What residents want from their building is duller than the amenity brochures suggest: repairs that actually get fixed, a quiet safe home, and a straight answer about what is happening. URBI runs that daily layer for buildings, but you can measure your own building with a clipboard.
What do residents rank highest?
Residents rank the things they touch every day above the things a building advertises. The largest study available is the 2024 renter preferences survey from the National Multifamily Housing Council and Grace Hill, covering 172,703 renters across 4,220 communities in 77 markets. Nothing at the top of that list is glamorous.
| What residents said mattered | Share who rated it important |
|---|---|
| Washer and dryer in the home | 93 percent |
| Air conditioning | 93 percent |
| High speed internet | 90 percent |
| Soundproof walls | 88 percent |
| Noise reducing windows | 83 percent |
| Neighbors respecting the community rules | 66 percent |
| Feeling welcomed by community staff | 52 percent |
Those figures come from Multifamily Dive's summary of the same survey. Sarah Yaussi, vice president of business strategy at NMHC, put the finding plainly in that piece: "it's the practical and everyday needs ... that renters care about."
A separate survey of 5,471 renters fielded by RentCafe between November 8 and December 9, 2024 lands in the same place. Laundry in the home and the price of rent tied at 63 percent, safety and security reached 62 percent, and clean common areas reached 53 percent. Almost half named friendly staff and responsive management. Two surveys, different samples, same shape: safety, quiet, function, and someone who answers.
Why does the spending list not match the noticing list?
Because operators and residents are ranking different things, and the operators do not know it. Zego's 2025 resident experience research, covering more than 1,000 renters and 600 property managers and reported by Multifamily Executive, found renters naming expensive rent, poor maintenance service, safety concerns and poor upkeep as their reasons for leaving. Managers named life changes and home buying. The report's own summary of the gap: "they also underestimate how important maintenance, safety concerns, and property upkeep are to renters."
Managers in that study put a technology enabled lifestyle at the top of what they believed residents cared about. Residents put maintenance repairs, security, and community cleanliness at the top of theirs.
The second half of the gap is that almost nobody measures whether an amenity gets used. Grace Hill markets its amenities report on the promise of showing "How satisfaction compares to actual usage across property types," which tells you how rare that comparison is. And MRI Software's survey of more than 2,000 renters found the widest gaps between what residents wanted and what buildings had were laundry in the home (50 percent wanted it, 34 percent had it) and broadband (38 percent against 16 percent), not the showpiece spaces.
What should you ask your own residents?
Ask four short things at four different moments rather than one long survey once a year. Annual surveys get low response rates, arrive too late to fix anything, and mix people who moved in last week with people who have lived there a decade.
1. The move in check, 7 to 14 days after arrival. Four questions: was the home clean and complete on day one, did keys, fobs and parking work, were the fees and rules what you were told, and which channel should we use for routine, urgent and emergency messages. This is the only moment a resident remembers your onboarding clearly.
2. The two question survey on every closed ticket. Ask "is the problem actually fixed?" and "was the person who came respectful and did they leave it clean?" Add an optional comment box. Nothing else. A closed ticket is not a resolved problem, and the only person who can tell you the difference is the resident. If you already track requests digitally, this attaches to the closing step. If you do not, it is a card left behind by the technician. See our guide to handling maintenance requests for the workflow this hangs off.
3. The quarterly pulse, eight questions maximum. Safety, cleanliness, noise, condition of shared spaces, whether staff treat you with respect, whether you get answers when you ask, value for what you pay, and one open box: "what is the single thing you would change?" The open box is usually where the real finding is.
4. The pre renewal or pre AGM check, 120 to 180 days ahead. Ask whether they intend to stay, what issue is still open, and what one change would most affect the decision. Asking after the renewal notice goes out is too late.
How do you ask so people actually answer?
Make answering shorter than complaining. Every design choice below exists to remove a reason not to respond.
- Use the channel they picked. The NMHC survey found email overwhelmingly preferred for tours and non emergency maintenance requests, while a RealPage survey of 2,000 renters aged 18 to 55 found 79 percent expect to get what they need through message, text or chat. Both are true. Record a preference per household and stop arguing about which channel wins.
- Re ask the channel question once a year. Buildium's advice on resident communication is to check annually which methods are the lowest common denominator for your building. People change phones, jobs and habits.
- Keep the pulse under two minutes and say so in the first line. State the number of questions.
- Do not require a login. A QR code on a lobby poster, a paper slip at the desk, and a link that opens without an account beat a portal every time.
- Ask in the languages people speak at home. A survey only in English measures your English speaking residents, which is the same problem covered in multilingual resident communication.
- Do not skip residents who are not on the app. Older residents answer paper and phone at higher rates, the whole subject of resident app adoption among older adults.
- Always publish the count and the response rate. "41 of 220 households replied" is honest and it tells the board how much weight the result carries.
What do you do with the answers?
Publish four things within two weeks, every time, in this order: what we heard, what we will do, what we cannot do and why, and when we will report back. The fourth line is the one buildings skip, and it is the one that decides whether anyone answers your next survey.
Then measure the operation itself, not just the mood:
- Median and 90th percentile time to acknowledge and to complete, by priority. Never publish only the average. A slow outlier disappears inside an average, and the outlier is the resident writing to the board.
- Percentage of requests finished inside the window you promised. Your promise, your number.
- Repeat visits. A job that needed a second trip was not done the first time.
- Open requests per 100 units. Backlog, in a form a board can read.
The reason to publish transaction level numbers is that overall satisfaction hides them. The Chicago Housing Authority surveyed 4,303 residents in 2025 and found only 50 percent reporting work orders completed on time and 49 percent finding property management responsive to inquiries. It also found only 29 percent using the programs it offered. Availability is not usage, and a single headline score would have concealed all three.
Apply the same discipline to amenities. Before calling a space a success, get seven numbers: how many residents know it exists, how many are eligible and able to use it, how many unique households use it in a month, how often they come back, how many hours it was closed or broken, satisfaction among users and non users separately, and what it did to complaints or renewal intent. A party room nobody books is a cost, and one with an unclear deposit process is a complaint generator.
Where does software fit?
Software fits after the habit, not before it. Everything above runs on paper, and a building that will not close the loop on paper will not close it in an app either. What a platform changes is the cost of doing it monthly instead of yearly: the ticket survey fires when a job closes, the channel preference sits on the household record, and response times come out as medians rather than a spreadsheet built by hand.
That is the layer URBI runs for residential buildings: requests with photos and vendor assignment, announcements that reach every household, amenity bookings with capacity and deposits, packages with a chain of custody, and a Building Health Score per property. Arthur, the resident facing AI, answers on voice, SMS, email and in app chat, and when it does not know something it escalates to the manager with a summary instead of guessing, then saves the approved answer for next time. More detail sits in URBI for residential buildings and in the guide to after hours maintenance calls.
Frequently asked questions
How often should a building survey residents?
Four times a year for the quarterly pulse, plus event driven surveys that fire on their own: one after each move in and one after every closed maintenance ticket. Add a renewal or AGM check roughly six months before the decision. The event driven ones do most of the work, because they ask a specific person about a specific experience while they still remember it.
What response rate should we expect?
There is no published benchmark that survives scrutiny, so treat your own first round as the baseline and improve on it. What reliably raises it is length, channel and follow through. Two questions after a repair beat a twenty question annual survey by a wide margin. Publishing what changed last round raises the next round more than any incentive does.
Are residents generally unhappy with their buildings?
No, and it is worth saying so. In the NMHC survey, 85 percent said they enjoyed living in their community and 86 percent felt included and accepted. Jay Parsons, chief economist at RealPage, told Multifamily Executive that "most apartment renters are happy being apartment renters." The failures are concentrated and specific, which is exactly why measuring them beats guessing at them.
Can a small self managed building do this?
Yes, and it has an advantage. A hundred unit building can post a lobby sign, hand out cards after repairs, run a quarterly paper pulse, and publish results on the notice board. The whole system costs a printer and an hour a quarter. The discipline matters, not the tooling.
Start with the two question ticket survey. It takes a week to set up, it produces findings you can act on immediately, and it tells you more about what residents want from your building than any national survey can. If you want the whole loop running without building it by hand, reach out at hello@myurbi.co.
