August 12, 2026
Karen manages 175 units across three properties. Last year she ran an experiment she hadn’t planned to run.
When her office line had a technical issue for three days, she sent a building-wide email directing residents to the portal for urgent requests. Then she watched what happened.
By the end of day one, six residents had submitted portal requests. Forty-two had texted her assistant’s cell phone directly. Eleven had come to the office in person. Her email open rate for the notice, she discovered afterward: 22 percent.
The data was inconvenient. But it was clear.
The communication channel question in property management determines what percentage of your residents can actually reach you, how much friction exists in routine interactions, and ultimately how satisfied residents feel about living at your properties.
The average email open rate across industries is somewhere between 20 and 25 percent. When you send a notice to 200 residents, 150 to 160 of them will not open it. Email also creates communication gaps. A resident who sends an email with a maintenance question at 11pm may not receive a response until the following morning.
Email works reasonably well for formal notices and records. As a primary communication channel for ongoing resident interaction, it is not performing well for most property management companies.
Resident portals do one thing very well: payment collection. Residents who set up autopay have a clear financial incentive to maintain their portal engagement. For everything else, maintenance requests, questions, communication with staff, portal adoption rates tell a consistent story. Most residents don’t use them.
• Text message open rates: 98 percent
• Response rates for SMS: 6 to 8 times higher than email
• Average time to respond to a text message: 90 seconds
These numbers reflect something fundamental about how humans interact with their phones. A text message arrives and demands attention. It doesn’t require logging in to anything or remembering a password. The adoption problem that plagues portals simply does not exist with SMS.
• Use email for: Official notices requiring documentation, newsletters, records residents may need to reference later
• Use portals for: Rent payment and history, document storage, resident profile management
• Use SMS for: Maintenance intake and follow-up, time-sensitive notices, appointment reminders, status updates on open work orders, any communication where you need a response
The objection is legitimate: if residents are texting, that’s even more unmanageable than a portal. The answer is a dedicated communication number routing through an AI system. Residents text one number. The AI handles the routine. Staff see only what needs their attention. Everything is logged and integrated with your PMS.
The 98 percent open rate and the 90-second response time are available to you at any portfolio size. You just need a system that makes them manageable.
For one month, track every resident contact and the channel through which it arrived. Include the texts to personal cell phones. Include the voicemails. Include the office walk-ins. The data will tell you more about where to invest your communication technology budget than any vendor presentation ever will.
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