In more than a decade in property management, I’ve learned that delighting residents is one of the best ways to increase renewal rates and win more clients. We recently made the choice to formalize that into a dedicated full-time role, the Resident Experience Coordinator.
Through careful planning, plenty of internal conversations, and a little bit of experimentation, we’ve seen a clear impact on our business and our resident satisfaction. It’s been a great business decision and a great way to show that we’re invested in our residents. After all, we can all say we care about resident experience, but if we aren’t intentionally taking steps to make residents thrive, do we really care that much?
A resident experience coordinator is a dedicated individual on our team whose primary focus is increasing resident satisfaction by going above and beyond, gathering and listening to resident feedback, and recommending policy and process improvements across the business. She operates across the property management team and works on improving every aspect of our business that touches the lives of residents.
While this isn’t a common role at most property management companies, we at JWB decided to take the leap and invest in resident experience like never before, with the goal of improving our residents’ lives and giving them the best renting experience possible.
Conversations about making resident experience a dedicated role started after we hosted a resident experience workshop. The workshop looked at what we were doing today and how we could improve our resident outcomes.
We left that meeting feeling like we were doing a lot of great things and working hard to deliver a strong resident experience, but that we could always be doing more. We decided that, since our property management and support teams were closest to our residents, we should ask them for ideas, suggestions, and pain points to solve for.
We came away from that conversation with about 80 different ideas on how we could continue improving. We were excited to get started, but we immediately realized that all of these ideas would add more work to our property managers’ plates without removing any of their existing tasks. We didn’t want to overload our team or shift their priorities away from other business-critical work, and we worried about things getting lost in the shuffle if we gave them too many tasks. That’s when we started to consider creating a new role.
As we started to think about hiring a dedicated person for this role, our only real question was whether it was truly a full-time responsibility. We knew there was tremendous potential value, and we were bought in on the idea, but we didn’t want to hire someone only to realize it should have been a part-time job.
We started by putting together a job description. We weren’t just listing out responsibilities (although that was part of it); we were identifying core goals, KPIs, and metrics. We had to determine how to objectively measure resident experience, if it could be measured at all.
Around the same time that we were starting to discuss hiring for this position, we were also experimenting with building out a resident committee. We wanted to select 10-12 residents who could be our “VIPs,” who could weigh in and give feedback, ask us questions, and help improve our processes. We knew we would need someone to spearhead this initiative, and the resident experience coordinator was a perfect fit. We had our first job responsibilities nailed down.
We had also tested out running a community town hall event for all of our residents. The idea was that we would get them together locally and have an open discussion about where we were meeting expectations, where we weren’t, and what we could do better. It was a deeply vulnerable experience, but it was hugely successful, and we knew we wanted to do more. Again, this was the perfect project for a resident experience coordinator to take on.
We had other events on the docket, too, like social and community gatherings at our multifamily properties, which were another great opportunity for this role. But we also wanted to go beyond just event coordination. Here are some of the other day-to-day functions that we found were a great fit for this particular role:
We were very careful to make sure we weren’t creating confusion between this new role and our expert property managers. The biggest difference is that our PMs each have a portfolio of homes that they’re responsible for, and they still handle all of the basic management functions like collecting rent, renewing leases, and coordinating move-outs. The resident experience coordinator does not have a set portfolio, and instead works across all of the properties that we manage, helping to deepen relationships. She sits on the property management team, but as an extension of the team.
Make no mistake, our property managers are still building strong relationships with their residents. The experience coordinator does not replace that. They’re still friendly faces and helpful points of contact for residents. The experience coordinator just adds another level of proactive support to help delight residents wherever possible.
Ultimately, we ended up hiring for this role from within. We took someone who had years of experience on our team, working with our residents and vendors, and shifted them into this position, and it couldn’t have gone better.
She’s already won teammate of the month twice this year because of the impact she’s had on the business and her peers. Our NPS score is higher than it’s ever been, thanks in part to her hard work and dedication. And we’ve gotten great anecdotal feedback from our residents about her performance and customer interactions. Across the board, shifting to a dedicated experience coordinator has been a boon.
Remember, there’s a lot of financial value in improving the resident experience. Happy residents stay longer, take better care of your properties, leave better reviews, and refer other residents to your properties. But there’s also just inherent value in taking good care of your residents. At the end of the day, we want to provide safe, comfortable, enjoyable housing for as many people as we can, and dedicating time and resources to the resident experience is a huge part of that.
Making hiring decisions is always tricky. You have to consider your finances, the size of your existing team, and how quickly you plan to expand the business. But hiring a dedicated resident experience coordinator was a great decision for our business.
I’m a firm believer that having a dedicated person leads to the best outcomes over time. Our hope was to see NPS scores increase because of the increased touchpoints, better communication methods, and a heartfelt person who can step in when things go wrong, and that’s exactly what’s happened. If your business is in a position where hiring is on the table, make sure to consider an experience coordinator.
If you're looking for additional ways to improve your resident experience, consider adding a Resident Benefits Package.