Your resident surveys are lying to you—and it’s costing you renewals.

The multifamily industry needs a wake-up call: Traditional resident surveys aren’t cutting it anymore. 

Rent growth is slowing, resident expectations are climbing, and retention has become one of the most important levers for protecting your margins.

And operators know it. In the last four years, the percentage of property management companies setting retention goals over 70% has tripled. 

There’s only one problem: Most operators are building these ambitious strategies on outdated survey tools that capture a narrow—and often misleading—slice of the resident experience. 

What resident surveys miss

Across multifamily, resident survey response rates hover between 10-30%, typically representing the extremes within your community: the happiest residents, and the most frustrated ones. 

This leaves a vast “silent middle”—the majority of your residents—missing from your retention strategy. 

“It’s really easy for our teams to get bogged down by the loudest voices in the room,” said Sarah Allwardt, Director of Marketing and Resident Experience at Kane Residential, during a Funnel Forum panel. “We heard from maybe 10% of residents who were really unhappy, 10% who loved us, and then that middle 80%—the silent middle—we never heard from.”

When you build a strategy on the loud minority, you’re not just missing the full picture—you’re gambling your retention on skewed, incomplete data.

The problem with just relying on surveys

Surveys aren’t inherently flawed, but most were built for a different time—one before every interaction in daily life came with a “leave a review” request. 

In a world where every interaction comes with a feedback prompt, residents may be quick to ignore another survey request. Clunky formats, long question lists, and redirects add friction that leads to abandoned responses.

Operators feel the pain too, as many survey tools can live outside your CRM, creating disconnected data and feedback that rarely turns into action. Over time, this erodes trust and drives participation rates even lower.

Additionally, traditional resident surveys are often sent at key milestones like move-in, renewal, or after service requests. While useful for one-off touchpoints, they miss the ongoing, day-to-day trends that impact satisfaction—leaving your retention strategy to rely on scattered snapshots instead of a complete picture.

Finding a better source of truth: resident calls

If you really want to know what matters to your residents, stop asking them to fill out another form — and start listening to the conversations they’re already having with your team.

That’s where Insights AI call scoring comes in. 

Insights automatically scores and analyzes every inbound resident call, tracks the real conversations and requests, revealing the trends you can act on immediately.

In July 2025 alone, Insights processed thousands of resident calls and uncovered the top five reasons residents reached out:

• Resident services (18%)
• Lease inquiry (17%)
• Billing inquiry (17%)
• Existing work order (14%)
• New work order (11%)

Drilling deeper, the system identified more than 780 unique subcategories from payment disputes to renewal questions to move-in assistance, providing operators with a detailed, real-time view of the issues that impact satisfaction and renewals.

As Insights collects this data in real time, leasing teams can determine if they are one-off complaints or recurring issues that need to be addressed. Plus, with individual call summaries and automated follow-up tasks, leasing teams get immediate, actionable next steps so nothing falls through the cracks.

By tracking resident conversations 365 days a year, Insights gives you a complete, real-time picture of the resident experience, instead of making strategic decisions based on a handful of survey responses.

Want to see how it works? Take the Insights product tour to see how resident sentiment analysis can turn everyday calls into a powerful retention tool: