Those in the property management profession need a means of reaching residents with key information immediately, whether it’s to let them know about a power outage or the status of a simple maintenance request.

But it can become difficult to maintain reliable and accessible communication between hundreds of apartment residents at any given time, especially when the tools in a staff’s arsenal are limited.

Enter Communiqué, a Wilmington-based startup that launched in 2015.

Communiqué traces its lineage from the mobile app agency WaveRider, company chief mobile officer and WaveRider CEO Tanner Clayton said in a recent news release.

As of early December, Communiqué had five clients, including national student housing provider The Preiss Company. Communiqué is active on 18 properties from Clemson, South Carolina, to Denver. Wilmington properties include Camden Forest, Wilshire Landing and The Lofts at Randall.

“Communiqué has secured contracts that will triple their growth by early 2016,” Clayton said.

Clayton cited the experience of Tim Litchfield as an example of the services provided by the company.  

After 10 years in the apartment management business, Litchfield, the chief operating officer of Communiqué, had served as a property manager in several communities, fostering many successful sites. But there was still one aspect of the job that was perpetually frustrating—communication between residents and staff.

“As soon as the apartment industry figured out that we can create email lists to communicate with our residents, the residents had moved on to texting,” Litchfield said. “As soon as we started taking the steps to provide a texting option, the residents had already moved on to smartphone apps, like the WhatsApp for messaging.”

Litchfield left property management to join Wilmington’s mobile app agency WaveRider in 2014, but never forgot his frustration with resident communication.

During his time at WaveRider, Litchfield learned what could be done with technology so office staff could easily  communicate to all of their residents, while at the same time providing each one the option on how they wanted to receive their communication. From this, Communiqué was born.

“It didn’t take long for me to realize that if you want residents to renew, receive good reviews, and recommend their friends to live at a community, communication was the foundation of all of these intended outcomes,” Litchfield said.

Litchfield said that most management teams are using email and social media, and many times even printed flyers are taped to apartment doors. Those practices still aren’t fast enough.

“After hours of posting to social media, creating flyers, and sending email blasts, I would still hear residents ask, ‘Why didn’t you tell me about it?’” Litchfield said.

He said he knew there had to be a better, more efficient way to communicate with his residents, especially tech-savvy student residents.

Litchfield partnered with Marty Hollingsworth, CEO of Wilmington company Epproach Communications, to create an innovative and simple service for property staff and residents to communicate with each other.

 Hollingsworth was the perfect partner because of his work at Epproach, which has provided wireless internet services to multi-family housing since 2005, Litchfield said.

 “I work closely with apartment managers and staff in my line of work, and I can sense their frustration with the tangled and always changing lines of communication with residents,” Hollingsworth said. “We wanted to come up with a more effective and easier solution for staff-to-resident communication, and Communiqué is that solution.”

He said that Communiqué gives property staff more tools.

“Not only does the service provide more options for communication, but it streamlines those options into a highly effective and accessible form of interaction that reflects the growing smartphone trend,” Hollingsworth said. Any message a staff member wants to send out, such as a community event reminder, an urgent message or a friendly hello, can be sent via text, email or an app notification in just one push, Hollingsworth said.

A message can be classified according to status, such as urgent or normal. The staff member can also send out the message through his or her own smartphone using the Communiqué app.

The Communiqué smartphone app has several unique features, according to the release:

• Simple and clean interface

• Pay rent and request a maintenance order straight from a resident’s phone

• Staff can send messages to the entire community, a specific unit, or several specific units.

“The best part of the app is being able to have everything you need—like your maintenance request forms, as well as community messages, news and events—right there in your hands,” said Camden Forest resident Abby Radford said in the release.