How to Effectively Communicate With Student Renters

By Julia Dunn on October 12, 2017

When it’s time to advertise your property listing, there’s no doubt you want to reach as many prospective tenants as possible. This is the ideal scenario.

In college towns, students make up a huge population of the folks seeking to rent or lease a house or apartment. But when you confirm them as your residents, you may wonder how these renters prefer to communicate with you as their property manager. Here are the best ways for student residents and landlords to communicate.

Email

Students already have to check email by virtue of being students; every college or university student is assigned a .edu email, so you’ll be certain your student renters have at least one functioning email address. Most students receive notices about campus-wide policies and events, scheduling information, professional development resources and more via email, so students access these email accounts quite often to stay up to date. As a property manager, you can check with your student renters to find out which email address is best to use.

It’s a large misconception to assert that students don’t check their email accounts. We don’t want to miss anything, and so much important information comes to us via email that we check many times per day (at least, I do, and others around me do!)

Image via Pixabay.com

You might think that students prefer texting to email. The truth is, this depends on the nature of the message, the level of urgency, and the subject matter. If you just want to remind your student residents that someone is coming to their apartment later today to do some repairs and repaint their hallway door, this is something that can be accomplished via text message.

However, most students want to keep all their important information in one place (email) rather than get things lost in a long iMessage thread. IF you’re sending out the monthly utility/gas/electricity bill, you don’t want to do this over text. If you’re emailing about a behavioral issue or another serious matter, email is much more appropriate than texting in this case.

To communicate with residents about rent, utility costs, maintenance notices, local events and other information, use email to contact students. Another reason to use email is that the “correspondence can be saved by both parties should a legal dispute arise later on.” It’s a standard, sort of universal platform.

Landlordsource.com does identify a couple of drawbacks to email communications. For instance, you must make sure your messages aren’t going to students’ spam folders. One easy way to avoid this, though, is to tell students to add your email as a contact so that platforms like Gmail don’t sort your emails into a folder where students won’t see them.

Texting/Calling

The majority of students have smartphones; when acquiring student tenants, ask them if they are okay with you texting them about small matters. If so, you can use this as a tool to let them know about building announcements that may be more temporary (such as letting them know you’re on the way over to fix their washing machine, or that the power will be shut off from midnight until 6 a.m. for regular maintenance). Use your own discretion, as some of these matters could still be emailed. Students who have email apps on their phone receive instant notifications about new emails, so you can be assured that many of them read your emails as soon as they are sent.

Like texting, calling tenants should be used more for day-to-day issues like giving notice before coming to repair an appliance. Additionally, students don’t want you to show up every day with a new reminder that could have been sent in an email or even a text. Use face-to-face communication only as needed: sparingly, and cordially.

Online Portals

In this fast-paced technological time, more and more housing units are turning to tenant portals to manage information, collect rent payments easily and conveniently, and mass email everyone in your units when needed.

According to PropertyWare, “The latest property management software suites can save you time on renewals, reporting, maintenance tracking and much more. When it comes to communication, a tenant portal gives your residents a quick and simple way to contact you, while tracking and documenting all of your correspondence for each exchange. Your renters will love the 24/7 availability, and you’ll love the time you save managing documents and requests.”

While you may feel slight resistance to learning a new online platform, the amount of time and hassle you’ll avoid through a tenant portal will be well-worth it. Students are familiar with the structures and abilities of online portals, as universities use them for course enrollment, financial aid and account management, academic records, and health records as well.

Ultimately, you probably have certain unique ways of communicating that work for you, and you may continue using these in the same capacities as you always have. Regardless, it’s worth knowing and updating yourself on how to communicate with students. We value clear, consistent, and comprehensive communication from our property managers, and hold this as an expectation.

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