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Why You Should Focus On Resident Experience | Second Nature

Written by Andrew Smallwood | Mar 21, 2023 4:00:00 AM

What's the best way to stand out from other Property Management Companies? How can you stay relevant and keep residents and owners happy? Andrew Smallwood from Second Nature explains why focusing on the resident experience can make all the difference.

Related: State of Resident Experience Study

For more on the topic of wow-ing your residents and building resident retention, check out some of our other articles and podcasts:

Here's more from Andrew on how to approach resident experience, and the best perspectives he gather along the way.

TRANSCRIPT

Andrew Smallwood:

Hey everybody, Andrew Smallwood back again with Stevie Wonder for a quick video. And in today's video we're going to talk a little bit about how property managers have been resonating with this concept of focusing on experience.

And I want to share with you a concept that I need to credit to Joe Pine. And you know what Joe Pine says: 

Hey, if you go back hundreds of years, materials were valuable. People were trading wood for metal, for gold, etc. And what happened is those materials became commoditized. And so in order to create value, those materials got turned into products. The metal turned into nails, right? The wood turned into a wall, etc., or a skateboard or what have you. And so materials turned into products and suddenly the dollar amount here that was very low and commoditized went here and the dollar amount became more.

But at a certain point, products even have become more competitive and commoditized. And what you've seen more recently, the last few decades, is a move to services, the services that are built around those products. So it's not just, here's a nail, but here's also a person to help you hang everything in your home and have it designed the way that you want. Instead of just here's a skateboard, here's also a teacher to help teach you how to use it.

And even now, we've seen commoditization of service industries, entire industries, being commoditized. And a lot of people are noticing and saying that's what's been happening in property management. And so where does that lead us next? It's really, here's where we are now: experiences. The customization of materials leads to products, the customization of products leads to services, the customization of services leads to experiences. Whereas commoditization moves things down this way, and the value goes down here -- the value goes up as you move up this way.

And so experience is really the name of the game today, and that's why we have RBP is because we believe the experience, the number one resident experience is where property managers are going to win. The people who create the best experiences for owners, the best experiences for residents, the best experiences for their team, create what we call a triple win. And an RBP is just a great example of a triple win.

It's why we've had the podcast, it's why we've had so much of this content. This is just part of the mental framework of what we believe is important and part of the way that we see the world.

Would love your commentary if you've read The Experience Economy by Joseph Pine. Would love to hear your thoughts. If you haven't, would love to hear your thoughts. And we hope this helps you in some small way or some big way. With that, take care.