NAI Hiffman conducts an annual survey of tenants in its vast portfolio with the goal of measuring its performance, getting to know its tenants better and leveraging the data to improve their experience.

Two hundred thirty-five office, industrial and retail respondents across 38 cities in and around Chicagoland weighed in on property management best practices. NAI Hiffman created an insightful video that highlights five interesting, potentially counterintuitive, conclusions reached with its data.

Tenants undoubtedly need their property managers to quickly get in touch with critical alerts, but how frequently do they want to be updated?

Most tenants only want to hear from their property management team once a month, with office tenants expecting more frequent contact than industrial tenants. But, one size doesn’t fit all, and tenant preferences vary tremendously. Some want to be in touch weekly while others rarely want to be contacted.

In today’s amenity wars, we’ve witnessed the arrival of some truly spectacular office perks. But are the traditional amenities still just as important as ever?

Turns out traditional amenities, like cafés, fitness centers and conference rooms, continue to be the most desired and demanded among tenants. But tenants also pine for newer, convenience-oriented amenities and services. Concepts like bike share programs, building concierge, car charging stations and valet dry cleaning are rapidly becoming commonplace, even in suburban offices.

Everyone can feel the weather cooling, putting snow removal on savvy tenants’ minds.

Interestingly, few care about the billing type for snow removal services, and those that do are pretty evenly split.

Technology, specifically new workflow management platforms, make instantaneous work order updates feasible. Do tenants actually value or expect immediate responses though?

They do. And with an electronic work order program, achieving this is simple and convenient. Building engineers get maintenance requests straight to their phones, tablets or computers and can update the work order status to notify tenants immediately.

Even with the advent of new technologies, location, location, location is still the word (or words?) in commercial real estate.

The overwhelming majority of NAI Hiffman’s tenants seem perfectly comfortable where they are.

This survey allows the property management group to identify early renewal or expansion opportunities, maintain a high retention rate, and give each tenant a chance to voice his or her opinions.

To watch NAI Hiffman's REFocus video exploring the survey results in depth, click here. To learn more about this Bisnow content sponsor, click here.