Resident SMS Notification System

Project Overview

A residential property management company overseeing 800+ units across six buildings was handling all tenant communication through phone calls and a shared email inbox. Maintenance requests sat unread for hours. Residents had no way to check the status of an open request without calling the office. Lease renewal reminders were being missed. And the property management staff was spending the majority of their day fielding status inquiries rather than resolving issues.

We built a two-way SMS notification system that gives residents a simple text-based interface for submitting maintenance requests, receiving real-time status updates, and getting proactive notifications for building-wide events — while giving management a structured platform to respond, route, and track every interaction.

The Challenge

The company's communication model had not scaled with their portfolio growth. What worked for 200 units — phone and email — became operationally untenable at 800. Residents were frustrated by slow responses and lack of visibility. Staff were buried in status calls rather than resolving work orders. Management had no structured record of communication history per unit.

• Average maintenance request response time was 6–8 hours — most of that time spent in an unread email queue
• Residents called the office an average of 2.3 times per open maintenance ticket to check status — consuming staff time disproportionately
• No structured opt-in framework — phone number collection was informal, making compliant transactional messaging impossible
• Lease renewal notices mailed by certified letter — high cost per unit, low engagement, and no read confirmation

The Solution

We designed a structured two-way SMS platform around Twilio's messaging API, with a clear opt-in enrollment flow at move-in, a keyword-based request interface for residents, and an internal management dashboard for routing, responding, and tracking all conversations by unit.

• Opt-In Enrollment at Move-In: New residents are provided a dedicated enrollment link during lease signing — they confirm their phone number and consent to receive transactional notifications. All opt-in records are timestamped and stored.
• Maintenance Request via SMS: Residents text a keyword (e.g., "REPAIR") to the building's dedicated number, receive an immediate confirmation with a ticket number, and are prompted for a brief issue description — the request routes directly to the maintenance queue
• Status Notifications: Automated outbound messages notify the resident when their request is acknowledged, when a technician is scheduled, and when the work is marked complete — without staff manually sending a single message
• Building-Wide Service Notices: Planned outages, elevator maintenance, package delivery availability, and similar property-wide updates are sent as scheduled transactional notifications to all opted-in residents of the affected building
• Lease Renewal Reminders: Automated renewal reminder messages sent at 90, 60, and 30 days before lease expiration — with a reply prompt to indicate intent, routing interested residents to the leasing team
• Opt-Out Compliance: STOP keyword immediately removes the resident from all outbound notifications and is logged with timestamp. Residents can re-enroll at any time by texting START.

Technical Architecture

Key Results

• Maintenance request acknowledgement time dropped from 6–8 hours to under 3 minutes — automated confirmation fires immediately on submission
• 91% of residents opted in during the first lease cycle — higher adoption than both email and the prior phone-based system
• Average full-cycle request resolution time improved by 72% — structured routing eliminated the unread-email bottleneck entirely
• Lease renewal response rate improved from 34% to 71% — SMS reminders at 90/60/30 days replaced certified mail as the primary renewal channel
• Property management staff recaptured an estimated 11 hours per week previously spent on inbound status inquiries

Interested in a Similar System?

If your organization communicates with a recurring base of contacts — residents, clients, patients, or customers — a structured transactional SMS system can replace phone tag and email queues with direct, traceable, two-way communication that people actually respond to.

Let's talk about your communication workflow →