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Almost 1 in 8 people across the United States reside in an apartment, including 37% of all renters. With so many people calling apartments home, it's important that apartment building owners take strides to improve the resident experience.
Whether your property houses just a handful of units or hundreds of units, the residents inside those walls are extremely susceptible to feeling isolated and disconnected. This leads to high resident turnover, negative online reviews, and decreased revenue for building owners. Sugar's app was created to improve the resident experience and make apartment living more enjoyable for everyone.
Resident experience is impacted by many factors--the cost of rent; maintenance and upkeep; neighbors and policies; location; and more. Many of those factors are outside of your control, but improving whatever aspects you can will help you improve the overall living experience for your residents.
A poor resident experience can lead to a negative building culture that contributes to an even worse resident experience. This often leads to higher turnover, more complaints, and eventually, negative online reviews. All of these things make it harder to fill your apartments with excited residents and keep them around.
Residents who feel they aren't being heard or aren't getting their money's worth aren't just more likely to complain and eventually leave, but they may also fail to pay rent on time, take less care of their apartment, and avoid reporting issues (especially if they don't think they're being addressed). All of that can harm the resident experience for even your happiest residents.
Given the importance of resident experience, it's essential that property managers and owners find new ways to improve it - but that's easier said than done. In the past, community bulletin boards, social events, and other strategies may have been useful for improving the resident experience; however, they're ultimately time-consuming, expensive, and difficult to pull off in current times.
Instead of looking back, more managers should be looking forward. By incorporating the latest technology into your apartment complex, you can support a better overall resident experience with less legwork and follow-up, all while offering even the most introverted residents with a place where they can better connect with their community.
Forget accidental lockouts and frustrating wait times for a locksmith to arrive. With Sugar's new residential app, residents can securely and easily enter the building and community areas with just one time tap.Aside from being convenient, this boosts security because it means no one has the chance to lose, copy, or borrow a key that unlocks your building or its resident-only areas.
Connecting your access control system to a resident engagement platform has tremendous benefits. In addition to being able to offer your residents a single app where they can take care of all their needs, you can also introduce several workflows to increase the operational efficiency of your properties. From a community engagement standpoint, integrating with access control systems is one of the most powerful features to increase resident usage of the platform. Since Sugar can integrate with hardware products such as Openpath and Brivo, this enables residents to unlock doors and share digital keys from inside the same app where they pay rent. This leads to increased product adoption and higher engagement rates inside the community portal. Higher engagement rates have been proven to result in higher rates of lease renewals and increased AREX scores.
Inside the Sugar app, residents can feel connected to their community. Residents who use the app have the option to enter the community lobby, which allows them to experience the building like never before.
Secure messaging, event sharing, and a building-wide marketplace help residents exchange items, get together, and stay in touch. By fostering this community among residents, you'll find that renters take greater pride in their apartment and the building as a whole.
As their apartment begins to feel more like home, you'll enjoy lower turnover, happier residents, greater use of common areas, and fewer maintenance issues around the property. Residents who are happy to live in your apartment community will help create a safe and welcoming environment that pleases everyone.
You can't just assume that all of your building's features are keeping your residents happy. Figuring out how to measure/track resident experience isn't easy and requires some work. Neither is improving resident experience without solid metrics. Luckily, with Sugar's new survey tool, you can easily reveal meaningful insights about resident engagement and resident experience.
Through the survey, you'll be able to calculate a Resident Experience Score for your building. Tracking this score over time will help you reveal trends, figure out how to improve resident experience, and know whether or not your tenant experience is as competitive as it should be. This tool is unique to Sugar's residential experience app and it will help you compare your resident engagement and experience to benchmarks so you know where you stand.
At Sugar, we looked long and hard at various resident apps and found every possible way to improve upon them. With Sugar's app, your residents will enjoy a better user interface that will help them connect with their community, get around the building, and make the most of what your property has to offer.
Plus, with the exclusive Resident Experience Score, you can get deeper insights into how your residents feel about your building so you can uncover valuable feedback and make big improvements with less trial-and-error. Ready to get started? Take Sugar's Free Resident Experience Survey to get your Resident Experience Score and understand how your property stacks up.
