Tenant Experience App: What Tenants Use, Costs and ROI

Six months after launch, the quarterly review lands on your desk. The vendor's slide shows a healthy download count for the tenant experience app. Your community manager tells a different story: the newsfeed has been silent since launch week, nobody has opened an event invitation, and the only screen store managers actually look at is the one showing yesterday's footfall against their own unit. Both are telling the truth. The question for the asset manager is whether that single screen is worth what the app costs, and how to prove it either way.

This article stays on three practical questions: which features tenants in a shopping centre or multi-tenant commercial building actually use, what drives the cost of tenant experience software, and how to judge the return with assumptions a finance director will accept. If you want the wider picture of categories, vendors and rollout stages, the complete guide to tenant engagement software covers that ground; it is not repeated here.

What tenants actually use in a tenant experience app

The most reliable way to find out is to look at your inbox before you look at a demo. Ask your community managers which tenant emails arrive every week. In most centres the list is short and repetitive: how did last Saturday perform, is traffic down or is it just us, why does the corridor feel quiet after six, when is the next marketing campaign. Those recurring questions are the features that get used, because a store manager opens an app when it answers something that affects their own numbers.

In practice the screens that earn repeat visits fall into three groups:

• Own-unit traffic data: daily and hourly footfall for the tenant's own frontage and zone, presented without the landlord having to compile it. A module such as VemTenant gives tenants self-service access to the same footfall and zone-level data the property team works from.
• Benchmarks: capture rate against the centre average, and whether a dip is unique to one unit or shared across the floor. This is the screen that changes renewal conversations, because it replaces "traffic is down" with a shared number.
• Operational contact: a direct channel to the community or facilities team when something needs attention, with a record of what was asked and when.

The features that tend to go quiet are the ones that look best in a sales presentation: community newsfeeds, broadcast push notifications and social-style content. They are not worthless, but they rarely justify a licence on their own, and they should not carry weight in your return calculation. Build the model on the data screens and treat everything else as goodwill.

What it costs: pricing models and the drivers behind them

Vendors structure tenant experience software pricing in a few common ways: a per-property annual licence, a per-unit or per-tenant seat fee, or portfolio tiers that bundle several assets. Ask for the model in writing and check what happens to the price when a unit sits vacant or when you add a second property, because that is where portfolio economics diverge.

The licence is rarely the largest line. The full cost picture usually includes:

• Counting hardware, if the asset has no credible sensors or the existing ones cannot exclude staff movements from tenant-facing totals.
• Integration with your ERP or BI stack, so that traffic data lines up with lease and turnover records.
• Internal project time from leasing, community and IT teams during rollout.
• A validation phase of four to six weeks before tenants see any figures, which vendors rarely volunteer and steering committees rarely ask about.
• Ongoing support and hosting, sometimes inside the licence and sometimes not.

The single biggest cost lever is hardware reuse. If the portfolio already has counters from Xovis, Milesight, Hikvision or AXIS, a sensor-agnostic platform lets you keep them. Reusing existing sensors instead of replacing them routinely cuts implementation cost by a third or more, and shortens payback accordingly. Before signing anything, ask the vendor to confirm in writing which of your installed sensors they can read.

A worked example with labelled assumptions

The figures below are illustrative and should be replaced with your own. They are not a quote and do not describe any Vemco price.

• Assumption 1: a centre with 60 units and an average annual rent of 150,000 per unit in your local currency.
• Assumption 2: 12 renewals a year, of which 4 historically included a traffic-based rent concession averaging 5%.
• Assumption 3: shared, credible footfall data neutralises one third of those concession requests, so roughly one avoided concession a year, worth about 7,500 in rent that is not given away.
• Assumption 4: community managers currently spend 20 hours a month compiling traffic reports and answering tenant data requests, at a loaded hourly cost of 50. Self-service dashboards remove most of it, saving around 12,000 a year.

That gives a hard-savings base case of roughly 19,500 a year before any retention effect is counted. Set it against the licence, integration and project cost from your actual quotes. If the base case alone pays back inside 9 to 18 months, the model is defensible. If it shows 3 months, your assumptions are too aggressive and finance will find the hole. Retention uplift, a one or two point improvement in renewal rate multiplied by fully loaded vacancy cost, is usually the largest number available, but attribute it as upside, not as the foundation.

How to judge the return after launch

Downloads tell you nothing. Measure the things that connect to money:

• Store managers active each week on the traffic screens, not registered accounts.
• Inbound data requests to the community team, which should fall month on month as self-service takes over.
• Renewals where traffic was discussed, and whether the conversation used the shared figures or fell back to opinion.
• Discrepancies found by tenants rather than by you. Each one costs credibility that takes months to rebuild.

That last metric is why the launch sequence matters. Roll out to five or six anchor and mid-size tenants first, sit with each store manager for half an hour, and find the shared entrance, the staff door and the food court zone that inflate counts before the wider tenant base does. The data only earns trust when the counting behind it is credible: a contractual accuracy of at least 96%, typically 98 to 99% where lighting, layout and visitor behaviour allow, with staff movements excluded. A tenant experience app built on numbers tenants can dismiss will be dismissed itself.

Frequently asked questions

Do tenants need a separate app, or is a web dashboard enough?
Store managers mostly check traffic on a phone between shifts, so mobile access matters more than whether it is a native app or a browser link. Judge the format by whether the data screens load quickly and show the tenant's own unit first.

Can we launch without new sensors?
Often yes, provided the existing counters are credible and can exclude staff from the totals shown to tenants. A sensor-agnostic platform can typically read installed Xovis, Milesight, Hikvision or AXIS hardware, which is the quickest way to reduce cost.

How soon should we expect a measurable return?
Reporting-hour savings appear within the first quarter after rollout. Concession avoidance shows up at the next renewal cycle, so a defensible payback for most multi-tenant assets lands between 9 and 18 months.

If you want to test these assumptions against your own renewal history and existing sensor estate, or see how VemTenant presents shared footfall data to tenants, talk to the Vemco Group team at vemcogroup.com/contact-us. Bring your concession records and hardware list, and we will help you build a cost and return model specific to your asset.