10 Tenant Satisfaction Survey Question Examples + Tools

It’s no secret that it can be hard to keep tenants happy.

Is there something more to it that you’re not grasping, something else you can do to increase tenant satisfaction?

There usually is, but you can’t find that out until you go to the source.

That is– ask your tenants.

By running a tenant satisfaction survey, you can glean useful information that not only allows you to take steps to make your tenants happier…

… but also helps you keep your tenants longer, increasing your occupancy rate long-term.

Not only that, that information will allow you to make future tenants happier, reducing vacancies and generally having an easier time managing your property. 

How do I get feedback from tenants?

We touched on it above, but the best way to get feedback from tenants is with a tenant satisfaction survey.

With a tenant satisfaction survey, you’re able to ask tenants a set of quick questions about their experience living in your property and pull out useful insights that allow you to improve the tenant experience. 

A survey can easily be carried out online by sending a quick email to tenants asking for their feedback.

You can even offer an incentive to make tenants more likely to fill your incentive out.

What is a tenant satisfaction survey and how do I run one?

There are lots of great options for running a tenant satisfaction survey online.

Which you use doesn’t matter nearly as much as what action you take after gathering your data, so don’t sweat this step too much.

With that said, here are a few great options:

1. Survey Monkey

Survey Monkey is the classic survey tool with more features than just about any survey tool out there.

If you’re looking for something that’s trusty and dependable, this is a great option. 

2. Typefom’s Survey Maker

Typeform’s Survey Maker tool is easy to use and super visually appealing.

If you’re looking for a visually impressive tool that delivers a great experience to your tenants, Survey Maker survey tool is worth looking into. 

3. Sogolytics

Formerly SoGoSurvey, Sogolytics is a complete analytics platform that still boasts its original and extensive survey features. 

If you’re looking for something a bit more robust– especially if you have a large portfolio and would like the cross-reference data for insights– this is worth looking into.

10 Tenant satisfaction survey questions (to get quality feedback from your tenants)

Now that you’ve got:

• A clear understanding of what a tenant satisfaction survey is
• Why they’re important, and
• Have started looking at tools for implementing one

Let’s look at some example questions you can include on your survey.

You don’t need to include all of the questions below, but you will want to mix things up within your survey.

Make sure to include a good variety of topics and types of questions to cover all of your most important points of concern.

Here are some great example questions:

1. How long have you lived at [property]?

Because all survey data should be anonymous, this first question will give you a clear idea of the correlation between:

• How long a tenant has been with you at a particular property
• And all the other data you’ll collect throughout the survey

This will give you data on things such as:

• Are your tenants more satisfied living at the property over time, or less satisfied?
• How long has your average tenant lived at the property? 

2. How satisfied are you with the property’s home maintenance services?

This is a big one, as it’s one of the two largest pain points for tenants.

You want to know if tenants are happy with the maintenance services you provide including:

• The promptness to respond to the service request
• How they felt communicating with your service professional whether internal or contractor
• And the end service provided (whether the problem was fixed, in other words)

3. How satisfied are you with the property’s community maintenance services (including common areas, gardening, etc.)?

Similarly, this is less important but still so. 

You want to know if tenants are happy with the building’s upkeep as a whole, from:

• The gardening of the area outside their unit and the unit’s overall appearance
• To the upkeep of common areas such as the gym, conference room, game room, or whatever else you offer.

4. How happy are you with the property in these areas: gas, electricity, water, internet, etc.?

For this question, you’ll want to go with a multi-section multiple-choice question that has several rows and bubbles to click with categories.

Those categories should range from something like ‘Not satisfied at all’ -> to ‘Completely satisfied’.

You can also include any additional services you offer such as included furnishings. 

5. How would you rate the office staff in these areas?

This question is great for getting an idea of how your tenants feel about working with the office staff.

You’ll want to ask about several areas here, such as:

• Responsiveness (especially)
• Resolving requests
• And general courtesy

6. Do you find it easy to pay your rent each month?

This question should be an easy ‘yes’, but if it’s not you’ll want to handle this sooner than anything else. 

Property management software like DoorLoop allows tenants to sign in to a convenient tenant portal from any device and pay their rent each month within minutes.

They can:

• Review their rent balance
• Pay other fees such as pet rent and parking
• And even submit maintenance requests straight from the app

Questions like this are great for finding out which parts of your process are working for your tenants and which aren’t. 

7. Is there an amenity you’d like added that would be worth an increase in rent?

This is a straightforward question that will help you find out if there’s anything your tenants really wish they had, enough so that they’d be willing to pay for it.

Finding this information out can help inform which future amenities would be worth adding and which may not be. 

8. How easy or difficult was it to do the following?

For this question, you’ll want to include a variety of areas that the tenant can give you an opinion on.

Such as:

• Complete the leasing process
• Request maintenance
• Resolve an issue or dispute
• Work with the office

9. Are you satisfied with the condition of the property?

Include several line items here to get an idea if your tenants feel that the property is in good condition or not.

You should ask about multiple areas here, including:

• Appliances
• Security
• Parking
• Interiors
• Landscaping
• Common areas
• The property’s overall condition

10. Do you have any suggestions for improvement?

This last one might not seem all that important, but it’s a useful question for getting open responses from tenants.

Where they may not have been able to throughout the survey, here they can talk about any additional grievances or feedback they have for you and the property as a whole.

It’s a great final question to include just to make sure you’re hearing every possible concern or bit of feedback to get a more complete picture.

How to get more of your tenants to fill out your survey: Offer incentives

One problem you may run into when sending out a survey is getting enough tenants to fill them out.

A simple solution for fixing the problem is to offer some kind of incentive for filling it out.

By offering an incentive, you’re able to convince more of your tenants to fill out your survey, therefore gathering more survey data.

That will make your surveys far more valuable and accurate as you’ll have more data.

Examples of some incentives you can offer are:

• Gift cards to local businesses (or generally attractive ones such as Amazon or Target)
• A raffle for something larger such as a tablet
• Or something smaller but still tangible such as a product or service from a local business that may offer up their product or service, a win-win for you as you don’t have to pay for anything

How to use your tenant satisfaction survey results to improve your property management

Once you receive your survey results, it’s important to take action on the data you’ve collected.

Don’t just read through your responses and toss them aside. 

If they uncover a common issue that tenants are having, take action.

By improving the overall tenant experience, you’ll not just make your tenants happier but improve occupancy rates and make everything smoother.

Look for patterns and common responses throughout your survey to find pain points you can act on, such as:

• The rent collection experience
• Maintenance
• Or your process for receiving and acting on feedback.

Use DoorLoop to maximize tenant satisfaction

According to data by MEL Research, there are two primary factors that contribute most to tenant satisfaction:

• How property managers handle repairs and maintenance, and
• “Listening to and acting on resident views” (i.e. listening to feedback)

Tenant surveys are great for getting feedback about both of those things.

However, what do you do to improve each area once you’ve gotten your survey data back?

If those are areas you need to improve, look to DoorLoop.

With DoorLoop, you can not only streamline your entire property maintenance by:

• Receiving maintenance requests and notes from tenants
• Communicating with tenants along the way so they know what’s going on
• Assign vendors and providing notes and attachments
• Paying out vendors
• And notifying tenants once the work order is complete

You can also communicate with tenants straight from within the platform, aggregating those communications and notes for each tenant.

You can also:

• Streamline and simplify rent collection
• Other fee collection, and
• Provide a convenient tenant portal where tenants can get useful information about rent payments and more.

DoorLoop allows you to provide a great tenant experience where it counts while simplifying things for you.

Schedule a free demo of DoorLoop to see how it can help you level up your tenant experience today.