Cost-Free Resident Benefits
# Resident Rewards 4 Category #1 Costs you nothing (https://vimeo.com/518334087) duration 08:26 [core] whisper small.en, float32, window-chained 24s Well, welcome back. Robert Locke here. We're kind of working our way through resident rewards training and the conversation in this video is going to be about four categories of benefits. Now, when we started out this series, we kind of ran through this pretty quickly. We said when you start thinking about listing benefits to put in your resident rewards package, you can literally, if you think it through long enough, you can break it down into different categories.
There's four. The first one is things that cost you nothing, and that's the one we're gonna go through in detail in this particular video. We're gonna kinda get down in the weeds and flesh this out a little bit. The second one is to forego a fee and then partner with people that have no cost to you, and then partner with people who have hard costs involved. So today, the conversation is on number one, and we're gonna start talking through and giving examples of things that you put in the benefit package that cost you nothing.
Now, what makes this work is that tenants don't know what you do, okay? If you think about it, you can list a whole bunch of things going to do for a tenant and they don't know, maybe they came out of the apartment buildings, maybe they rented from, maybe they owned a home and they got foreclosed on or something. Whatever the reason is, tenants don't know what you do. And so you can come up with a whole bunch of benefits that to them have a high dollar value, have a serious value to them.
to you, it's really something you already do anyway. So let's kind of tease this out a little bit, okay? How about a copy of a move-in inspection in photos? Now, we mentioned this earlier. You probably already do that for yourself.
Maybe the owner even pays you for it. Maybe it's part of your procurement fee. But the bottom line is, you already do it. So you can say to the tenant, we will give you a copy of the move-in inspection with photos. And the benefit is that you can't be held accountable for pre-existing conditions, damages that were there before you took possession, okay?
Since you're already doing it, you simply give them a copy of it.
Enhancing Tenant Experience
Now the value on that for a move-in and a move-out inspection, pretty high dollar value, right? How about early move-in without pro-rating rent for about 15 years? We said to the tenant, once they were approved, hey, how would you like to move in a week or two early, start moving over the next two or three weekends, a couple of weekends, and we won't prorate the rent. Now, we had a separate video on this and why the owner will love this. Most owners never find out.
When an owner finds out, we have really good answers, It was very persuasive, it made good common sense, and we got away with it constantly. So what we're able to do is give a benefit to the tenant, move in early without prorating rent, okay? And we would put a dollar value on that. I mean, for a week early, it might be 250 bucks, might be 350 bucks. So there's a big dollar value here, And we would say to an approved tenant, assuming the house was ready, okay, we would say, how would you like to move in a week or two early?
Start moving things in next weekend. They love it. They fell in love with it. We did it already, but we put it in our resident benefit package and they wowed over it. They delighted in it.
Ask us for that video. We'll see you get it. how about 24-hour emergency hotline? Now, we did that in-house for a few years, passed a cell phone around to different people, and later on we connected with outside vendors to provide 24-hour service maintenance response service. Some people hire virtual assistants to do that, but you're probably doing it already.
You're probably already providing your tenant with a emergency hotline for maintenance. They don't know that. Put it in your resident benefit package, put a dollar value next to it. It'll impress them, trust me.
Implementing Benefits
How about tech star staff 24-7, or tech star staff during business hours? Well, that's kind of cool. Not every business will let you do that. You're probably already doing it. If you're not, you should be.
It's cheap, okay? and you get really, really much better responses from your tenants. How about waive an online payment fee? Well, most of us want our tenants to pay online, right? Most of us don't put a fee out there for paying online.
Often we have a fee if you give us a personal check because we now have to figure out how to get it to the bank. But most people want tenants to pay online. Well, I don't know that. So you can say, we give you an online portal, you can pay your rent online, there's no additional fees. Well, the question is not, how much is that costing you?
The question is, how does the tenant perceive it? That's why you put it in a benefit package. How about we'll re-key or we'll clean just before move-in? While our system was set up, we re-keyed two or three days before every move-in, just to give the tenant total safety and privacy. And we have the cost all figured out between us and the owner, and we just say to the tenant, we will re-key the property just before move-in.
Value? $175. We went over two or three days before move-in of what we called a pre-move-in wipe-down. We already factored into our system. We had the owner paying or the managers were paying.
We figured it out, but we put it in there and it sounds like, oh my gosh. So you go over and vacuum up the dead bugs and clean the toilets and wipe down the counters and so that there's that fresh Lysol Windex smell when the tenant moves into the property. Yeah, and we made that a benefit in the benefit package and put a dollar value on it, okay? How about 24-7 move-in schedule? Well, most of us are kind of moving toward a remote move-in program, right?
Lockbox, code, blah, blah, blah. There's a lot of different ways to conquer that. We just say to people, You can move in Sunday afternoon. You can move in during the Super Bowl. You can move in on Labor Day weekend.
We don't care. That's a benefit to them. That's a huge benefit to them. You get to put a dollar value on. Pay with a credit card with no fee.
Now, we talked earlier about this. We didn't take a credit card for rent or deposit, but any money that was owed us, we were happy to pay a credit. take a credit card. We were happy to pay the fee. It just wasn't that much on a hundred, two hundred, three hundred dollars.
So we made that part of our benefit package cost us nothing. And we might have been forgoing a little tiny fee, okay. And now this, that's why this works. Why this works. The applicants don't know what's normal.
Applicants don't know what you do. So you get all these benefits out there that cost you nothing. Charge $35 a month for it. They love it. Now you can actually, I'm using things you already do, to build an RRP package and give it away.
So there are managers out there with a bunch of Section 8 tenants that are paying $50 a month for an $800 rental and they kind of say, hmm, I don't really want to charge those tenants $35 a month because they're only paying 50. That's just way too much. And so you can build a resident rewards package just for your section eight people and it's benefit things you already do, but it's not costing you anything and you can go out and charge zero for it or charge five dollars, just cover some hard gauze, okay.
Property Management Rewards and Resources
So it's, it's, you can design it to make it free for the tenant if you need to.
Free Resources for Tenants
So we use that for our co-signers, we use that for our Section 8 properties, we use that for, we see managers using that for the tenants that are covered under the CARES Act because you don't want to charge them and you want to charge them very little. So there's a variety of ways of doing this, and we can help. How can we get you help? Go to trainingpropertymanagers.com slash rewards.
You can go to our website, you can find all this information there, or you can go to Monica's site, gilroyfirm.com slash property dash management, Get a ton of free videos, a guide, a lot of stuff you can get there. Thanks for hanging with us today.
