How do you communicate with your renters? Communicating with residents in the digital age is quicker and easier than ever if you know how to capitalize on the available technological resources! According to CNET News, Americans now spend an average of 13 hours online a week, excluding email. Why not communciate with renters via these same channels? We bet you’ll have a much greater response. Consider using digital communication for rent reminders, community announcements, and maintenance requests, among other things.
Gathering Resident Emails: It’s as simple as requiring an email address at the time the lease is signed and requesting email addresses on rent checks, maintenance requests and forms, as well as using email as your preferred communication avenue. With an email, residents are able to open the message and take action immediately or at their convenience. This channel is also easy to use, considering you can reach all residents with one single email.
For your convenience, RentPayment offers customized email blasts for your community. If requested with ample time (usually one week in advance), we are able to build a payment reminder email that can reach your residents instantly. Please contact Marketing@RentPayment.com if you are interested in learning more.
Social Media Platforms: Tools such as Facebook and Twitter are a great way for residents to feel more connected to your property. If your renters are talking about your property – potential renters will as well. These outlets allow for two-way communication and for your residents to be more candid with you about their wants and needs.
Text Message Communication: With many people opting to forego landlines these days, cell phones have replaced them as the most common communication tool. Collecting phone numbers and confirming that residents do in fact receive text messages, is a great means of communication for short messages (usually under 160 character spaces). However, be cognizant and try and keep text messaging to a minimum and reserve it for important messages.
Video Sharing: Making video announcements and tutorials can be a fun and innovative way to share news and information with your residents. Videos can also be wonderful leasing tools. Looking for ways to energize or motivate your team? YouTube, Vimeo and Tout are a few of the websites that can be used to post videos on and the videos are fun to create as a team.
YouTube and Vimeo both allow you to create customized channels where all of your videos can be aggregated. You are able to brand these pages to your community and residents will be able to access new and older videos through a video library.
Tout is a new micro video website. Users can create 15-second videos from an iPhone or pull clips from a YouTube video. This is great for frequent and brief one-way communication with residents.
