Your owner clients don’t wake up excited to fill out surveys.
Your job is to make it fast, relevant, and clearly worth their time — then prove you acted on what they said.
TL;DR
- Don’t guess. Measure owner sentiment regularly and act on it.
- Be intentional with your list of people to survey
- Keep surveys short, timed to key moments, and safe for candid input.
- Close the loop publicly to build trust, reduce churn, and drive referrals.
- With PropertyManagement.com, you can run best‑practice surveys end‑to‑end and showcase results via your TrueMatch profile — no extra lift for your team.
Why surveys matter more now
Vacancy risk, maintenance inflation, and statement complexity are raising expectations across the board. Silent churn is real: many dissatisfied owners and residents won’t complain — they’ll simply leave. A disciplined survey program gives you three advantages:
- Retention moat: Catch issues privately and early before they become public reviews or lost contracts.
- Operational focus: Invest where it actually matters to customers, not where you hope it does.
- Credible proof: Convert quiet goodwill into visible, verifiable proof that earns trust and referrals.
Great programs nail two things:
- Reach people at the right moments in the right channels.
- Protect data quality so decisions are based on signal, not noise.
What to measure
Keep your core questionnaire lightweight and stable over time so you can benchmark progress. At PropertyManagement.com, our owner survey is designed to measure satisfaction across all major lifecycle moments of a property owner’s journey. We cover resident quality, leasing, maintenance, communication, and overall satisfaction. This allows us to capture a holistic picture of the customer journey while also allowing us to pinpoint strength and weakness areas. Plus, it’s still short!
In general, when surveying customers, we recommend you include:
- Satisfaction signal: A single overall satisfaction rating or recommendation intent
- Service drivers: Speed and quality of maintenance, leasing and vacancy experience, communication, financial reporting accuracy and timeliness, move‑in/outs
- Confidence & trust: "I trust my manager to act in my best interest" agreement scale
- Open feedback: One prompt for what’s working and one for what to improve
How to build your send list like a marketer (not a spreadsheet)
When creating your list of owner clients to survey, think about the clients that have recently engaged with your team, reached key moments in the customer journey, or who have demonstrated engagement in the past. You can even ask your team to contribute 5-10 clients they’ve recently engaged who may be great survey candidates. Collect those names and emails and build your send list.
Some good rules of thumb to remember:
- Prioritize reachability and value. Start with your largest portfolios and your highest‑engagement owners (recently communicated with, someone you just had a call or meeting with, opens/clicks your emails). This lifts volume without bloating your denominator.
- Warm the data. Confirm preferred email and phone, map each owner to property names (merge fields), and remove known bounces.
- Use a short pre‑notice for VIPs. A heads‑up to your VIP customers can lift response. Shoot them a quick text or phone call letting them know you’ll be sharing a survey link. Follow-up with a tight sequence.
Run a 7‑day sprint (the playbook)
Principle: multiple, well‑timed contacts beat one‑and‑done. This is the core of Dillman’s Tailored Design Method and modern mixed‑mode practice.
Day 0 — Pre‑notice (email or text message)
Taking a cue from research done in the medical industry, sending a pre-notice about an upcoming survey can increase response rates by 50%. Grab your phone or business messaging tool and draft up an SMS to clients. Or, pass along a template to your team so they can send it to clients they’ve recently interacted with. Here’s an idea of what to share:
“Heads up: we’re sending a 2‑minute owner check‑in this week. You know our team works hard and your feedback means the world to us! Can I count on you to complete the survey? Your inputs will help us improve our process and communication!”
Day 1 — Email invite (embed question #1 of the survey if your tool allows)
Send the owner survey email with the link to the survey at the top! Research from American College Testing (ACT) has shown that placing a link in the beginning of the email significantly increases response rate. Embedding the first question in the email can raise response even further beyond a plain link.
Day 3 — SMS nudge
Short reminder to the same people you messaged on Day 0 to ask them to do the survey! Here’s a template you and/or your team can use: ”Did you receive the owner survey we sent? It only takes 2 minutes and your feedback would mean a lot to our entire team!”
Day 5 — Email reminder (new subject + restated value)
Fresh subject line and a clear reason to respond.
Day 7 — Phone mention for VIPs / non‑responders
Instruct your team to add a thirty‑second ask at the end of any scheduled calls they’re doing. Mixed‑mode outreach improves coverage. You can continue this strategy even after day 7!
Engineer a clear value exchange (what owners get back)
People respond when the benefit outweighs the effort and risk. Design for that. Remember the research from the Cochrane Methodology Review Group? Their study showed that the odds of a survey response almost double when using monetary incentives. So ask yourself, how valuable is it to have structured feedback from my customers? Think about how that will help you make decisions on how to improve your business, team, and process.
Here are some ideas for small incentives you can offer for survey completion:
- Guaranteed small thank‑you ($5-25 e‑gift card): Monetary incentives consistently lift response; prepaid or guaranteed outperforms raffles in many studies.
- Priority callback promise. “If you flag an issue, we’ll call within 1 business day.” Time and access matter to your owner clients.
- 1 month of management fees waived. Align the incentive with the costs your customers have associated with your service.
- Portfolio mini‑report. Share a one‑pager with vacancy‑day band, turnaround highlights, or fee‑clarity check.
- Owner Market Update Webinar. Invite respondents to a quarterly 20‑minute market update.
- Donation option (mission‑aligned). Works for some segments, but typically trails cash for lift.
If budgets are tight: favor guaranteed small incentives or priority service over lotteries; lotteries tend to produce smaller gains.
Activate your team (internal incentives and scripts)
Beyond incentives for your clients, it’s also important to consider internal incentives. Get your team excited about the opportunity to collect feedback. Everyone always wonders what their clients truly think about them. Make it fun and rewarding for your team to collect that feedback and clarify that the goal is to get responses on the survey, not penalize anyone.
Here’s some ways to activate your team:
- Name owners to reps. Every PM/CSM “owns” a list of clients that they’re responsible for following up with.
- Micro‑KPIs: report during your all-hands or stand up meetings on number of contacts reached and responses completed per rep.
- Light gamification: weekly leaderboard and a small spiff for “fastest two completions,” “cleanest list,” and “biggest save.”
- Talk‑track for calls: “We’re running a 2‑minute owner survey right now and would greatly appreciate your feedback. If you complete the survey, we’ll make sure to prioritize your service requests as they come in! I’ll text you the link to the survey after this call.”
Where to mention the survey (so it’s impossible to miss)
Lastly, think of all the places you can put a link to the survey to subtly remind your clients. Here’s some ideas:
- Email signatures: “Help us improve your next owner statement in 2 minutes. Complete the survey (link)”
- Owner newsletter: write some content about “you told us to improve in X, so we did Y” and then include the link to the survey
- Calendar invites: do you or your team do scheduled meetings with clients? If so, add the survey link into the calendar invite description.
- Owner portal banner: can you put the survey inside your owner portal? If so, add the link!
Why this works: Multiple, well‑timed contacts across modes increase response and improve coverage compared with a single‑mode approach.
From feedback to revenue impact
Data without action is trivia. After you run your survey, it’s important to turn the responses into outcomes with a tight cycle:
- Pattern first, not anecdotes: Prioritize recurring themes that affect many customers.
- Quick wins in days, not months: Fix small but frequent pain points to build momentum and credibility.
- Plan bigger lifts: For portal upgrades or process redesigns, define owner, timeline, budget, and milestones.
- Communicate and celebrate: Announce what changed because customers spoke up. Give credit to their feedback.
- Measure again: Re‑run a pulse after major changes. Track movement in satisfaction and churn‑leading indicators.
Where TrueMatch fits
TrueMatch is PropertyManagement.com’s evidence‑based system for helping owners find the right manager — and for managers to demonstrate real performance. While pay‑to‑play signals like BBB or Yelp do not influence the TrueMatch score, a well-executed survey program can power credible proof on your public profile. Get verified on PropertyManagement.com and run customer surveys in our Growth tier to unlock these profile enhancements:
- Increase your TrueMatch score: survey responses can only increase your score. The more positive the responses, the greater potential increase. Your score will not decrease.
- Verified highlights: Showcase satisfaction metrics and real owner testimonials captured through our official survey on your profile.
- Context that builds trust: Display how you communicate, how fast you resolve maintenance, and what you’ve improved lately.
- Differentiation that endures: Compete on service quality owners value, not on ad spend or superficial badges.
If we identify any potential business improvements based on the survey results received, we’ll package them up and deliver to you alongside specific tactical recommendations.
PropertyManagement.com can run this for you
Running a rigorous survey program takes time. If you’re already verified on PropertyManagement.com and want us to handle the surveys, we make it turnkey in our Growth tier. Book a call with our founder to learn more.
The done-for-you survey package includes:
- Strategy and setup: Right questions, right moments, right channels.
- Lightweight delivery: Email and SMS distribution with reminders and clear privacy language.
- Clean data: De‑duplication, fraud checks, and anonymization where needed.
- Insights to action: Clear summaries, prioritized themes, and recommended fixes your team can own next week.