The Best Way to Communicate With Your Tenants

You need to get in touch with your tenant about a minor matter regarding your rental property. It’s not urgent, but you’d like to get it handled this week. So you send your tenant an email…and nothing for several days. You follow up with a text message…and get an almost instant reply. What gives?

If your tenant is under 34, it’s probably not personal – it’s generational. Studies indicate email use by Millennials is on a steady decline. A 2010 ComScore study showed that email usage by those ages 12-34 dropped 27% that year, and since then other conversation tools like Facebook, Twitter and, yes, texting have continued to gain in popularity. While an old-fashioned phone call is generally understood as appropriate for emergencies, for non-critical back and forth there is an increasing pool of options from which to choose.

For a property owner who just wants to have a reliable channel of communication to your tenants, it can be frustrating. With that in mind, here are some suggestions for making sure you have a decent shot of reaching your renter when you need to.

• When your tenant signs their lease, find out their preferred method of communication. If it’s texting rather than email, great. If it’s Facebook messaging and you’re comfortable with connecting that way, go for it. But don’t feel that you need to over-accommodate; if your tenant only communicates via Pinterest vision boards, you’re allowed to push back.
• If you agree on texting as your primary method of contact, set some ground rules around timing – unless you are okay with a non-emergency buzz from a tenant waking you up at 1am.
• If email communication is important to you from a record-keeping perspective but your tenant tends to be non-responsive, consider taking screenshots of text conversations on your phone (or any other non-email communication) and emailing to yourself to log for your records. In Pendo Rent, you can upload these images as files related to your property.

How do you communicate with your tenants?