How BlueSky Property Management Separates Owner and Resident Feedback to See What Each Side Actually Wants

Overview

BlueSky Property Management has been managing rentals in Charlottesville and the Shenandoah Valley since 1965, serving residents and property owners across Central Virginia. Six decades in a single market produces a particular kind of relationship: owners who have been with the firm for more than ten years, and residents who expect the same responsiveness their landlord's reputation was built on.

Since spring 2024, BlueSky has been measuring both of those relationships with Retently, and measuring them separately. In the last twelve months alone the program has sent more than 7,100 surveys across two distinct audiences, and roughly half of every response comes back with written feedback attached rather than a bare number.

The Problem With One Score

Earlier this year we published a study on the owner-resident CX gap built on tens of thousands of surveys across US residential property management. Two findings drive everything BlueSky does differently:

• Owners and residents rate the same firm differently. Property managers average an NPS of 35 with the owners who pay them and around 10 with the residents who live in their properties. A single blended score hides the gap entirely, and the blend is usually dominated by whichever list is bigger.
• A score without a reason is not actionable. Knowing you scored a 6 tells you nothing about whether the problem was a slow maintenance ticket, an unanswered email, or the condition of the unit on move-in day.

BlueSky's program is built to solve both at once. Owners and residents get their own campaign, their own cadence, and their own list. And every survey, on both sides, asks a second question the moment the score comes in.

Owners and residents are not the same customer. They want different things from us, they judge us on different things, and if you average them together you end up with a number that describes nobody. We would rather run two surveys and know where each one actually stands.

Jeff BloxsomPresident @ BlueSky Property Management

The Solution

The program runs on two parallel relationship surveys plus a transactional trigger, all on NPS so the numbers stay comparable across audiences:

• An owner survey. Around 1,800 sends over the last twelve months to the property owners BlueSky reports to, returning a 6% response rate, which runs roughly double what the resident list produces. Owners answer, and they answer at length.
• A separate resident survey. A much larger list, more than 5,300 sends in the same period, kept deliberately apart from the owner program so neither population's score can mask the other's.
• A transactional homeowner trigger. A webhook-driven survey that fires off events in BlueSky's own systems rather than waiting for the next scheduled wave.
• A driver question on every single response. Immediately after the score, every respondent picks what drove it from a fixed list: Communication, Condition of Property, Maintenance, or Leasing, with an open comment for anything that doesn't fit. This is the piece most property managers skip, and it is what turns BlueSky's feedback into a work queue instead of a dashboard.

Because the driver list is fixed and identical on both sides, BlueSky can compare owners and residents on the same axes, and can see when a single operational weakness is dragging on both relationships at once.

Results with Retently

An owner NPS of 48, thirteen points above the industry benchmark. Against a property management average of 35, BlueSky's owners sit comfortably ahead, and the written comments say why: long tenure and named people. Owners describe staying for a decade or more across multiple properties, and repeatedly credit their specific property manager by name rather than the company in the abstract.

Communication identified as the single biggest lever. Across the last twelve months, Communication was selected as the score driver more than any other factor, roughly twice as often as the next one. It is also the most polarising: it appears in more promoter responses than anything else, and in more detractor responses than anything else. For a firm deciding where to put its next operational hour, that is an unusually clear answer, and it is only visible because the driver question exists.

Leasing confirmed as a strength, not assumed to be one. On the owner side, Leasing draws promoter selections at more than ten times the rate it draws detractor selections, the cleanest positive signal in the entire program. Owners repeatedly note that units are re-leased within weeks of notice. That is the kind of claim a property manager would like to make in a pitch, and BlueSky has the data to back it.

Half of all responses carry written feedback. Roughly 49% of respondents write something in addition to scoring, which is the raw material the team reads to decide what to fix next, and the reason the driver counts can be traced back to specific properties and specific interactions.

A score on its own just tells you how you did. The reason behind it tells you what to go fix on Monday. Asking every single person what drove their number is the part of this that actually changes how we run the business.

Jeff BloxsomPresident @ BlueSky Property Management