FIG Property Management Achieved a Vendor NPS of 90 Through Tenant, Leasing, and Vendor Feedback

Overview

FIG Property Management is the property management arm of Freedom Investment Group, a community-minded firm managing rental homes in Knoxville, Tennessee. The company runs on a set of values it calls GRACE, generous, remarkable, accountable, community-minded, and empowering, and treats them as more than a poster on the wall: they define how the team treats each other internally, and how it shows up for tenants, owners, and vendors.

Since spring 2024, FIG has been putting numbers on that promise with Retently. The program covers every relationship the firm depends on, tenants, leasing prospects, owners, and vendors, and has sent over 5,000 surveys, with nearly two-thirds of responses coming back with written feedback attached, not just a score.

The Industry Pattern FIG Breaks

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. The pattern is remarkably consistent:

• Owners are happy, residents are not. Property managers average an NPS of 35 with the owners who pay them, and just 10 with the residents who live in their properties. In every firm we studied that surveys both, owners score higher.
• Each relationship is a different experience. A tenant filing a maintenance request, a prospect touring a unit, an owner reading a statement, and a vendor waiting on a work order live in different worlds, but most firms measure at most one of them.
• Vendors are invisible. The contractors who determine how fast a leak gets fixed, which is often what decides whether a resident renews, are almost never asked how the partnership is going.

FIG's numbers invert the industry chart. Its tenant NPS stands at 51: forty-one points above the industry's resident average, and sixteen points above where the industry's owner scores usually sit. Asked what they credit for it, the team doesn't point at a survey tool or a process. They point at culture.

We credit our internal culture for our scores. Our values of GRACE (generous, remarkable, accountable, community-minded, and empowering) shape how we treat each other as a team and externally. When staff feel empowered and supported internally, that carries over into how we show up for our tenants.

Cassidy JohnsonAccount Manager @ FIG Property Management

The Solution

FIG's starting decision was the one most firms never make: every group gets its own survey, because every group has a genuinely different experience with the company. The program is built from four instruments:

• Tenant NPS. A recurring relationship survey, triggered automatically by events in FIG's property management stack rather than sent by hand. It tracks how residents feel between the big moments, not just after them.
• Leasing experience. A five-star rating survey sent right after the leasing process, grading the journey from prospect to resident while it's still fresh. It currently averages 4.3 out of 5.
• Vendor NPS. An email survey to the contractors and service partners FIG works with, asking for feedback and suggestions on the partnership itself. Very few property managers survey vendors at all.
• Owner NPS. A survey wave to property owners, which came back at an NPS of 88, confirming that the resident-first culture doesn't come at the owners' expense.

Each group, owners, residents, and vendors, has a genuinely different experience with our company. Vendors are our partners just as much as our owners and tenants, so it made sense to ask for their feedback and suggestions for working with our company.

Cassidy JohnsonAccount Manager @ FIG Property Management

Results with Retently

A resident experience above the industry's owner benchmark. FIG's tenant NPS of 51 doesn't just beat the industry's resident average of 10, it clears the bar owners usually set. The one score property managers struggle with most is the one FIG is strongest on.

A vendor NPS of 90. Treating vendors as partners, and asking them how the partnership is going, produced one of the highest scores we've seen on any audience in the category. Vendors who feel like partners answer the phone when a resident's repair can't wait, and that reliability feeds straight back into resident satisfaction.

FIG Access: feedback that rebuilt a program. Tenant surveys surfaced consistent dissatisfaction with the services in FIG's previous resident benefit package. Instead of switching providers, FIG built its own customizable program, FIG Access, which even offers residents cost savings compared to what they had before. It's the clearest kind of feedback loop: residents said the program wasn't working, and the program was rebuilt around what they said.

Feedback people actually write. Nearly two-thirds of FIG's survey responses include written feedback alongside the score, the raw material the team reads to decide what to fix next.

Resident feedback is actually what led us to overhaul our Resident Benefit Package. Tenants were dissatisfied with the services being offered through our previous program, so we built our own customizable program, FIG Access, that even offers cost savings for residents compared to what they had before.

Cassidy JohnsonAccount Manager @ FIG Property Management