5 Special Things to Do for Student Residents During the Holidays

By Elana Goodwin on November 27, 2016

As a property manager, you play an important role in your student residents’ lives. Students have attained their home through you or because of you and you’re the one ultimately responsible for maintaining their residence.

As such, it’s nice to show your appreciation of your residents during the holiday season and do something special for them. After all, they could’ve chosen from any number of apartments and houses and ultimately chose one of yours to live in — so some humble holiday-themed gesture of recognition and gratefulness could go a long way.

Here are some ideas of special things you can do for your student residents during the holiday season.

Photo Credit: Pixabay.com

1. Decorate the complex. While student residents may choose to decorate their homes on their own, they may not have the time or monies to put toward getting their apartment or house into the holiday spirit. A nice thing for you to do as their property manager would be to decorate the apartment complex or outside of your residents’ houses or apartments so they’re more festive.

You can string lights around trees and shrubbery or buy cheap ornaments and hang them on the property. Consider buying wreaths — they can be fake — and/or stockings and putting them up on each apartment or house door. If you go the fake wreath route, you can collect them at the end of the holiday season and reuse them for years to come.

2. Put up a tree. If you’ve got more than one apartment complex and/or several houses you’re the property manager for, you may want to choose smaller or fake trees to be more cost-effective, but putting up a tree for your student residents will be special and appreciated.

You can decorate the trees or tree yourself or consider inviting your residents to make decorations and hang them up so they feel involved in decorating their home and tree for the holiday season.

3. Throw a holiday party. You can do something special for all your student residents in one fell swoop if you choose to throw a holiday party for your residents. Choose a date that works for you and that will enable at least the majority of your renters to show up and make it convenient for them to attend. If you have more than one rental property or complex, choose the most central one that has a place for you to host the party or throw the party at your office if it’s easy to get to.

If your properties are more spread out, while it may be a little more of a pain for you, it’s probably wiser and will be much nicer if you throw more than one holiday party and send out the info to your residents so they know where the parties will take place and can attend the closest one.

Buy some hot cocoa, cider, baked goods, and other snacks, decorate the place where you’re having the party or parties, and bask in knowing your residents will appreciate your efforts.

4. Give them a gift. You don’t have to go overboard if you’re going this route for the holidays — especially if you manage a lot of properties and have a lot of student residents to give a gift to. Your gift to your renters can be as simple as a gift card to the closet grocery store, a movie theater, Target, Amazon, iTunes, the local bookstore, etc.

Gift cards are easy and affordable and you can conveniently buy a bunch of them at once and send them to your residents or drop them off in their mailboxes during the holiday season. An amount upwards of $5 is a nice gesture that shows your renters you thought of them and wanted to do a small something special for them during the holidays.

5. Offer rent reduction. This may be a pricier gesture depending on the number of residents and properties you have but it might also be the easiest one to do as it doesn’t really require any effort on your part if your residents pay their rent online. You can send them an email wishing them a happy holiday and offering them “X” amount deducted from their monthly rent for that month. This way, they’ll have that much more money to spend on other things during the holiday season, and you’ll be the one to thank.

If you don’t want to offer each resident a deduction, you can simply offer a deduction of whatever amount for each apartment or house, meaning even if there’s more than one person living there, their rent reduction is the same.

This holiday season, consider doing one of the special things mentioned above for your student residents to show them your gratitude — they’ll appreciate whatever gestures you make and their holiday season will be that much better.

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