If you’re like most multifamily communities, August marks the beginning of your budgeting season. To create an amazing resident culture, property managers need to get ready to sharpen their pencils. In today’s competitive environment, however, that means more than just nailing down your expense forecasting.
Residents these days expect more than ever from their community’s amenities and services, reflecting broader changes in their lifestyle and work habits. With the continued trend of working from home, many residents are now looking to their apartment amenities to serve as extended living and working spaces. This presents an exciting opportunity to create an outstanding culture and experience that drives them to renew their leases and recommend the property to others. In this post, we share four things that property managers should consider adding to their budgets this planning season.
1. Community Events
If you haven’t already considered hosting community events, now is the time. By hosting fun and exciting events for your residents, you’ll help them form connections with their neighbors and engage with the property. These connections can create a sense of belonging and mutual support, leading to a happier and more harmonious community. The increased engagement between residents can also foster a culture where residents take better care of shared spaces, since they have a stronger sense of pride and ownership within their surroundings.
The scale of your community events can range from more casual gatherings, such as coffee hours in the lobby, to more elaborate occasions, such as holiday parties or outdoor movie nights. Budgeting for these events may vary accordingly. A small-scale event can be executed with a minimal budget, while a larger-scale event may need a more significant budget allocation to factor in food, entertainment, and decorations.
For those wrapping up the end of summer with a resident event, our blog, “Six Resident Event Ideas: Summer Edition,”can provide some great inspiration.
2. Concierge Services
For many, concierge services are one of the first things that comes to mind when you think about high-rise lavish apartment home living. Providing services that make residents’ lives easier is a huge draw that can drive satisfaction up and enhance their quality of life.
Your front desk is typically the busiest place in the building, managing keys and the daily high volume of packages is time consuming and often overwhelming, therefore, its absolutely essential to equip staff with the right tools to do their job. Adding property software equipped with package tracking is a great way to save time and ensure packages are processed properly. In fact, a package tracking system can reduce processing time by over 80% vs traditional methods. Similarly a key management system is great way to not only manage keys but provide residents with peace of mind regarding access for their guests, cleaners, pet sitters, and more.
Pro Tip: Ensure your front desk or front office services are always up and running and never hindered by internet slow downs and/or outages. BuildingLink is the only solution that offers a locally installed version of BuildingLink called ConciergeLink. ConciergeLink is designed to ensure that your team can keep processing packages, managing amenity reservations, creating visitor passes and more completely independent of the online version of BuildingLink.
3. Fitness & Wellness Amenities
In today’s health conscious society, providing fitness and wellness amenities within your property is an excellent way to improve the culture, allowing residents to stay active without needing to leave the property. Consider budgeting for updated exercise machines, spa facilities such as a sauna, or meditation areas to help residents unwind and relax. If your property is limited in physical space, consider establishing a partnership with a local wellness center or gym as an alternative solution. You may be able to offer residents discounted gym memberships or wellness services adding value to their residency.
Providing ways for residents to take care of their physical fitness does more than improve their individual quality of life. It also helps create a vibrant community culture that residents can enjoy and take pride in, positioning your property as one that truly cares for and invests in its residents.
4. Communication Tools
Effective and efficient communications are key to enhancing the overall living experience for your residents. Having a property management system equipped with an email broadcast system that can communicate by resident type (e.g. owner or renter), by location and even special groups is absolutely key to successful communications. Leading property management systems are not only equipped with email broadcasting but voice and SMS broadcasting, public display systems and easy to use survey and poll tools for soliciting resident feedback, all of which are key components to effective community communications.
Partner with BuildingLink
Trusted by condos, co-ops, HOA’s and multifamily properties around the globe, BuildingLink helps property managers deliver superior resident experiences while streamlining maintenance and operations. We offer tools that will simplify your record-keeping and administration, communications, maintenance, and front desk operations.
When you’re ready for smarter property management, book your BuildingLink demo today.