In order to build resident retention, you need to start with resident satisfaction. And to do that, you need to develop a method to actually measure how happy or unhappy your residents are. Without objective measurement, you’ll have no way of knowing whether you’re improving. That’s where resident satisfaction surveys come in.
In this post, we’ll walk through what resident satisfaction surveys are and why they’re so important, along with what questions you should be including, some of the best survey tools out there, and how to actually leverage data once you’ve collected it.
What is resident satisfaction?
Resident satisfaction is a measure of how happy residents are with their rental property and the team managing it, along with how well property managers are meeting resident expectations and needs.
In other words, resident satisfaction is a quantitative measure of how well you as a property manager are delivering a high-quality resident experience. Measuring resident satisfaction puts you in the driver’s seat to start testing improvements in your processes and seeing how effective they are.
What is a resident satisfaction survey?
A resident satisfaction survey is a tool used by property managers to measure resident satisfaction, usually by gathering feedback via a questionnaire about things like happiness, complaints, and likelihood of renewing.
A resident satisfaction survey is typically sent at regular intervals to large groups of residents in order to gather their feedback. It’s a key part of managing the resident experience because it provides a property manager with benchmarks and trends.
What is the purpose of a resident satisfaction survey?
A resident satisfaction survey helps you to measure the overall experience a resident has at your property, including the property itself, staff performance, maintenance, responsiveness, and more. Conducting regular satisfaction surveys helps demonstrate your company’s commitment to improving the resident experience, as well as your willingness to listen and adjust course based on feedback.
A well run resident satisfaction survey provides opportunities to recognize what’s working and celebrate those things—including highlighting team members who are doing an exceptional job. At the same time, it offers a chance to reflect on what’s not working as well and flag them as areas for improvement.
Over time, satisfaction surveys can be used to measure progress and validate decision-making, ultimately leading to better resident retention, positive reviews, and happy clients.
Key benefits of resident satisfaction surveys
Resident satisfaction surveys can help your residents feel more connected to you as a property manager and feel like they’re being heard. Satisfaction surveys also give you opportunities to improve your business. Here are some of the key things that resident satisfaction surveys can help you do:
- Make more informed decisions and enhance your services: When you gather feedback on what residents truly want, you’re able to be better informed in your decisions and consistently improve your business.
- Manage your reputation: When you have happier residents, they’re much more likely to leave positive reviews (or at least they’re less likely to leave negative reviews). When you’re known as a property management company that listens to resident feedback, that goes a long way toward securing new residents and new clients.
- Address issues quickly: Resident satisfaction surveys can often help you identify potential conflicts before they arise, including maintenance issues, communication struggles, or misalignment with resident expectations.
- Increase transparency: Satisfaction surveys also drive better communication with residents and give you a look at what residents expect of you. They also pull back the curtain for residents, who get a better view of the reasoning behind some of your decision making.
Satisfaction surveys simply improve the resident experience overall, which is vital to the success of your business.
What information should you gather in a resident satisfaction survey?
Selecting what to include in your resident satisfaction survey can seem intimidating, but it helps to approach it based on a few key categories. Keep in mind that making the survey too long will decrease your response rate, so you don’t want to include too many questions. Try to focus on key areas like the property itself, maintenance experiences, customer service, and overall perceived value. Be sure to also include an opportunity for residents to comment on anything you didn’t ask about, to make sure they cover their most pressing topics.
Resident information
Consider starting your survey with basic resident information like their address or unit number, which will help you identify and respond to any local issues. You can also ask about how long the resident has lived in their home and how long their lease is, which helps give context to their other answers.
Property condition
The condition of a property plays a massive role in how satisfied the resident will be, so asking them for their thoughts on the home itself is important. This is a great way to identify potential issues that otherwise might not get spotted until the next inspection walkthrough. It can also catch potential problems early, before they turn into more expensive maintenance issues. If you’re surveying residents in a multifamily building, be sure to ask about both their specific unit and any common areas.
Maintenance experience
If something does go wrong with a property, you want to make sure your maintenance team is delivering on your promise of customer service. Ask about recent maintenance tickets that the resident has put in, as well as the responsiveness of your team to that issue. This is also a great place to ask about the frequency of maintenance calls, recurring problems, and what kind of condition the maintenance team left the property in.
Customer service and staff
Customer service is one of the clearest areas that you can improve with fast process changes. That makes it a perfect area to collect resident feedback, iterate, and measure progress. Ask residents how satisfied they’ve been with recent staff interactions. If they only recently moved in, ask for their feedback on the leasing and move-in process. If they recently renewed, as about their experience with renewal.
Amenities and community features
If you manage multifamily housing, amenities and community events are often a key part of the resident experience. Ask about things like pools, gyms, dog parks, and other common areas, including both how often residents use them and how satisfied they are.
If you manage single-family homes, you can still ask about any amenities or extra services that you offer. If you provide a Resident Benefits Package or include internet or utilities with rent, ask how your residents like these features and how much value they provide.
Digital resident experience
If you use a property accounting software tool, it likely includes at least some digital experiences, like a maintenance portal or an online rent payment tool. You may also offer a digital leasing experience, pet screening or other online services. Poll residents on how useful they find these tools to be and where they run into problems in order to better optimize your tech stack.
Safety and security
Ask residents about how safe they feel in their homes and in their communities. Include questions about locks and other security measures, especially if you include smart locks, video doorbells, or security cameras with your properties. If you manage multifamily, you can also ask about overall community security, like swipe access to buildings or lighting around the property. A resident who doesn’t feel safe isn’t likely to stay long, so make sure you’re acting quickly if any security concerns arise.
Value for money
Make sure that you’re asking residents how much value they feel you provide to them. If your pricing is wrong, residents are likely to be vocal about it, and unlikely to renew their leases. Validate your pricing strategy with current residents in order to attract and retain high quality renters.
Open feedback
Finally, always be sure to leave a place for residents to provide open feedback. This can often surface valuable insights that you didn’t otherwise ask about. Even if residents don’t take advantage of the opportunity, it gives them a sense that you’re open to hearing their thoughts and that they have a reliable place to offer ideas.
Best practices for effective resident satisfaction surveys
With those topics in mind, it’s important to build and share your survey in a way that will generate authentic responses from as many residents as possible. Let’s take a look at some best practices for maximizing the effectiveness of your survey.
Incentivize participation
You can build the most detailed, thoughtful, comprehensive survey in the world, but it’s not going to be useful if none of your residents participate. Consider offering an incentive for residents to complete the survey; even a small reward can get residents invested.
You can offer incentives like gift cards, or you can enter participants into a drawing for a larger prize, like an Apple Watch or a new TV. You can even offer a rent discount or prime parking space as the grand prize. If you use a Resident Rewards program, you can set up survey responses as an activity you want to reward, giving your residents points to use on the prize of their choice.
Remember, the larger your sample size, the more accurate your data will be, so increasing participation should be a top priority.
Ask clear and concise questions
Next, make sure that the questions you’re asking in the survey are clear and concise. Don’t get bogged down in technical jargon or internal terminology; put yourself in the shoes of a resident reading the survey and make sure that it’s easily understandable.
Simple question formats like multiple choice or “rate on a scale from 1 to 10” can also minimize confusion—just make sure you define what a 1 means and what a 10 means!
Ask unbiased questions
When you’re writing your questions, make sure you’re not constructing them in a way that will influence responses one way or the other. For example, don’t preface a question about maintenance response times by saying “We take pride in responding to maintenance requests as quickly as possible,” because that can influence your residents’ responses.
You should also make sure you aren’t requiring residents to answer a question about something that isn’t relevant to them. For example, make sure you’re not asking, “How would you rate your recent renewal experience?” to residents who haven’t recently renewed their lease. If they’re required to answer, they’ll give inaccurate information, skewing your results.
Survey Monkey has a comprehensive guide to best practices, so take a look and make sure that you understand how to write unbiased questions before you jump in.
Protect resident anonymity and confidentiality
Finally, make sure that residents feel comfortable being open and honest with you by ensuring anonymity and confidentiality. If a resident is afraid they’ll be retaliated against for giving negative responses, they’re not likely to be fully transparent.
You can help ensure anonymity by detaching responses to each question from others, and communicating this to respondents. This means that questions about one topic can’t be cross-referenced with questions about another topic to identify an individual.
5 Best tools for resident satisfaction surveys
Selecting the best tool for your survey depends on a few factors, including budget, how many surveys you’re sending per year, how many responses you aim to gather, and how detailed you want your questions to be. When choosing a tool, make sure you’re opting for one that will automate delivery and follow-up, provide a mobile-friendly interface, and help with data analysis.
- JotForm: JotForm offers a user-friendly tool for building surveys, along with basic data analysis and visualization for your results. It also includes several survey templates to help get you started. The free version of JotForm only allows you to collect 100 responses per month, so if you have a larger number of units you’ll likely have to upgrade to a paid subscription.
- Google Forms: Google forms are simple and free with any Google account. Google forms are somewhat limited in your ability to customize the look and feel or add your company logo, and there isn’t as much flexibility in the types of questions you can build out. However, the easy integration with Google Sheets makes sharing and analyzing data very easy.
- Survey Monkey: Survey Monkey is one of the most established survey tools available, and that history has given the company plenty of time to perfect their product. Survey Monkey has one of the most complete tools you’ll find, with plans starting at $30 per month for up to 50,000 responses.
- Typeform: Typeform is a newer survey tool, but also has excellent user friendliness and some of the best visual customization options around. Pricing starts at $25 per month, but a jump to the Plus plan allows you to remove Typeform branding and collect up to 1,000 responses per month for $50 per month.
- Sogolytics: Sogolytics is a highly detailed, powerful data collection and analysis tool. With stronger analytics and visualization tools than most other survey tools, Sogolytics is great for companies with larger portfolios and a high volume of data.
How to use your resident satisfaction survey data
Once you’ve gathered all your responses, it’s time to dig into the results. The key here is to remember that survey responses don’t exist in a vacuum, and they shouldn’t be analyzed that way. You shouldn’t be looking at each response on its own and then moving on.
Instead, look for patterns in the results. Are you getting consistently low marks on your maintenance response times? Are residents frustrated with the lease signing process? Most survey tools offer basic analytics functions that will let you see average response scores and where you’re over- or underperforming.
Make sure you’re also comparing responses over time. That will help you better understand whether the changes you’ve made are having the desired impact, or whether there’s more work to be done.
Finally, make a clear game plan based on the results of your satisfaction survey. What can you do to address some of the most common areas of criticism? What steps will you need to take to make changes? How long will that take? Write out a project plan that you can share with the larger team and prioritize it so that you don’t let key issues fall to the wayside.
Improve resident retention today
You’re probably not going to get your resident satisfaction survey exactly right on the first try, but by following the guidelines in this post, you can get off to a great start. From there, you can iterate and improve each time you send out a survey.
The key is to start measuring resident satisfaction sooner rather than later so that you can start making tangible improvements. Happy residents stay longer and are more cooperative, helpful, and understanding. Creating a cycle of transparency can go a long way to helping your business and your relationships.
If you’re looking to improve resident satisfaction without adding more work to your plate, consider adding a Resident Benefits Package to your offering.
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August 5, 2025
