Peter Lohmann at RL Property Management used NPS surveys to spot why owners were leaving. A word-cloud analysis of low scores revealed one problem dominated: maintenance costs and turnover. They launched an initiative to control expenses and communicate proactively with owners.
We for years have been, we've been surveying our owners and our tenants using an NPS survey, Net Promoter Score. We use a piece of software called Retently, but there's a million of them. It really doesn't matter which one you use. And so once every 3 or 4 months, an email would go out to all of our owners asking them, how likely are you to rate RL Property Management? How, how likely are you to refer RL Property Management to a friend or colleague on a score through 1 through 10? And whatever the score they gave, they would be given the opportunity to leave a comment. Nice thing about this, by the way, is it heads off a lot of your bad Google reviews because when people feel like they've been heard, they're less likely to go to a public place. So what I did was when I first started looking at this churn problem, I got a data dump of all of the negative client NPS scores. So basically 0 through 6. Or 1 through 7, anyone who scored 1 through 7, I grabbed all of their comments and I fed it into like a word cloud analysis tool. This was like pre-AI. This was like 2 years ago before I was really using ChatGPT. And it showed me a word cloud of like, what are the most common words that people use when leaving a negative comment about their experience with my company? And the biggest word was maintenance. And so when I dug into it, I found out that mo— a lot of people were complaining about turn costs and maintenance costs. So that kicked off a huge effort at our company to figure out what's going on with our turn costs and our maintenance costs and try and get those more under control or loop owners into what was happening at the property earlier so that they weren't surprised even if they did have to spend a bunch of money.
