How can rental living be delivered with resident experience and wellbeing as a priority?

Understanding what residents want and need from the places where they live is key to the build to rent (BTR) model. The ‘experience’ side of residential is an important aspect of operating any development and it’s interesting to see new players enter the market – and big brands, such as John Lewis, which have decades of experience in focusing their values and reputation on human and customer experience.

With the growth of BTR, not only is more being done to deliver great, secure and professional-managed homes for the rental market, but we’re also seeing a sharper focus on providing residents with an ‘experience’. There are several ways we can prioritise the resident experience, particularly through good design principles, and this can have a positive impact on residents’ wellbeing and, in turn, through customer retention and referrals, the bottom line for operators.

Firstly, there is no doubt that good design and good designers are key, and we are interestingly seeing the rise in new specialist health and wellbeing-focused architectural consultancies, such as Ekkist and Oliver Heath Design, who advise on specific strategies early in the design process.

Secondly, various well-regarded certifications, including WELL, Fitwel and the Home Quality Mark, are good hallmarks of quality, ensuring that wellbeing is being considered seriously and that the long-term management strategy of a place is embedded in the design from the outset.

However, the most important step we could take – and it’s a bit of an ongoing obsession of mine – is to introduce Post Occupancy Evaluation as a standard deliverable. We must review the impact of our design decisions based on real-life experiences of what it is like to live there and use the spaces we have designed, and use this feedback loop to implement the ‘lessons learnt’ in our next designs and developments. That is the only way to truly know if we are delivering great resident experience and wellbeing.

As architects and design teams, we can have a significant impact on the lives of residents and wider communities. However, historically, there’s been no incentive for clients to assess the choices made and to obtain first-hand, objective feedback on the outcomes of these decisions.

So, if we want to deliver rental living that provides the best resident experience where wellbeing is a priority, and that enables developers and operators to compete with the big customer-focused brands, the industry must do some proper Post Occupancy Evaluation on all of our schemes and across all areas – from operations and building performance to design and customer experience – and share the knowledge!