Property management companies constantly balance a complex ecosystem of staff, contractors and tenants. Effective and timely communication within such an ecosystem can impact building and maintenance costs, occupancy rates, efficient delivery of services and tenant safety and security.

Whether property managers are dealing with planned or emergency outages, they must be able to alert and communicate with hundreds of people in a short period of time. Most importantly, they must have the ability not just to broadcast messages but to get confirmations back in order to ensure that tenants are aware of scheduled maintenance or have safely evacuated the building in the event of an emergency.

Successful real estate firms depend on on-demand alerting and response services to instantly reach any user, anytime and anywhere with any device, in the case of a crisis. In addition, the ability to facilitate everyday communications with staff, tenants and contractors to help enforce property security and the delivery of services adds to the property’s value for a tenant.

Because commercial real estate is such a competitive environment, value-added services help make a property desirable to tenants and give the property an edge in the decision making process. Many property managers have found that by incorporating an alert and response service into the myriad of services that they offer to tenants, it provides additional peace of mind for the building occupants. Security once meant a fire alarm and sprinkler systems. Now, in the post-Sept. 11 world, safety is at the forefront of every tenant’s mind, and terrorism, chemical contamination and pandemics all are cause for concern. With an alert and response system, instant communication is available to every tenant contact in the event of a crisis situation.

How It Works

Alerting and response services use multiple modes of communication – including text-messaging, telephones, mobile phones, e-mail, pagers, BlackBerries, Treos and other personal digital assistant (PDA) devices – to deliver alerts within minutes of an incident. Property management or security personnel can initiate an alert from the Web, phone, e-mail or internal information system application.

The two-way alert and response services enables real-time response to all voice and text alerts, allowing message-senders to immediately verify and track whether a response was made. In addition to enabling immediate communication in a crisis situation, the service can be used to communicate in everyday situations, including alerts about construction on a certain floor, a water main break, fire drills and other building situations.

By implementing an on-demand alerting and response service, property managers can:

• Alert building tenants within seconds or minutes of any crisis situation;

• Quickly, securely, and reliably distribute critical information in real time;

• Know what is happening, when it is happening, in order to minimize risks;

• Reach contacts on their preferred communication device(s) via voice or text messages;

• Reduce miscommunications and the dissemination of misinformation;

• Confirm that messages have been received and the requested action has been taken;

• React to responses from tenants that may need help;

• Notify tenants of routine events within a building, such as maintenance, construction, fire drills, etc; and

• Provide assurance to tenants that their safety is of utmost concern.

Although an on-demand alerting and response service is a critical tool during crisis situations, it also provides the routine types of communications necessary to keep a building running smoothly.

Emergency Communications

Emergency communications has two crucial elements: getting information out quickly to those at the front lines of the crisis, and coordinating and monitoring communications before, during and after the crisis.

With an alert and response service, a property management company can ensure an efficient, reliable and documented system for managing crisis communications. In addition to quickly disseminating information and tasks to key personnel and confirming that messages have been received, some services include incident management.

The property management company at one large office building recalled a situation where they were able to use their alerting and response system to communicate quickly with their tenants to keep everyone calm. They had provided an alert service for their clients to keep lines of communication open. The property management company recently used the alerts service to communicate with its tenants during a fire near that location. The fire was actually a block away but people could see and hear the fire engines approaching. To allay fears, the property manager immediately used the alert service to send out a consistent message to 1,500 tenants and inform them not to worry because the fire was not in their building. By sending the alert, they stopped the huge influx of calls coming into the management office with questions. The alerting service enabled them to send the message instantly and avoid panic. They report it is the quickest way they’ve ever been able to communicate with their tenants.

Everyday Communications

The daily ins and outs of life in a large commercial building also need to be communicated. A water main break, construction on the seventh floor, bathrooms under repair on the main level and closings due to weather are all examples of day-to-day occurrences that need to be communicated.

Traditional methods, such as bulletin board postings, mass voicemail messages or mass e-mails fall short because they do not reach everyone in an effective way that meets their needs. By reaching tenants they way they want to be reached – including text messages to their cell phones, BlackBerries or other PDAs, they can receive building updates wherever they are and respond accordingly.

One property management company harnessed its alerting and response system for tourism activity as well as having it in place in case of a crisis. The building is a top tourist attraction in addition to providing commercial office space. More than 1.4 million people visit yearly. But when fog, wind or weather conditions shut down the observation deck, they need to contact tour operators, hotels and concierges. The building management previously had to individually call each contact, but now uses the alerting and response system to reach all of the hotels and tour operators to notify them of a closing in a timely manner, and is able to use the best method to reach each individual contact.

If an alerting and response service sounds like a good solution to incorporate as part of your property management services, make sure that you choose a service that has the experience and technical back-end expertise to support your needs.

As you gather information, take a look at these factors:

• On-demand, Web-based service: To avoid implementing and maintaining a high-availability, on-premise system yourself, choose a vendor that can deliver an on-demand, Web-based service architected with the necessary scale, resiliency and security;

• Multi-Modal: The alerting and response service should be designed to reach anyone, anywhere, anytime, with any device over any type of connection. This includes wired and wireless phones, e-mail, pagers, short messaging services (SMS), MMS, VoIP, Skype, instant messaging, satellite phones, BlackBerries and PDAs, including Treo, Palm and those that run Windows Mobile;

• True SMS service: Text messages via SMS are important. Make sure the service supports correct SMS levels so that messages are prioritized over simple texting;

• Two-way, urgent communication: Look for an alerting and response service that enables interactive response to all alerts, including the ability to initiate a conference bridge and “push” conference calls out to critical personnel;

• Ease of use: A service should be designed for non-technical users to ensure that personnel using the system act quickly, confidently and accurately in high-stress situations;

• Enterprise-level reliability and security: Ask if services are based on redundant systems based in multiple secure locations. Ensure that 128-bit Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption is used to deliver critical information safely and securely;

• Customer service: Customer service should be available, helpful and ready to listen to your needs and concerns. They should be able to help you set up the system and test it; and

• References: Make sure to ask for customer references in your industry, and talk to them to get their impressions.

As property management companies look to make their commercial real estate more valuable to tenants, safety is at the top of the list. By implementing alerting and response services that can enable rapid two-way communication in a crisis, as well as facilitate everyday communications, property managers demonstrate how valuable their tenants are.