Know your tenants, it’s a statement that landlords and asset managers hear multiple times, but how do you really understand your tenants? What is going to make them excellent tenants, stay for longer and pay rent on time?
Firstly, we need to understand who our tenants are. Without tenants we have an empty building – devoid of energy and life and importantly revenue. Knowing your tenants (or customers) and what attracts them to your spaces and makes them stay, whether in commercial, retail, industrial or residential properties, is critical to ensuring the right tenant is reached and you can successfully optimise revenue from your asset.
Having a holistic view of your data, including tenant activity and types of tenants that are reliable and retainable, is key as it will reduce risk of leases lapsing or rents not being paid on time. On a role-based level, finance and asset management teams gain access to tools that visualise the total number of deferrals, abatements and aging AR to understand in real-time the health of their leases. Furthermore, property management gain oversight and comprehensive data pertaining to collections and communications with tenants.
What do your tenants want?
As companies grapple with new ways of working and how to attract people back to their spaces, there’s the risk of tenants not renewing or requesting shorter leases due to uncertainties or clarity of the future. By giving property owners and property managers real-time visibility of their data, they can foresee and mitigate risk and strategise more easily.
But it’s not only about lease sign ups, once you have the tenant satisfying them to ensure retention, it is equally important to enable stable returns and increase value for your asset.
Demand for hybrid and flex workspaces is becoming more prevalent. Yardi’s recent partnership with WeWork to develop its enhanced Workplace offering is an example of the market responding to this. The WeWork Workplace will manage and accommodate on-demand spaces for its members – this allows corporate members to provide employees the ability to book a desk, private office or conference room in any company leased or owned office space at any WeWork location or affiliate WeWork.
Responsive maintenance
Competitive property owners understand the importance of responsive maintenance. Digital tracking and scheduling tools are a great way to facilitate a better service delivery to tenants. Your tenants can make maintenance requests and communicate with you more easily, which allows you to monitor responses, progress and helps manage expectations for resolution times. It also ensures efficiencies by streamlining maintenance and inspections required.
Benefits of digitisation
Accuracy, visibility and timeliness are the key benefits of digitising processes, and in the property sector, digitising processes also enables better collaboration with both internal and external stakeholders as you can deliver your services and assets more efficiently.
Steven van Ginkel, manager of finance and control for GREEN Management says, “Yardi provides an ideal platform for communication between team members. Information is easily accessible on mobile platforms and finance information is now combined with business information. That’s a win-win situation. Workflows with Yardi have helped us streamline our business processes.”
See how Yardi can help you know your tenants better and satisfy their needs for better returns on your investment.