Tenant Satisfaction = Tenant Retention
As I read the market reports from my fellow professionals at HPI, one thing becomes clear: When the velocity of the market is slowing down, it becomes all the more important to retain your existing tenants. When I think of taking good care of our tenants, I am reminded of a maxim that I learned long ago from a marriage class in college. The professor asked the class the following question, “When should you tell your spouse that you love them?” The answer, “Before somebody else does!” I believe that this translates well to the landlord-tenant relationship. While this has always been a focus at HPI, we are taking a fresh look at how we can better serve the tenants in the properties we manage. By retaining our tenants, we are reducing downtime, tenant improvement costs and lease commissions with a resultant increase in returns.
One key element in our program is an annual tenant survey performed by an outside consulting group. This has allowed us to benchmark our results, not only against our own portfolio, but against the “Best-of-Class” operators in the country. By analyzing this information, we can quickly address any issues and fine tune our management operation to prevent future problems from occurring. We have used this information to improve our automated work order system to follow up on tenant calls and insure that everyone is pleased with the results. We also use this information as we develop new projects to incorporate features that reduce maintenance and upgrades on the appearance of our projects. It is essential for us to have a program of regular, “in-person” meetings with the decision maker in order to provide an opportunity for open communication when there is not a crisis to resolve. This allows an opportunity for all involved to anticipate future needs long before lease expiration, enabling us to effectively meet our tenant’s needs for expansion or contraction. We strive to have partnerships with our tenants where we work with them to meet their real estate needs. Our success has been built on fulfilling this very commitment.
We not only work to meet our customers' spatial needs, but our team also completes annual service training, which is another important component of our program. Everyone on our property management team understands that we are in the service business, and our job is to make our tenants' lives easier. This encompasses everything from having a pleasant phone greeting to our engineers leaving personal cards indicating they have resolved the tenants' problems. We understand that our tenants and clients have options, and we want to ensure that HPI is their best option in Central Texas.
