property management teams. 

While revenue management software is a valuable tool in this process, having your leasing staff address lease expiration on a regular basis eases the anxiety that can come from an unnecessary sense of urgency created to fill vacancies at any cost. 

Historical leasing cycles changed in 2020 as a result of the pandemic. Our normal spring cycle was delayed by two to three months and it extended well into the fall, leaving the industry to question what leasing cycles will look like going forward. 

Coming soon: These adjusted cycles will affect forecasting. Even more, they will make expirations from last year’s lease-ups more demanding. 

Your 2020 actuals are both different and unique, and you can’t really use them for comparative basis in 2021. As for 2022, and it is too soon to know if it’s a safe assumption that you’ll be tracking back in line with 2018-2019 trends. 

Right now, you cannot afford to have a “set-it-and-forget-about-it” lease management strategy. Once you have determined the approach most suitable for lease management at your communities, you need technology to help you to execute your plan and to ensure compliance by the site staff. 

ResMan is here to help with that. 

Our property management software was designed during the height of the Great Recession to help operators navigate down market and aid in long-term planning to create more predictable revenue flows and maintain occupancy.  Our software worked for us when we needed it most, and ResMan can help achieve your financial goals today. 

Leasing Trends

We started seeing in our customer base as 2020 progressed that there was an unusually high number of month-to-month leases at their properties, many of which were carried through into the new year.  Traditional retention rates dropped from a lease term perspective; however, residents were staying in their apartment homes, and it was much because of uncertainty about health and safety, the economy, federal support programs and their own employment. 

We are well into what is considered a seasonal leasing cycle without fully understanding what the emerging trends will on the backend.   What will retention rates look like for 2021 as hold over month-to-months may be ready to make long-term decisions.  How do you balance the leasing activity while not losing sight of the long-term impact to occupancy and rent growth?    

How to Develop an Effective Lease Expiration Management Plan

The key to your asset’s financial stability and ability to make up lost margins could lie in your lease management plan.  

We learned the hard way about the impact of not having a lease management plan during the 1990s – before revenue management was developed – when a lot of communities didn’t manage lease expirations well.   I personally learned my lesson from a group of lease-up communities I was responsible for filling up.   They were in lease-up, and back then, it was all about filling that property up! But there was not much thought beyond that in terms of how to maintain it as a stabilized community. 

In one Dallas property, we had 200 leases expiring over an April to August period.  The property also faced competition from a new development across the street.  Assuming a 50 percent renewal rate, that could have and did result in just over 100 apartments that the site team had to lease and turn in three months.    The property didn’t have the marketing budget we had during lease-up and faced increasing expenses compared to a brand-new community.  That was really a wake-up call. 

From that day forward we had a well-developed lease expiration management plan, and eventually a great set of features in the ResMan Platform to help you develop and manage your plan.   A good lease expiration plan goes beyond tracking and reporting on lease expirations, it is proactive and positions the property, the specific unit types and the team for success.  

Every time our team met about what we were doing, it wasn’t only about that day, it was about how what we do will affect things 30-60-90 days from now. And when they achieve their leasing goals through this hard work, you’ve got to reward them for it. 

Having that kind of mindset put us at ease and helped us avoid lease expiration pile-up and instead drive ahead in an efficient and on a more predictable and profitable road ahead.  Controlling how and when units are available in the market, provides you the opportunity to maximize the rent potential and creates organic sense of urgency for the leasing staff and prosects to lease the units. The last thing you want is to be forced into displaying an unusually high number of a particular unit type (such as one-bedroom apartments) on your community website and ILS listings. If you do, that’s a red flag for prospects about whether they want to lease with you. 

Does revenue management help with this? Yes. But you can handle it without revenue management – it just takes more time and more work and the desire to learn. 

This is the time to teach your staff about pricing. They shouldn’t just be blindly offering whatever the revenue management software says you should that day. 

The federal government’s seemingly never-ending eviction moratorium made headline news twice this past week when a federal court ruled the national eviction moratorium was invalid, only to have another court issue reverse that decision for the time being. 

Apartment owners and operators continue to work to manage what’s coming next while many residents stay put in their apartments, owing millions of dollars in back rent.  

Debt is piling up all over the place for owners, too, and there is one solution that could make a difference – namely those needles in the recently allocated $50 billion-plus haystack from the Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) and The Consolidated Appropriations Act designed to support of eligible renters in need. 

I say needle because figuring out a way to get access to these funds is a 50-state journey, as each has its own criteria. Some operators have not even begun to look into the process which isn’t wise.  The allocated funding is first-come, first served.  

Solving this big problem is both good for apartment owners and their residents. And yes, you can “apply” on behalf of the delinquent renter and get those applications taken care of.  

Smaller owner-operators were impacted the most over the last 12 months; the smaller the portfolio the bigger the impact from uncollected rent.  For an owner with a smaller unit count, even a handful of residents who do not pay their rent for even one month put a strain on the owner. Several months of back owed debt starts to impact the owner’s ability to maintain the property, or worse, pay their mortgage.  But rent is rent, and income is income.  As of the end of 2020, the average delinquent renter owed approximately $5,000. So, even if you only have a handful of them, it pays to follow up and work out a payment plan for them. 

To Reach Residents, Try a New Approach 

I hear from operators that residents are ghosting them, even though they are trying to help them.  Sincere, direct and persistent resident communications is the key to building valuable and trusting relationships with those who are behind on rent.   

Those who have become chronically delinquent might not be responding – and in fact, avoiding you.  Consider referencing news updates about the eviction moratorium via text or email to create a new sense of urgency.  If standard outreach approaches, such as email or texting, aren’t effective, you need to consider new techniques to connect with them.   

Visiting them at their apartment home is a good first option. And for those who have regained employment – and keep 9-to-5 hours – it’s worth adjusting operating hours for some of your staff so that they can visit residents in the early evening, perhaps after 7 p.m. 

If this timing isn’t right, another option is contacting them by phone. Use the “emergency” contact number they gave you if you have to.  

Finally, during my more than 20 years in property management, including spanning three recessions, one successful approach was to leave residents notes that tell them they have a package to pick up at the leasing office. When they visit us, we give them a gift card (it’s the “package”), but more importantly, it creates an opportunity for the property manager to speak to the resident about qualifying for financial relief. 

It’s at this point when you can help them fill out the application. Many in the industry we speak to aren’t aware of how to apply for this aid. Each state has its own criteria and process. Here are a few resources to leverage: 

LeaseLock’s State-By-State Application List 
Emergency Rental Assistance FAQs 

Onsite staff are going to have a bigger “lift” on this – relying on the resident to know what to do is simply unrealistic.  If owners and operators are struggling to navigate the process to apply for funds, imagine how difficult it must be for the renters.  

Property management companies and their residents need to understand this and more importantly, how to access it. Companies’ corporate headquarters should appoint someone who is expert at navigating this renter support fund procedure.  

Don’t Let Your Residents ‘Shut Down’ on You 

It’s been my experience that when renters begin to fall behind on their rent, their tough times spiral downward, and they shut down. Don’t be surprised if they display helplessness to you, and then even give up. Unfortunately, they might decide it’s best to move out, but that’s not a good solution and will harm their overall economic viabilities.  

For another group of renters, they were receiving not one, but two stimulus checks. Some were getting significant bumps on top of their state unemployment benefits for a six-month period last year. And every day, they heard from the media that they didn’t have to pay rent because the moratorium protected them. 

Misinformed residents who “feel they are safe in place” because of the moratorium, based on what they see and hear in the news, are often the ones who are most in need of accessing federal support funds through their states. 

Unfortunately, some spent their stimulus dollars to pay down credit card bills or car payments. But really, their rent payment is the biggest check they have to write each month, and it should be a priority, or else their credit score and rental payment history will be hurt. 

Some residents simply take too much of a short-term outlook on their finances and not a long-term one. They might be thinking, “Oh, another stimulus is coming. I’m all right.” 

Owners: Don’t Have a False Sense of Security 

We see in the ResMan database that more residents engaged in rental payment option plans with their owners in the first quarter.  We saw 400 to 500 new repayment plans initiated. That’s a lot more than the .001 percent from a year ago. 

Owner/managers, too, shouldn’t feel they are above it all and don’t have to participate in (the name of the support plan). In recent months, their occupancy and collections might be increasing, but unpaid rent remains and it’s important to address it. 

“Oh, this wasn’t as painful as we thought it would be,” is not the right mentality in today’s market. Don’t let the same sense of urgency you had months ago, go away. You need to get engaged with your renters and be relentless. If they move out, it’s not good for you, either. 

One thing not to do is criticize your residents on social media. You should not be callous about their situations and not rush to judgment about their behaviors because you don’t know the whole story. Therefore, if you get a chance to do so, listen. 

The Impact of Apartment Turnover

Apartment turnover has one of the most significant impacts to your financial performance. When you consider the lost revenue from vacancy loss combined with the expense to turn and remarket the apartment, the impact to the bottom line increases with every turn. While it is equally important to focus on leasing activity, you cannot lose site of the impact of apartment turnover on your budgets and maintenance technicians.    

The cost of turning a unit in 2021 could be higher than the average cost from prior years as gas and the cost for materials are skyrocketing. With increased pressure on budgeted turn expenses comes increased pressure on your maintenance team. While the financial impact is cause for concern on its own, the workload on the maintenance team members to turn the units, especially during peak leasing cycles, can be significant.   

How many times have preventative maintenance items been delayed or overlooked due to the maintenance team being consumed with getting units ready or as a result of budget concerns?  Delaying preventative maintenance has a higher cost down the road.    

While move-outs are inevitable, there are ways to minimize the vacancy loss from apartment turnover. Operators can take a variety of measures to lessen the burden on your team members and limit the impact on your bottom line.  

Taking a proactive approach to managing turns and having an efficient make-ready process will save you time and money. Here are 5 best practices to improve your apartment turnover rate. 

1. Proactive Management Has to Include Maintenance

Budgets typically align with historical leasing cycles, which are helpful for staff and budget planning purposes. Your properties are unique. Instead of solely relying on regional historic leasing cycles, you need to track each property’s projected occupancy rate and future lease expirations to forecast appropriately for apartment turnovers.  

Your maintenance team needs as much notice as possible about any potential increase in expected move-outs. Sharing the number of expiring leases for the rest of the year and expected renewal rates with your maintenance team can help them plan spend and staffing appropriately.   

With property management software, you can provide them access to information to help them understand the renewal value. Every renewal means there is one less unit to turn, which will impact how maintenance team members engage with current renters in the best way.  

Your maintenance supervisor is responsible for staying within the allotted maintenance and turn budget, and he or she may already proactively work with vendors to get products ordered and tasks scheduled in advance. If they can adjust the spend and use of vendors weeks or months in advance, they will manage the budget more effectively.

2. Create Make-Ready Work Orders

Every property has some form of make-ready board. Whether you’re using a whiteboard, spreadsheet or software, you have a way to communicate upcoming turnover tasks to your maintenance technicians. But what if your make-ready board allowed you to maximize your time?  

We all know that time is money. Leveraging property management software to manage the unit turns for upcoming notice to vacates proactively saves time and makes sure that no units slip off the radar.   

As mentioned above, visibility is crucial, but it is not the only way to help your team manage the process. Most maintenance teams are limited in size and rely on outside contractors to prepare units for a new renter. Managing the contractors is one area that turn management software can ease some of the burdens and decrease the time to get the unit ready.    

Regardless of how clean the former resident thinks they left their apartment, you know that you must send in your housekeeper or cleaning contractor, so why not automate the process? With make-ready work orders, your team no longer has to schedule maintenance after they walk the units. Routine tasks can already be scheduled in property management software. Not only does this save time, but it ensures no tasks slip through the cracks and cause delayed move-in dates and vacancy loss. 

3. Designate Specific Move Out Dates

Taking a strategic approach to apartment turnovers can help ensure your units aren’t vacant for long periods and that the workload is manageable for the staff. Management companies have been moving away from the old concept of ending their leases on the last day of the month, which would often overload the maintenance teams the first week of the following month. 

When there are more units to turn than there is time in the day, they (naturally) don’t get turned, increasing vacancy loss. More and more management companies have lease expirations spread throughout the month—some schedule leases to expire on Saturday or Sunday. Considering the most desirable days for a new move-in are Friday, Saturday and Sunday, your team has plenty of time to complete the turn.   

If you are using property management software with turn management capabilities, the office staff can help maintenance get a jump start on even the toughest of turns while they were doing the final walk-through with a resident upon move-out.  

*Keep in mind that you should document this in the lease if you choose to designate specific move-out dates each month. 

4. Go Green to Cut Costs

Apartment turnovers are a great time to complete budgeted renovations or implement green initiatives.  

With the number of energy-saving products and appliances on the market, consider ways you can go green while saving money in perpetuity.  If going green is something you are looking to evaluate so that you can budget for an entire project in the future, consider selecting a handful of units that are not preleased to install eco-friendly products.  Some eco-friendly products, like LED lightbulbs, are simple to add to your maintenance budget for apartment turnovers.   

When your team is optimized for efficiency and expense management, testing the water for the handful of units selected might be in your budget after all. Once you see the results in net rental revenue for green apartments, you have the justification for the spending in next year’s budget.  Oh, and don’t forget the net rental improvement and increased asset value you will see!   

5. Give Your Team Some Time for Last-Minute Issues

Walking the apartment prior to the resident moving out will help you identify the work and materials needed in advance. When your team is overloaded, walking the unit in advance often gets deprioritized.  

If you have to do a final walk-through only hours before a resident moves in, you may not have time to fix any issues that come up, causing a poor first experience for new residents. When the team and contractors are rushed, there is a potential for a decline in their work quality. The move-in experience for new renters has proven to be a significant factor in lease renewal. Empowering your team will ensure an excellent experience for your renters, too.  

Your maintenance team members and your supplier partners are valuable assets. Working with them empowers them to do their best. Take the time to educate the team and show them how and why being proactive will reduce their workload in the long run.  

ResMan helps teams improve turn management, maximize efficiency and control spending! Learn more with a free demo!