Adam Willis is the President and Principal Broker of Nestwell Property Management, serving Utah's Salt Lake Valley. He has over twenty years of leadership and real estate experience, and has spoken at multiple NARPM conferences and other industry events. Adam is a Second Nature Triple Win Mentor.
Measuring the business value of your investment in resident experience can often feel difficult. A lot of the time, property managers just feel whether or not it’s working. There’s a different tone to the conversations you have with residents when they’re happier. Your team all feel it in their day-to-day work. And for some of us, that’s a huge part of why we put so much emphasis on resident experience. It makes us feel good, it makes them feel good, and it makes our team feel good.
But sometimes you also want to know how it’s impacting the bottom line. Especially when you’re in a growth stage, you can’t always afford to shovel money into resident perks, gifting programs, and other resident experiences if you can’t prove that it’s actually successful and impacting the bottom line. That’s why, at Nestwell, we track several KPIs related to resident experience, and why I’m going to outline them here.
1. Customer Satisfaction
Customer sentiment, CSAT, or customer NPS (“Net Promoter Score”) are generally designed to measure the same thing: how happy your residents are with your company. This is one of the most important metrics for us, because it’s an indicator of how well we’ve been doing our jobs, and a predictor of how likely those residents are to stay with us, take better care of their properties, and leave us positive reviews.
We ask for resident satisfaction via our call system and email ticketing tool. When a ticket is resolved, the resident is asked on a simple 1-5 score how happy they are with the experience. For tickets that have been open for a long time or require a lot of back and forth, we also ask them to provide feedback privately, which is often more nuanced than a simple number.
Finally, we use a tool that processes our support call recordings and analyzes the resident’s sentiment throughout the conversation. It can identify, based on their tone and language, whether they’re frustrated, sad, happy, etc.
We can then take all of this data and analyze it quickly across different lines, whether that’s property type, team member they worked with, or reason for the call. That gives us a much more detailed look at what we’re doing well and where we might be falling short in the resident experience.
2. Lease renewal rate
Lease renewal rate is a core KPI that most property managers are probably already tracking, in part because it helps forecast future vacancies and how busy your leasing team will be at a given time. But we also like to keep tabs on it because it’s a reflection of how happy our residents are with us.
In addition, we’re looking at why some residents choose not to renew and categorizing that into two categories of what we can control and can’t influence. Knowledge is power and understanding the difference is critical to improving resident satisfaction and retention.
Many non-renewals stem from factors outside a property manager’s influence — life events, job relocations, home purchases, or financial hardship. These circumstances are inevitable and shouldn’t be viewed as failures. Recognizing them for what they are helps teams focus their energy where it truly makes a difference, rather than chasing outcomes that can’t be changed.
On the other hand, controllable factors are opportunities for growth. Responsiveness to maintenance requests, clear communication, consistent policies, and fair renewal pricing all directly impact a resident’s decision to stay. When property managers consistently deliver high-quality service and proactively address preventable issues, they reduce turnover, strengthen trust, and protect profitability. The key is to track both categories separately—own what’s within your control and learn from what isn’t.
Finally, we’re considering the length of renewals and whether residents renew repeatedly. Someone who opts for a two year renewal is probably pretty happy with us as PMs, and if they’re renewing year after year, that’s also a good sign.
3. Early exits (and their reasons)
Conversely, we’re looking deeply at residents who opt to break their lease early. If they’re willing to pay an early termination fee just to get away from us, that’s a very bad sign. But, just like with those who opt not to renew, there could be extenuating life circumstances that have nothing to do with us. To help parse the two, we’ve started conducting exit interviews with residents who choose to terminate a lease early, asking what’s driving their decision and whether there’s something we could have done to give them a better experience. These have been hugely informative and led to some important discussions within our team.
4. Google reviews and online reputation
Online reviews are another hot topic within property management, and something that most companies are keeping tabs on. At Nestwell, we talk about our reviews internally every single week, flagging any negative comments and celebrating the positive ones. Reviews are so important to us that we’ve tasked our frontline team members with asking for a certain number of feedback requests each week after all resident interactions.
The thing about online reviews is that they can quickly create pile-ons. When a resident leaves a negative review and another resident sees it, they feel inspired and empowered to leave their negative comments, too. But I believe that the same thing happens in a positive direction. When residents see others leaving positive reviews, they’re encouraged to do the same, and suddenly you have a series of ten or twelve new reviews in a few days.
There’s been a lot of discussion around reputation management software and different tools that can manage your Google reviews for you. We do use a simple tool that analyzes sentiment in reviews, flags trends, and notifies us of changes, but we don’t like to use a lot of the automation features that are available. Our philosophy is, this is a people-first business, so we want real human interaction rather than a bot that has stock replies for positive or negative feedback.
Don’t underestimate the power of Google reviews. They can really create a flywheel effect: we take care of our team, our team delivers a great resident experience, the residents leave great feedback, and that helps new residents find us, kickstarting the whole process again.
5. Participation in our homebuying program
I previously outlined our Evernest homebuying program and why we chose to implement it. One ancillary benefit of the program is that it serves as a great barometer for how well we’re doing with our residents. Ideally, we want residents who are ready to buy a property—some of those who are choosing not to renew or opting to terminate their lease early—to think of us first. We want them to come to us and say, “Hey, you’ve been so good to me as property managers that now I want to work with you when I buy my first house.”
On the other hand, if they’re choosing to forego a potential discount on their house just so that they don’t have to work with us, that’s a pretty big alarm that we need to be doing things differently.
Final thoughts
Measuring resident experience can be tricky, but even if you don’t have a homebuying program set up, or you don’t have intricate reputation management software, there are still meaningful touch points in your business that can serve as a reflection of your performance. It might take some creativity and digging, but it’s absolutely worth it to be able to show the value of your resident experience efforts.
But don’t overlook the intangible benefits; the feeling that phone calls are easier, your team is more inspired, and your residents are happier.
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November 11, 2025
