Loyalty Program for Renewals

[Wilson Bunton]

Hey everyone,

Getting started with some small multi family properties and after listening to many podcasts and reading around on here it seems one of the biggest issues with being a landlord is retaining high quality tenants.  My thought on this was to offer some sort of loyalty program for tenants that renew leases.  This is not some sort of reward designed to keep people paying on time, just something that would be given to current tenants with their lease renewal package and show benefits of signing an extension.  Obviously this is something that would only be offered to tenants that have proven to be better quality.

I figured that I would escalate the value of the benefit based on how long they have been a tenant.

So for signing a renewal after the first year offer options of either a $100 gift card, free accent wall painting, or maybe a lease credit, etc.

For signing a renewal after the second year offer options of $200 gift card, professional carpet cleaning, free flat screen TV, etc.

Then it would keep going up and the benefits would increase depending on how long the tenant stays.

I figure offering keeping a tenant in place saves at least a month of vacancy plus whatever costs I need to make my units rent ready again.  So offering these benefits still saves me in the long run.  Plus I think that tenants may be more willing to accept that $20 per month rent increase if they are getting something for signing the renewal.

Is anyone else doing anything like this?  If so, what benefits are you offering?