Offering resident benefits is currently the best way to grow high-margin revenue without spending capital on sales and marketing. If you’re looking for a pathway to increased profitability without adding more units to your portfolio, then look no further.
If you’ve heard of resident benefits before, then you probably are aware of mandatory benefits. With this model, you require the residents to sign up for your benefit package as part of the lease. This can be a great way to grow your revenue BUT mandatory benefits come with a swath of pitfalls. Forcing residents to pay more for a benefit can:
- Hold up the leasing process;
- Reduce applicants in tight rental markets;
- Reduce resident retention in tight markets;
- Impact owner relationships;
- Illegal in many states and counties.
So what are your options if making a mandatory benefit fee doesn’t work for your business. Latchel is the only company focused on offering an optional resident benefit that averages a 40% opt-in rate and creates an average of $24k in new annual revenue for every 100 units you manage.
In this blog, we’re going to walk through how easy Latchel’s optional benefits are to use and why you should be considering adding them to your management company even if you already have a mandatory benefit package but want to create even more ancillary revenue.
All of our benefits, besides being optional, are designed around improving resident issues around maintenance and reimbursing them for the places we know residents wind up spending money.
The most hated experience for renters is getting maintenance chargebacks. And we know this experience is also painful for property managers. Often the residents don’t pay, and it comes out of the security deposit. You, as the manager, have to go through a lot of nonsense to ultimately get those chargeback expenses covered, and the resident is always left with a sour taste in their mouth unless you or the owner flips the bill. Our benefits are designed for those moments where there are going to be chargebacks to a resident, and we want to create a WOW moment for a resident rather than create a retention headache for you.
Our most popular benefit is the $1,000 of chargeback reimbursement that we provide residents each lease term. This turns that negative chargeback moment into a seamless and positive experience. Our chargeback credits also encourage renters to report issues before move-out so they can use their chargeback reimbursement and save money on their security deposit. This benefit alone makes opting into the Latchel resident benefit a financial no-brainer for renters.
On top of that, Latchel provides 5 additional exclusive benefits that renters and managers love. We reduce minor plumbing dispatches by nearly 30% because we regularly ship drain clearance packs to residents which contain a disposable plastic declogger, no chemicals, no damage to drains. This is the most used benefit as almost 50% of maintenance issues are these types of minor plumbing problems.
Latchel provides several other benefits that put money back into the residents pocket making opt-in an obvious choice including a utility setup concierge, overnight stay reimbursements during emergencies, lockout reimbursements, missed service appointment coverage, and more. Any of these benefits can be easily disabled or turned on so you can customize your benefit as needed.
We have a host of additional benefits that you can add-on with just a click, including HVAC filter delivery, rent rewards and credit reporting, pest control, tenant liability insurance, and more.
You can even create your own custom benefits to sit right alongside your exclusive Latchel benefits. Some of the most popular ones we see are late fee waivers, nsf waivers, and home buying support.
And in just a few clicks, you can drop your benefit portal into your website by just copying and pasting the embed code that Latchel provides into your website. This makes it easy to advertise your benefits to new renters, new owners, and for existing residents to easily access all of their benefits from your website.
And for residents, getting $1,000 of damage reimbursement has never been easier. All they need to do is click the benefit tile, submit for their reimbursement, and within 72 hours they receive their reimbursement.
If you’re looking for ways to increase revenues, Latchel optional resident benefit is the lightest weight way to do it. By simply using the one-sheet addendum that Latchel provides, the benefits sell themselves right inside your lease agreement. Within your first few months, you’ll realize more revenue.
If this is your first time launching a resident benefit, talk to one of our product specialists about whether optional or mandatory is the right fit for you.
If you already have a mandatory benefit package, our optional benefits can be a great replacement to maintain your revenue or you can layer our optional benefit on top of your existing mandatory one to generate even more revenues without increasing your door count.
