THE KEY
HUNTERS HINTS By Hunter Boucher, Director of Operations, LandlordBC
Listening to Your Tenants: Building Maintenance
why it is a valuable endeavour for any landlord or property manager. In this issue I will focus on building maintenance and repairs, both as an exercise in customer service and to safeguard your asset.
I love reading online reviews on sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor; it’s a guilty pleasure of mine to see the mundane complaints people have about random businesses I will likely never patronize, in cities I will likely never visit. It may be odd to some, but I think this not so bragworthy pastime has given me some insight into what really drives customer frustration and it can be directly applied to your rental housing business.
In the age of social media, reputation is critical even for rental housing providers, and having a robust tenant communication strategy can assist in protecting your asset in a very real and practical way. Knowing about a leak under a sink or about new crack in the drywall early on can save thousands in remediation costs. Sometimes the costliest repairs stem from longstanding issues that simply went un-reported. If your goal is to have a building that stands the test of time, you need tenants that are willing to communicate with you about building issues.
What drives a customer to leave a negative review? Most often it is a sense that their concerns were not heard or taken seriously by a representative. The risk of not listening to your customers (and tenants are our customers) can be a costly mistake both to your reputation and your bottom line. You will have heard from LandlordBC countless times that communication is critical in your success as a rental housing provider and over the next two issues of The Key I will be digging into this further with a look into how to ensure that your tenants feel heard and
To start, let us look at how to establish a system that allows and encourages constructive tenant communication. The mission here is to provide your tenants with an easy way to let you know about issues in the rental unit or property, occasionally remind them that you want to hear from them when there is an issue, and less frequently directly solicit information. It is also important to note that even if you have implemented what appears to be theAD most intuitive12/9/11 and easy9:52 to use card:q7 AMreporting Page 1 system, there will
CAMBIE ROOFING & DRAINAGE CONTRACTORS LTD.
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24 | FALL 2020
