What Residents & Tenants Really Want: Property Amenities Edition

Do you remember what superpower you wanted when you were a kid? I do. It wasn’t flying, or super strength, or invisibility, or running crazy fast. Not for me. No, I wanted to read minds. And if you were to ask me now, it’s still a superpower I covet. That’s why I’ve become obsessed with studying microexpressions from books like “Emotions Revealed.” 

It’s also why I wrote today’s newsletter about the amenities residents and tenants really want. Because even if we can’t read their minds, we can 1) ask them, 2) observe them, and 3) see if they put their money where their mouth is. Today, I’m putting the pieces of the renter mind-reading puzzle together for you. 

Whether your firm is a developer, manager, or owner, you need to know what amenities renters value. That way, you can add, renovate, or highlight the most important ones in your properties. 

Let’s talk about office amenities first. Imagine your employer requires you to start working in the office again. Your emotions are mixed; you’re excited about seeing coworkers and talking to real, live people. But on the other hand, you enjoy taking a walk with your dog at 2 p.m. or knocking out laundry on a day other than Sunday. As a facilities manager or office landlord, you’ve been busy updating the property during this quiet time. Finally, the highly anticipated first day back in the office comes. You wait with bated breath. Perhaps your new amenity will make them excited to work in the office again! 

But…what is that new amenity?

Office owners and managers can’t afford to get this wrong. With commercial real estate loans’ delinquency rates continuing to rise, we have to ask: What do tenants really want? Let’s take a look at the data. Using Anthropic’s Claude AI model, I categorized all of our 2024 year-to-date office tenant survey comments into categories. Here’s what I saw.

It’s the same theme over and over again — office tenants want food. This may come in the form of restaurants, coffee shops, food trucks, vending machines, and the like. Fortunately for landlords, many food-related amenities are lower cost to implement than other amenities like a fitness center/gym or a rooftop patio. And don’t worry; I didn’t forget about amenities across industrial, medical office, and retail! More on these later.

The same conundrum about what amenities to focus on applies even more so to multifamily. After all, multifamily is only a hop, skip, and a jump away from hospitality. We’ll explore what amenities your residents love (and don’t love) compared to how often they use them. Then, we’ll take a look at potential drivers of monthly rent premiums. That way, you can better estimate the return on investment for a particular amenity.

First, let’s review satisfaction rates across the most common amenities in the U.S.

Residents were most satisfied with the clubhouse, pool, fitness center, and pet amenities. And in terms of total usage, the clubhouse, pool, and fitness center were in the top 5 most used amenities per day per Gatewise’s access data.

However, when we look at these three categories on a per-unit basis, they drop to only the top 10 most used amenities. More on how you can access this analysis later.

On the flip side, renters were least satisfied with EV charging, bike storage, and laundry rooms. Note to self: These are areas for improvement that could immediately increase your residents’ satisfaction!

Lower satisfaction with certain amenities could be due to quality issues. Not only was I lucky enough to collaborate on an amenities usage analysis with Gatewise, but the HelloData team also chimed in. Using optical character recognition and artificial intelligence, they algorithmically determined how “nice” a multifamily property is based on website photos. Using this data and numerous other data points they provided, I created a model to predict rental rates. Some of the key features included each property’s amenities, location, and unit count. Guess what? Overall property quality had the third largest impact on the predicted rental rate.

You need to know what amenities will drive ROI. Amenities may increase or decrease satisfaction, have high or low usage, and some may even garner a rent premium — while others negatively impact monthly rent.

Want to make smarter, more impactful decisions about which amenities to build or renovate? Download our free research report here. We investigate amenities across multifamily, office, industrial, retail, and medical office property types. And we dive into all the analytics I referenced above but didn’t have space to include.

As a reminder, resident and tenant satisfaction analysis is an aggregation of all our customers’ data. Results may differ from individual properties. Always use your specific KingsleySurveys analysis to make strategic decisions for your property. Contact Grace Hill today to get a tailored survey of your residents and tenants. We can’t wait to hear from you!

Next, work with Gatewise to have app-based access control in your community and understand who uses your amenities and when. You can easily manage your entire community access control, from car gates and amenity doors to individual model units — all within one reliable platform. Reach out to their amazing team to learn more. And last but certainly not least, examine HelloData’s 30+ million units of comparable properties. All of their data is 100% public, mined from property website pages and listing sites. Get a demo (it’s awesome!) to see how over 11,000 multifamily professionals save 4+ hours per week on market surveys with HelloData.

Please give a huge round of virtual applause to the Gatewise and HelloData teams for all of their help with this newsletter and report. I couldn’t have “read the minds” of residents without them! 

Don’t forget to download our collaborative research report on tenant and resident amenities here.

—By Jen Tindle