Multiunit residential communities are always buzzing with activity. Phones ring and residents pop by the office to say hello, pick up a package, or submit a maintenance request. Staff members come in and out, addressing repairs and setting up events. And, of course, everyone’s looking out for prospective residents looking to tour open units.

It’s tremendously challenging to manage the wants and needs of hundreds of residents while keeping the property running smoothly and cost-effectively. While the desktop property management platforms on the market can help, they don’t provide what could be your most valuable tool for understanding and engaging residents: contextual mobile data.

3 Ways Mobile User Data Helps Property Managers

As users go about their daily lives, they take their mobile devices with them. Those devices capture uniquely contextual data about where the users go, what they do, and even why they might be doing it. With a resident and staff mobile app, property managers can streamline operations like package deliveries and maintenance requests and gain access to rich contextual mobile data about residents as well as staff—data you just can’t get through your desktop CRM.

Let’s take a look at a few hypothetical scenarios of properties leveraging mobile data to improve operations and the resident experience:

1. Improve Resident Experience
Thanks to requests submitted through its app, Property A has discovered the high demand for treadmills in its on-site gym, particularly on weekend mornings. Cross-checking with mobile data, managers found that a significant percentage of residents’ frequent local running stores and trails. Leveraging these insights, the property might choose to add more treadmills to the gym, modify landscaping to create a running path, and/or organize run groups on weekend mornings.

2. Address Inefficiencies
Property B’s management team has uncovered an inefficiency in its valet parking service: More than 50% of tickets are taking 20 minutes to resolve. Location data reveal traffic bottlenecks in the parking garage that slow the valet team’s performance. Adding a few traffic cones and a slight rerouting of the flow of cars could speed things up.

3. Increase Revenues
Property C uses location-based technologies to discover how many of its residents visit the coffee shop around the corner, including the most common times of day and the average frequency of visits. The property has used these data to attract new first-floor retail tenants, adding an in-house bodega and coffee provider to help keep those dollars in-house.

As the above scenarios illustrate, a property-wide mobile solution can serve as a “goes everywhere” connection between residents and the property management team, capturing more (and more contextual) user data in a single solution. Through a back-end property management dashboard, a comprehensive mobile app can also crunch all of that data into reports that reveal actionable insights. With more contextual data—made more accessible and more meaningful—properties can make smarter business decisions.

For more information, please check out http://www.phunware.com/solutions/residential/.