Refer to customers, not tenants. If one thing has been drilled into my mind in my first month at RealService, it is that. But changing your vocabulary is one thing – actually understanding why is the difficult part.
As a classics graduate embarking on my first role in the property industry, I decided to take a historical approach to the distinction between tenants and customers.
Look into almost any historical period prior to the 20th century, and you will find the landlord-tenant relationship to be fraught with antagonism. Landlords of the past did not enjoy a stellar reputation.
This was the case for most instances in the ancient Mediterranean. Frequently, the rent demanded an unreasonably high proportion of a tenant’s income (particularly in cases where agricultural land was rented out, in which case the landlord could well demand such a high percentage of the crop yield that a family faced starvation during bad harvests). The class difference between the property owner (who was typically a wealthy, high-status individual with a large portfolio) and the impoverished tenant meant that there was no chance of protest against this injustice.
Tenants quickly built up debts which they would never be able to pay off, potentially resulting in their enslavement to the landlords. Since the bonded tenants were no longer entitled to land of their own, the landlord gained both his old property and a new slave. It was a rather profitable system, from his perspective. However, it built resentment and propagated negative perceptions of landlords.
But the introduction of democracy in classical Athens improved conditions for tenants. Suddenly, citizens of even the lowest classes had rights, and could not be exploited by their landlords. Rent was paid through fixed monetary amounts, and repayment of debt became a state issue rather than a direct arrangement.
These limitations, in addition to the fact that landlords were no longer allowed to accumulate vast property portfolios (an attempt to prevent individuals building up the resources to overthrow the democratic system), meant that renting out land was no longer a viable way to make serious money. Since the tenant was no longer one of many anonymous contributors to the landlord’s wealth, personal relationships between landlords and tenants became more commonplace. The tenant’s needs could now be treated individually. The landlord-tenant relationship became one of mutual benefit, and improved greatly.
So enslavement is not an issue that concerns most tenants today, but these historic examples parallel the difference between a tenant and a customer in modern property rental.
It is all too easy to view an occupier as nothing more than a source of profit. The relationship between the landlord and the tenant (for that is all they can be described as; to call them a customer implies a level of mutual respect that cannot be fostered in this environment) is coldly transactional and impersonal. Just as in the first historical example above, this attitude towards the tenant can only lead to customer dissatisfaction and a poor reputation for the landlord.
However, paying attention to the occupier’s individual needs and expectations creates an entirely different dynamic. In the personalised relationship created by the restrictions of Athenian democracy, the tenant becomes a customer rather than a mere contributor to the landlord’s finances. The result? Popular landlords and happy customers.
In the modern world, this attitude results in a strong corporate reputation and excellent retention and promotion rates among customers.
The historical evidence makes best practice pretty clear in terms of landlord behaviour.
Make like an Athenian and treat your tenants as valued individuals.
Liana Smith is a classicist and projects and marketing assistant at RealService
