As a landlord, your business reputation is your lifeblood. If you let it slip, your tenants could share less-than-flattering details about their experience. If that happens, you could lose prospective tenants and your earning prospects could suffer.
Luckily, there are ways that you can help control the narrative around your quality as a landlord. Put simply, you can act with a code of conduct that inspires trust and loyalty. As property managers in Northern Virginia, we manage rental housing for a living, so we know a few tips on enhancing your business reputation management. We’ll show you the tricks of the trade below.
1. Stay Organized and Responsible
Landlords must be able to stay organized throughout their operations. This includes their communications with business affiliates, tenants, and others. It spans paperwork, financial forms, and other key documents. There are a few ways you can keep track of all these happenings.
3 Ways to Stay Organized as a Landlord
- Store Your Files in One Place: You should have all your files handy in one place, whether that’s physical or digital. If you go digital, it’s a good idea to utilize Dropbox, Google Drive, Apple iCloud, or other cloud services. This way, you can access your files wherever you go.
- Categorize Your Files: Another aspect of storing your files properly is grouping them into different sets. For instance, you can put all your maintenance bills in one folder. In another, you could incorporate a tenant’s records.
- Maintain Your Correspondence: When tenants get in touch with you or vice versa, you should always keep a written record of your messages. It’s critical to keep a paper trail for legal purposes or if you ever receive complaints.
Little daily routines like this can enhance your attentiveness and allow you to enhance tenant satisfaction. That, in turn, will give you more of a good reputation.
2. Be Responsive to Concerns
If tenants have concerns, questions, or maintenance requests, you should earnestly respond to them.
It’s critical to be reliable and follow through with your promises. If you don’t do this, your tenants might think of you as being unreliable. People talk, and they can spread the word about any negative experiences they have with you. In turn, they could turn away new potential tenants.
Also, you must stay consistent with inspection times and other routine events. For instance, if you say that you will inspect homes on the 3rd of every January and June, you should do your best to maintain that exact timeframe every time. If not, should give people notice in advance.
People will expect dependability and predictability from you. You must meet their expectations to maintain your business reputation. This is a top trait of successful landlords.
3. Prioritize Effective Communication
Tenants expect clear, consistent, and easily accessible communication from their landlords. Needless to say, you must deliver on these qualities. There are many ways you can achieve this.
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Match Your Tenant’s Communication Style: Everyone has a different style of communicating with other people. Some people prefer direct, clear-cut, to-the-point communication. Others will respond better to a warm, friendly demeanor. You should read the room so that you can connect with people on their level.
- Match Your Tenant’s Communication Method: Everyone has communication method preferences. Some prefer text, email, calls, or even traditional in-person meetings. On the other hand, others may not use certain methods often, like email. If you try to reach them these ways, it could go in one ear and out the other. You should alter your method based on their preferences. Additionally, it would be best if you ended verbal exchanges with written follow-ups.
- Keep Your Tenant in the Loop: Always keep tenants updated on new developments. As an example, when you experience maintenance mishaps, you should regularly inform tenants about what exactly you are doing to solve the problems. This way, tenants can rest assured that you care about their comfort. This will do wonders for your reputation.
A little bit of effort in your landlord communications will go a long way for your social status.
4. Be Honest and Transparent
Many property owners choose to conceal unwanted attributes of their property so that they can fill vacancies. While it’s understandable that you want to show your property in the best light, it would be unwise to lie. Do not overstate or make guarantees on facilities or services you cannot follow through upon. These lies will inevitably catch up to you, and tenants will lose faith in your integrity. Your business reputation will take a hit.
5. Be Available
While you should always set boundaries, it’s helpful for everyone involved if you have set times, places, and methods by which people can get in touch with you. This way, your tenants will know that you’re a resource they can rely on.
As for after-hour issues, it’s best to maintain a contact info sheet of people who can assist, like emergency numbers, utility service contacts, and other essential figures. You will do your part in making sure your tenants have the tools they need, which boosts your business reputation.
6. Address Maintenance Needs Quickly
The most basic thing tenants expect from a property is that it’s habitable. If they experience prolonged interferences with their daily life due to maintenance issues, that will reflect badly on your business reputation as a landlord.
Even worse, tenants may interpret your inaction as stemming from active apathy, not just forgetfulness or incompetence. This will indicate to tenants that you are unwilling to provide them with the customer service they deserve. They might feel they cannot come to you when they run into trouble. Overall, a failure to act will cultivate a culture of distrust.
All the above are why it’s vital to address newfound maintenance issues as soon as possible.
To prevent these pitfalls from happening, you should have a standardized policy for handling urgent repair needs. This could come in the form of a checklist of procedures for various common situations, as well as a list of repairmen who can help at short notice.
7. Prioritize Preemptive Maintenance
If you want to avoid expensive maintenance messes in the first place, preemptive maintenance is the way to go. This will save you trouble, time, and money. For landlords, this is a business reputation management must.
You can accomplish this by scheduling maintenance regularly. It’s a good idea to hire a certified technician to inspect and continually repair major systems. This way, you can demonstrate that you truly invest in your property and leave no stone untouched.
Also, you can hold semi-annual property inspections to ensure that your tenant is fulfilling their end of the bargain. As always, you should write down the results of these events for future reference.
By doing this, you can catch potential problems before they escalate.
8. Always Be Improving
Best business reputation management practices change over time. Social norms, technological advances, safety regulations, and other conditions shift through the seasons. Things that people do all the time now may not be viewed as acceptable in the future.
Luckily, there’s a simple way you can maintain your business reputation. The internet is an excellent source of current information. Social media, news apps, google, and other popular sites are your friends. Of course, you should always be careful to vet your sources to make sure that they are legitimate. In addition, you can read articles like this one, pore over books, and take courses.
When you stay up to date with modern standards, you keep pace with your tenants’ current needs.
9. Obey the Law
Every landlord’s worst nightmare is being hit with a lawsuit. So, you’ll want to ensure you don’t break the law by accident. You should go through all the laws that impact you.
While it’s important to understand federal laws, like the Fair Housing Act and Americans with Disabilities Act, it’s equally critical to learn about local laws. These can include state, county, city, and town laws. Measures like these can better help you stay out of the courtroom and public scrutiny.
Business Reputation Management with PPM
If you want to streamline and simplify your operations without compromising your reputation, Professional Property Management of North Virginia can help. With over 35 years of experience managing over 2,000 units, we know how to keep tenants happy like the back of our hands. You can count on us to handle maintenance problems, rent collection, and other daily issues that impact a landlord’s business reputation. Contact us today to maintain tenant retention with a lot less of the maintenance effort that comes with it.
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