by Kirk Layton, President & Co-Founder of The Tenex Group
In the best buildings in town, tenants know there’s a rooftop terrace. They know the lobby café does two-for-one lattes on Fridays, they know the fitness centre just added a 7:00 a.m. yoga class, and they’ve booked the boardroom on the building app before their coffee has cooled. That isn’t luck. It’s effective communication.
In my previous blog post, “The Great Amenity Guessing Game,” I looked at the gap between what tenants want and what landlords think they want, and found that the good stuff is often already there; it just needs a spotlight. After all, an amenity nobody knows about is, functionally, a very expensive storage room.
This is where digital communication comes in.
Meet the Digital Megaphones
Property managers today have an impressive communication toolkit. Tenant experience platforms and workplace apps put building news, bookings, events and service requests right in tenants’ pockets. Social media gives a building a personality: LinkedIn for the professional crowd, Instagram for the “look at this latte art from the lobby café” crowd, and Facebook for … well, let’s keep this blog post friendly, shall we? And the humble digital newsletter, whether quarterly or monthly, remains the dependable workhorse that shows up, does the job and never asks for a raise.
Each channel does something different. Together, they make sure the great things happening in the building actually reach the people they’re intended for.
Why It Matters (Beyond Packing the 7:00 a.m. Yoga Class)
Here’s where fun turns into finance. In 2024, economists Minyi Hu, Nils Kok and Juan Palacios studied tenant satisfaction across thousands of office buildings. They found that a one-point increase in tenant satisfaction on a five-point scale is associated with an 8.6% higher willingness to renew the lease, an 11.5% higher likelihood to recommend the property to prospective tenants, and a 14.6% lower probability of moving out. At the building level, 10% higher satisfaction was linked to 0.9% higher growth in effective gross rent and a 0.3% drop in the vacancy rate.
What moves satisfaction? Their research points to better property management as one of the levers, and communication is how tenants actually experience that management. Every event invite, every amenity spotlight, every “heads up, the water’s off on floor 12 Tuesday morning” message is a small deposit in the goodwill bank account.
The stakes are real, too. Research from JLL found that satisfaction ratings of “good” or “excellent” resulted in renewal rates of over 70 percent, and that losing a tenant could mean nine months of leasing downtime and two years to recover revenue.
The math is refreshingly simple: informed tenants use more of the building, tenants who use more of the building like it more, and tenants who like it more stick around, happily paying for the privilege.
Megaphones Don’t Run Themselves
Of course, owning a megaphone and knowing what to say into it are two different things. Having the channels in place is only half the job. Tenants need information that’s timely, regular and, above all, relevant: this month’s café specials, not the 2019 fire drill schedule. That’s easier said than done when property managers are also juggling HVAC calls, capital projects and the eternal mystery of who keeps propping open the loading dock door. An app with stale content quietly becomes an app nobody opens.
The channels also work best as part of a broader tenant engagement strategy that ticks all the boxes, from building events and activations to tenant surveys and amenity programming. That’s when the magic happens, because the whole thing becomes a virtuous circle. Events and activations create fresh content for social posts and newsletters. Surveys reveal what tenants actually care about, so the next message lands. Better content drives more engagement, more engagement drives satisfaction and satisfaction, as we’ve seen, drives renewals and net effective rents. Round and round it goes, and everybody wins.
Don’t Forget the Brokers
Effective communication often extends beyond the building, too. Leasing representatives are, in a very real sense, a building’s sales team, and often create the first impression of your building on future tenants. Ensuring the leasing teams and third-party brokers have access to your tenant communications and availability reports can improve their understanding of the onsite experience. A well-informed broker turns a list of amenities into a story that prospects can picture themselves in.
The Good News
CRE has been getting this right for a while. The best property teams aren’t just managing buildings; they’re running vibrant little communities with highly engaged — and informed — tenants. Digital channels simply give them a louder, clearer, more consistent way to tell their building’s story, and, just as importantly, to hear back from the people they serve.
So go ahead. Post the latte art on Instagram. Send the enewsletter far and wide. Push the notification about Taco Tuesdays on your building’s app. Use your digital megaphones to amplify your building’s best features, and you’ll be rewarded with engaged and informed tenants who sing your praises to the rooftops. Just make sure that your communications are timely, regular and relevant, and that they support your broader tenant engagement strategy.
SOURCES
Hu, M., Kok, N. & Palacios, J. “Tenant Satisfaction and Commercial Building Performance.” MIT Center for Real Estate Research Paper No. 24/01 (2024); Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics.
JLL, “The Cost of Losing a Tenant,” as reported by Building Engines.
Every event invite, every amenity spotlight, every “heads up, the water’s off on floor 12 Tuesday morning” message is a small deposit in the goodwill bank account.
