In today’s rental market, seemingly every property has a pool, a fitness center, or even a rooftop patio. The reality is, amenities such as these have become the standard and they don’t make a property stand out anymore.

In the never-ending effort to attract and retain residents, forward-thinking operators are offering services like rent reporting, loyalty programs, and deposit alternatives—amenities that provide financial benefits—to help their communities get a leg up on the competition. In the 2024 Entrata Summit session Leveraging Resident-Based Services to Acquire and Retain Quality Residents, the panel consisting of multifamily executives and industry experts shared their companies’ success stories with financial-focused amenities.

Dave Hyman, President of Haverkamp Properties, noted that security deposit alternatives are popular amongst their student-housing and market-rate communities, while resident loyalty programs have been a particularly big hit in Haverkamp’s student-housing portfolio as well. Residents earn loyalty points for things like paying rent on time, renewing a lease, or even attending onsite community events. “It’s really been a huge success in our properties,” Hyman said. Reporting positive rent payments to the major credit bureaus to help residents build credit is another popular financial amenity among Haverkamp’s residents, Hyman noted. 

Eric Milton, Chief Technology Officer at United Property Management, also said deposit alternatives, rent reporting, and alternative payment plans are attractive amenities to residents across their properties. Their alternative payment service allows residents to split their rent payments into two installments, giving them the flexibility to match their rent payment schedules with when they receive their paychecks. “Many of our residents are living paycheck to paycheck, and this service really helps those residents pay their rent and not have the late fees, while also helping us stabilize our revenue curve,” Milton said.

Hyman emphasized the importance of getting site team buy-in on these amenities and making sure the supporting systems create easy experiences for both residents and onsite teams alike. “If your site teams are spending too much time training on it, it’s not going to work,” he said. Milton echoed similar sentiments. “With any system that you roll out, if your manager or site team doesn’t really understand the value it brings not just to your organization, but to the resident and the applicant, it’s going to fail,” he said.

The panelists also provided some additional resident-retention tips unrelated to financial-based services. For instance, they noted the powerful benefit of facilitating good relationships among neighbors. “Relatively speaking, one of the most important things for resident retention is making sure that they like their neighbors,” Milton said. “And so having resident events and increasing interactions is advantageous for us. That’s something we’ve been really big on.”

Haverkamp believes high-performing maintenance teams are also essential to driving retention rates, Hyman said. “We put a lot of emphasis on our maintenance teams to deliver exceptional customer service. They probably have a bigger impact on our resident retention than our leasing staff office because they’re getting a chance to be out there and meet and interact with them,” he said.

Looking ahead to the future, the panel was bullish about the ability of AI to enhance the leasing experience by providing quick responses to a prospect’s outreach. “I’m really interested in seeing how AI will improve our team’s responsiveness and allow us to address applicants who reach out after normal business hours,” Milton said. Along the same line, “I'm just excited about AI’s ability to handle so much of those interactions with prospects well,” Hyman said. “The studies show that if you can respond to a prospect within the first five minutes of them reaching out to you, your conversion rate is through the roof.”