Introduction
MISCELA Boston, MA
SURVEY DESCRIPTION Within 60 days of moving into a Greystar-managed community, residents receive an invitation via email to participate in the design survey. Residents can respond to the survey online up to 90 days after receiving the invitation.
value is the resident placing on stainless-steel appliances? Does the economic value residents place on a pool justify its cost? These questions have important implications for project design, property management, and acquisition and development strategies. In 2017, Greystar developed our design survey to help our teams and clients better understand renters’ preferences relative to apartment features and community amenities. We poll thousands of our residents nationwide and dive deep into the data to understand their priorities regarding property design and amenities, as well as their perceptions regarding how these attributes affect rents. This report summarizes 45,800 survey responses from US communities received in 2021 and is intended to provide relevant and timely information to support strategic decision making.
From a certain point of view, an apartment community is an aggregation of attributes. The extent to which these attributes address the wants and needs of renters in the market determines the rent residents are willing to pay. In turn, rents help determine the value of the community. Therefore, to maximize the value of a multifamily property, it behooves developers, investors, and operators to understand both the preferences of renters in the market and the relationship between attributes and rents. The impact of an attribute’s presence on rents is not directly observable. It can be observed that a resident signs a lease to pay a given amount per month for an apartment, but this figure is an aggregation of the values of all the separate attributes of the apartment unit, the community in which it is located, and the surrounding neighborhood. But what
Then residents are asked a follow-up question:
“If there are two identical apartments, but only one has the following feature, how much more rent per month would you expect a renter in your area to pay for the apartment with the feature?”
The survey poses two key questions. First, residents are asked
“how high of a priority are the following features when making your lease decision?”
The survey presents residents with the features they had previously described as a very high priority and prompts them to assign each a value between $5 and $200 (in $5 increments).
They are then presented with a list of 18 apartment features and prompted to select one of five responses for each feature: very high priority , high priority , neutral , low priority , or very low priority .
Survey respondents then repeat this process for 29 community amenities.
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