You have great amenities, great prices, and a great staff, but lately you’ve been losing occupants. There are many things that could be reducing your occupancy rates, but sometimes they are things that you haven’t even considered. Here are some small things that may be driving your residents out and how to fix them:

  • Excessive Noise: People who live next to noisy neighbors have a hard time staying happy. They may have disrupted sleep, interrupted downtime, and can’t relax and just enjoy being home. A lot of the times if residents do not directly file noise complaints, you may not even know this is going on. An easy fix is to just check the noise of your spaces and if needed add a few layers of noise reduction insulation between residents to keep everyone happy.
  • Unauthorized Entries: If you don’t have gated entries, people may be coming and going through your rental to the chagrin of your renters. These people may be making excessive noise, causing inconveniences, and making your residents feel unsafe. So consider installing entry keypads or buzzers so that not anyone can just enter the building.
  • Bad Neighbors: Sometimes residents may love their homes, but new neighbors move in and cause conflict. Residents who have been with you for years may leave because of a bad neighbor. This is a little more difficult to control than some of the other facets of property management but if you suspect this is the case, you can implement better and more thorough screening processes when selecting residents. A lot of the time this is overlooked by property managers because they just want to increase their occupancy. However, you have to remember you are creating a community and it’s better to have long-term happy neighbors, than just filling the space with whoever can pay.
  • The Neighborhood Changes: Neighbors fall in and out of fashion over time and a lot of people have specific things they want in their neighborhood. This is not as easy to address as some of the internal issues that may be driving away occupants, but there are still things you can do. First, you can improve your resident’s community by offering events and ways to foster neighbor relations. Secondly, you can get involved in your local community by attending community events and support local legislators to improve the community. As a property manager, you have a lot of investment in your neighborhood so you should find ways to help grow the area by joining community groups and local boards.

Sometimes when your occupancy rates are low it may be little things you are missing. So if you can’t figure out why you are losing residents, consider some of these factors and implement these solutions. If you still can’t figure out why you are losing occupants, you can setup exit interviews to see what improvements you can make to either keep them or occupants in the future.