Circles – A Vibrant, Safe Community app for Tenants

Property managers and operators manage apartments, coliving spaces, co-working spaces and a range of assets across Real Estate. All of these places remain “spaces” and do not nurture into Communities. 

Our learning is that this can be detrimental for property managers and operators affecting recurring revenue from tenants. To address this challenge, we dedicated a platform specifically towards a community with a tonne of utility – MONK CIRCLES. 

With polls, discussions, a marketplace and the ability for tenants to post and share ideas we have enabled property managers and operators to create a safe environment where tenants can interact, vibe and bond.

Why have we introduced a Community App?

Earlier I mentioned that not building a community can be detrimental to property managers and operators. Here are a few challenges we noticed as essential to building the community app: 

1. More emphasis on getting new tenants than retaining the existing ones: Property managers and operators spend so much time and effort on getting new tenants and the majority of the effort to retain existing ones goes into fixing maintenance issues in the property. Community building does not fit into their priority at all. In reality, this reduces tenant retention.
2. Lack of knowledge on how much a community adds value to the tenant: Based on a 2023 report conducted by Chainels, a community adds a lot of value in different ways to tenants. Do we consider this a factor to measure our work as property managers?

It was important to us that our property managers can create harmony between people, particularly neighbors and we made it a point to take on the task of building an all-inclusive app around the community. 

What does Monk Circles (Dark Themed) App bring to the table?

1. Tenants can Vote, Poll, and Post with a language filter: Tenants can post about topics that are on their minds, and take a vote on a poll about where to organize the next event, party or dinner. With a language filter, operators and property managers can be confident that the discussions will not take an ugly turn.
2. A marketplace for tenants to buy, sell and exchange items: Let’s look at this with an example;John is a tenant who is moving out tomorrow and wishes to sell some items.Clara, a new tenant who is moving in tomorrow, wishes to purchase a bed. All she needs to do is log in to the Circles app, move to the marketplace and buy the bed from John.The impact of this is that for tenants, there is no additional logistics cost.
3. Tenant Interest matching and grouping: Our algorithm can match tenants based on their interests, likes and dislikes helping property managers and operators group people from the time they move in all through tenancy. 

The added benefit:

The Circles app can perform all the utility-related functions like raising tickets, and booking common amenities, and is useful to make payments, read admin notices and manage deliveries all while catering to building a community.

In today’s modern era, property management goes beyond simply maintaining physical structures. A sense of community is essential in creating a successful property management strategy. By using Circles, operators can focus on resident satisfaction, property values, and tenant retention rates which can create and foster a sense of community within properties.