Customer Support

How to run nps and csat surveys as Property Management Founders

Customer SupportFor Property Management Founders2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

You're running NPS and CSAT surveys the hard way: a SurveyMonkey link in a move-out email, responses sitting in a tab you check monthly, and no connection to who the tenant actually was, which unit they lived in, or whether they ever submitted a maintenance ticket that went unanswered. When an owner asks why renewal rates dropped at a specific property, you're guessing. AppFolio and Buildium have basic satisfaction features, but the data lives in a silo — you can't cross-reference it against delinquency history, maintenance response times, or lease duration without exporting to Excel and building it yourself. Most property managers under 500 doors skip structured feedback entirely because stitching it together feels like a part-time job.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Customer SupportFor Property Management Founders2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

Automated NPS surveys triggered by lease renewals, move-outs, and resolved maintenance tickets — with responses routed back into a dashboard segmented by property, unit, and tenant tenure

A CSAT loop tied to your maintenance workflow so every closed work order generates a quick rating and any score below 3 creates a follow-up task for your leasing agent

A live owner-facing summary you can drop into monthly reports showing satisfaction trends by property alongside occupancy and delinquency numbers — no manual Excel rebuild

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

CRM

Data sources & config

Starch automates your AppFolio or Buildium tenant and maintenance data through your browser — no API needed. Gmail is connected as a scheduled-sync provider so Starch can read survey response emails and send follow-up messages directly from your inbox. For response logging and cross-referencing with property and tenant data, Starch builds a custom CRM-style surface where you describe the fields that matter to your operation.

Prompts to copy

Build me an NPS survey workflow that sends a two-question survey via email to any tenant 3 days after a maintenance ticket is marked resolved in our system. Log the score and their comment, tag the response with the property address and unit number, and flag anything below a 7 for follow-up by my leasing agent within 24 hours.

Build me a CSAT tracker that collects responses from our post-move-out survey emails, scores each property on a rolling 90-day average, and surfaces the bottom two properties in a weekly digest I get Monday morning with the specific complaints listed.

Create an owner reporting view that shows NPS and CSAT trends for each property alongside vacancy rate and average maintenance close time for the current quarter. I should be able to export it as a PDF to attach to owner statements.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Gmail to Starch as a scheduled-sync provider — Starch will read incoming survey responses and send outbound survey emails from your existing property management address.

2 Tell Starch to automate your AppFolio or Buildium portal through your browser so it can pull the list of resolved maintenance tickets and move-outs on a daily schedule — no API required.

3 Describe your NPS trigger logic in plain language: which events send a survey (move-out, resolved ticket, lease renewal signed), how many days after the event, and what the two questions are.

4 Starch builds the email survey template and the response-capture workflow — responses land in a structured log tagged with property address, unit, tenant name, and the triggering event type.

5 Set your CSAT threshold: any response below your chosen score automatically creates a task in your leasing agent's queue with the tenant name, property, and their verbatim comment attached.

6 Starch builds a property-level satisfaction dashboard — rolling 30- and 90-day NPS by property, average CSAT by maintenance category (HVAC, plumbing, appliances), and response rate per building.

7 Wire in the Monday morning digest: Starch pulls the two lowest-scoring properties from the past week, lists the specific complaints, and drops the summary into your Gmail inbox before 7 a.m.

8 Build the owner reporting view — describe it to Starch: 'Show NPS trend, CSAT average, vacancy rate, and average maintenance close time for each property this quarter, formatted for a PDF export.' Starch builds the surface.

9 Test the end-to-end loop: trigger a mock maintenance close in AppFolio, confirm the survey email goes out in the right window, submit a test response below threshold, and verify the follow-up task appears for your leasing agent.

10 Review the first 30 days of data — Starch can answer plain-language questions like 'which property has the worst CSAT on HVAC tickets in the last 60 days?' directly from the dashboard without you building a filter.

11 Attach the property satisfaction summary to your next monthly owner statement cycle — the export pulls live data at generation time, so numbers are current without any manual refresh.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

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Worked example

Q1 2026 CSAT Review — Elmwood Portfolio (3 properties, 87 units)

Sample numbers from a real run

Elmwood Commons (34 units) — 90-day NPS	62
Ridgeline Flats (28 units) — 90-day NPS	41
Parkside Terrace (25 units) — 90-day NPS	55
CSAT: HVAC tickets closed in Q1 — Ridgeline Flats	2.4
Below-threshold responses auto-flagged for follow-up	11
Follow-up tasks completed within 24 hours	9

Ridgeline Flats came into Q1 with the lowest NPS in the portfolio at 41, and the CSAT data made it obvious why: HVAC tickets at that property averaged a 2.4 out of 5, versus 4.1 at Elmwood Commons. Starch flagged 11 below-threshold responses across the quarter and routed them to the leasing agent queue automatically — 9 of the 11 got a personal follow-up call within 24 hours, and two of those tenants went on to sign renewals they had previously said they were undecided on. The owner for Ridgeline asked at the March statement meeting why renewal velocity was lagging. Instead of guessing, the property manager pulled up the owner reporting view Starch built — NPS trend by month, CSAT by maintenance category, average close time on HVAC tickets (11 days vs. a 5-day portfolio average) — and had a real answer: the HVAC vendor response time was the problem, not the units or the pricing. The owner approved switching to a backup vendor on the spot.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

NPS by property, rolling 30- and 90-day windows

CSAT score by maintenance category (HVAC, plumbing, appliances, common areas)

Survey response rate as a percentage of triggered events

Below-threshold follow-up completion rate within 24 hours

Correlation between CSAT score and lease renewal rate by property

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

SurveyMonkey + manual Excel cross-reference

You can run the survey, but connecting responses to specific properties, units, maintenance ticket histories, and renewal outcomes requires manual exports and rebuilds every time you want to see a trend.

AppFolio or Buildium built-in satisfaction tools

Satisfaction data stays inside the PMS silo — you can't cross-reference it with your Plaid trust account data, owner reporting, or maintenance close times without leaving the platform and rebuilding in a spreadsheet.

Typeform + Zapier

Works for basic collection and routing, but you're building and maintaining the logic yourself, and there's no native surface for property-level trend analysis or owner-facing reporting without yet another tool.

Dedicated property management survey platforms (e.g., Satisfacts, Kingsley)

Purpose-built for multifamily satisfaction benchmarking, but priced for larger operators and don't connect to your maintenance workflow, owner reporting, or trust account data the way a composable setup in Starch does.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — crm, founder inbox all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

My property management software is AppFolio — does Starch have a direct integration?

AppFolio doesn't publish a general API, so Starch automates it through your browser — no API needed. You log in once, and Starch can pull resolved maintenance tickets, move-out dates, and tenant contact information on a schedule. It's the same pattern you'd use for Buildium, Propertyware, or Rent Manager.

Can Starch actually send the survey emails from my property management email address?

Yes, if you connect Gmail as a scheduled-sync provider. Starch reads your inbox and sends outbound survey emails through your existing address. For Outlook users, Outlook connects the same way. The Gmail OAuth consent screen will show the underlying connector's name during setup — that's a known display issue we're working to fix, but the connection itself is fully functional.

What if I already have survey responses sitting in an email inbox from the past six months?

Starch syncs up to 30 messages per page from Gmail. For a bulk historical import, describe what you want: 'Import all emails with subject line containing our survey from the last 6 months, extract the score and comment from each, and tag them by property based on the unit number in the email body.' Starch will walk through the import and structure the data.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? I need to tell owners their tenant data is handled properly.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified yet. If that's a hard requirement from an institutional owner or a specific compliance obligation, that's worth knowing upfront. For most residential property managers under 500 doors, it's not a blocker, but we'd rather you have the honest answer than find out later.

Can I segment NPS results by property type — say, residential vs. commercial — or by owner?

Yes. When you describe the dashboard to Starch, tell it the segments that matter to your operation: 'Show NPS by property, and let me filter by owner, property type, and unit count.' Starch builds the surface around the way you actually think about your portfolio, not a generic template.

We use a third-party maintenance coordination service. Can Starch pull closed tickets from their portal?

If their portal is web-accessible and you can log in, Starch can automate it through your browser — no API needed. Tell Starch the URL and what a closed ticket looks like in the interface, and it can pull that data into your satisfaction workflow the same way it would from AppFolio or Buildium.

What happens when a tenant leaves a low score but doesn't write a comment?

Starch still routes the low-score response to your leasing agent queue with whatever data is available — tenant name, property, unit, event type, score. Your follow-up task gets created either way. If you want Starch to draft a follow-up email asking for more detail, describe that: 'When a response below 7 has no comment, draft a one-sentence email asking what we could have done better and queue it for my review before sending.'