People lead hectic lives. If we’re not at work, we’re visiting friends and family, looking after the kids, doing the weekly shopping, trying our best at the gym, and all while trying to fit in seven or eight hours of sleep every night.
Put simply, there aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done. So, if you can improve convenience for residents in your development, you make their schedule more manageable.
In this blog, we look at the importance of convenience for residents, how to improve convenience in your development, and the key benefits of doing so.
The Importance of Convenience for Residents
We don’t get as much time to relax and enjoy ourselves as we would like. According to a survey by Direct Line Insurance, the average UK adult needs a precise six hours and 59 minutes to achieve the perfect work/life balance.
In actual fact, we tend to get just 4 hours and 14 minutes; that’s more than two and a half hours to ourselves that we’re missing out on every day.
This is why tenants will always value developments looking into time-saving solutions. It removes a lot of the everyday stress and hassle, creating a lot of added convenience for residents.
How to Improve Convenience for Residents
There are many ways you can make life more convenient for tenants. The amenities you offer, the proptech solutions you’ve explored and your staff’s general attitude and helpfulness all go a long way. Let’s take a look at each point in detail:
A Range of Amenities
The average age of a renter in co-living accommodation is 28.2 years. For the most part, your development will be home to many similar individuals, the young professionals who work in the city centre.
Most of their day is busy and hectic, and having one central point where they can relax, blow off steam and sort out the little things on their minds is key.
A gym is great for quick workout sessions, a cafe or restaurant provides a pick-me-up, games and cinema rooms offer fun distractions, and a co-working area is perfect for keeping the work/life balance in check.
Parcel rooms are another important amenity that provides a lot of convenience for residents, and they’re also the most requested facility. If your residents are out when a parcel is delivered, their package will be safely stored in a secured room instead of being returned to the sorting office.
And it’s not just parcels for which a package room can be used.
Dry cleaning and groceries can be delivered straight to a package room, cutting out the need for your residents to make special trips to collect their clothes or spend their free time walking around a supermarket.
A range of amenities is necessary, but remember, the facilities you offer only provide value if they work with your residents’ lifestyles. Regularly check with residents to see what amenities they use and what else they would like to see.
Proptech Solutions
Technology is making life more and more convenient each day. It’s why the UK proptech industry is worth over £6bn, as new solutions and investment opportunities keep coming to light.
Proptech comes in all different forms. From key fobs that make entering the building less hassle to apps that control heating and lighting. But proptech isn’t just convenient for residents; it also provides a lot of help to your team.
Let’s take PSP Lite as a critical example. Within 5 seconds, your front-of-house advisors — or the couriers themselves in most cases — can check in each package, and an automated push notification is sent out to let residents know a delivery is waiting at reception.
It saves you from the laborious task of manually checking in and signing for items, and of course, residents can pick up their parcels when they have a free moment. Check out more information on PSP Lite, and get in touch to see if your development is eligible for a two-month free trial.
Helpful Staff
We place a lot of importance on amenities and proptech to improve convenience for residents, but the human element has to be there as well. After all, you and your team are running the development, and residents will turn to you when there is a problem.
Never underestimate the power of a friendly face and helpful attitude. If it looks like residents are struggling with bags or boxes, offer to help carry some. When a resident points out an issue such as water spillage, ensure that someone can resolve it as quickly as possible.
You should also ask for regular feedback from your residents, getting to know how satisfied they are with service levels and if they have any suggestions for improvement.
Being proactive is a significant factor in resident convenience, as it shows you’re willing to continually find new ways to provide a better all-around service.
What is the Key Benefit?
The key benefit to improving resident convenience is that you’re providing the one thing they want most: a place to live that works around their lifestyle.
Amenities save on trips to the gym, supermarket and cinema, proptech streamlines time-consuming processes, and helpful staff adds reassurance that the building is being run with the residents in mind.
In turn, all this helps with the reputation of your development. Naturally, you want every unit to be occupied for the most extended amount of time, and a resident who is happy where they are is less likely to move at the end of their tenancy agreement, improving your net promoter score.
This means you’ll have fewer void periods cutting into the development’s profit margin.
Some residents will eventually move on, but the strong reputation you’ve built by running a modern development means units will quickly be reoccupied if they return to the rental market.
Parcel SafePlace is at Your Convenience
We specialise in creating convenience for both you and your residents. Our parcel rooms and PSP Lite software are designed to take the stress and hassle out of package management, a task that takes up a lot of time and requires collections to be done during the 9–5 working day.
We’re at your convenience, so get in touch to learn more about our parcel solutions.