Talking to residents

Ilia Sotonin, founder of Unitify, ran a residential management company for about 20,000 residents and then built doma.ai, the platform used by 10,000 management companies across more than 5 million apartments. His core view on resident communication: most conflicts in housing come from silence, and the measure that matters is how much effort a resident has to spend to get a problem solved, not how satisfied they say they are once a year.

Most conflicts come from silence

People leave for work in the morning and come back in the evening. They see none of what the management company did that day. When something then goes wrong, they assume nothing was being done at all. In my experience, organized anger in a building rarely starts with a real failure. It starts with a failure residents learn about by themselves, with no explanation from anyone.

The same is true of delays. A resident waiting a long time for a complex repair is usually not angry about the wait. They are angry because nobody told them anything. If you are going to miss a deadline, call first. A resident who hears about the delay from you will usually accept it. A resident who discovers it alone will not.

So the default must be to speak first: short regular updates on what was done, before-and-after photos of work nobody would otherwise notice, and a monthly report. A management company that keeps publishing small updates never leaves an empty space for rumors to fill.

Effort matters more than satisfaction

In 2015 I wrote that NPS "is a great system if you use it correctly." Used alone, it is not enough. An annual NPS survey is a barometer. It tells you a storm is coming when it is already overhead.

The more useful question comes right after each interaction: how much did we simplify solving your problem? That is customer effort. Every extra call, every repeated explanation, every handover between departments costs the resident something, even if the problem is eventually fixed. Reducing effort earns more loyalty than a perfect fix that took a string of phone calls.

In our book we name three things that destroy loyalty: too much effort, problems the company knew about but did not warn people of, and poor communication. A satisfaction survey cannot fix any of them. Changing the process can. And no follow-up call annoys people more than "Did I solve your problem completely?" asked after a failure that should never have happened.

Handling requests

Let residents use whatever channel they prefer: phone, chat, app, email, a word to the building manager. Then bring every channel into one system, so whoever answers sees the whole history. Forcing people into a single inconvenient channel just pushes their complaints into the building's group chat.

The traditional dispatch office was the opposite of this. In 2015 I wrote that in old-style management companies "the dispatch office usually works so that you don't want to call there one extra time. We need to break those traditions."

A request is closed only when the resident has rated it. If the rating is low, someone calls to ask what went wrong. Without that loop you have no real quality data, only opinions. At Ande Tower in Batumi, requests are handled three times faster since the building moved to Unitify.

How to write to residents

• Write so that you cannot be misunderstood, not merely so that you can be understood.
• Put the most important information first, then the reason, then what residents should do.
• Use plain human language: no bureaucratic phrasing, no capital letters, no rows of exclamation marks.
• Notices only work if people can understand them; in 2019 I wrote exactly that.
• Treat the board as a partner. Its members are your customer, your representative and your ally at the same time.

When a complaint appears in public, answer openly and with evidence, apologize sincerely when you really failed, and move the heated part of the conversation to a private channel. Conflict cools when there is no audience. My shortest rule, from 2016: "Put yourself in the resident's place."

Questions people ask

How should an HOA or management company communicate with residents? Speak first and speak regularly: short updates on work done, warnings before planned disruptions, and a monthly report on work and money. In the company I ran for about 20,000 residents, most conflicts we saw came from silence, not from the underlying problem. Residents forgive delays far more easily than surprises.

Is NPS a good metric for community management? It is useful as an annual barometer, but too slow to run operations on. I prefer measuring effort right after each request: how easy was it for the resident to get the problem solved? That number tells you what to fix while there is still time.

How should a management company handle resident requests? Accept them through every channel residents use, route them into one system, keep the resident informed at each step, and close each request only after the resident has rated it. A low rating should trigger a personal call. At Ande Tower, after moving to Unitify, requests are handled three times faster.

How do you deal with an angry resident in a public chat? Reply calmly and with facts, apologize if you really failed, and offer to continue in private. Most heat goes away once there is no audience. Then fix the process that caused the complaint, so the next resident does not have to raise it.

Ilia Sotonin is open to conversations on this topic: [email protected]