Best questions for tenants survey about building safety

Here are some of the best questions for a tenants survey about building safety, plus a few practical tips to help you create them. If you want to build such a survey in seconds, you can use Specific’s AI-powered survey generator—just generate a customized survey for your building right now.

What are the best open-ended questions for tenants survey about building safety

Open-ended questions are ideal when you want tenants to express their genuine thoughts, describe personal experiences, and highlight concerns you might not have anticipated. These questions help you collect deeper insights that can’t be captured by ticking a box. Use them when you want stories, context, or to uncover new issues.

1. Can you describe any building safety concerns you’ve noticed in your home or common areas?

2. How do you feel about the current emergency procedures and safety information provided to tenants?

3. Tell us about a time when you felt unsafe or uncomfortable in the building. What happened?

4. What improvements, if any, would you suggest to make the building safer?

5. In your opinion, what is working well regarding building security and safety?

6. Have you ever reported a safety issue here? If so, what was your experience with the response?

7. What types of safety features or amenities do you wish your building had?

8. If you’ve witnessed repairs related to safety, how would you describe their quality and timeliness?

9. How would you rate communication from building management about safety topics or incidents?

10. Is there anything else you’d like us to know about feeling safe in your home or this building?

Tip: Recent tenant satisfaction surveys found that 77% of tenants are satisfied with their landlord’s provision of a safe home, but concerns often center on compliance, security, and repairs. Asking direct, open-ended questions helps you surface these pain points and target improvements. [1]

What are the best single-select multiple-choice questions for tenants survey about building safety

Single-select multiple-choice questions are a perfect way to quantify opinions, gather quick input from busy tenants, or start a conversation before asking for more details. Sometimes “choose one” options simplify participation and help identify trends at a glance. Later, you can dig deeper with open-ended or followup questions.

Question: Overall, how safe do you feel living in this building?

• Very safe

• Somewhat safe

• Neutral

• Somewhat unsafe

• Very unsafe

Question: How satisfied are you with the maintenance and repairs related to building safety?

• Very satisfied

• Satisfied

• Neutral

• Dissatisfied

• Very dissatisfied

• Other

Question: Which area do you feel needs the most improvement for better safety?

• Building entrances/exits

• Lighting in shared spaces

• Fire safety measures

• Building security (locks, cameras, etc.)

• Repairs and maintenance response

• Other

When to followup with "why?" Any time a tenant chooses a negative or surprising answer—such as “very unsafe” or “dissatisfied”—it’s worth asking “Why?” in a followup. This uncovers root causes like communication gaps, unresolved hazards, or slow repair times, which were highlighted in recent surveys where only 66% of tenants were satisfied with the timeliness of repairs, and just over half reported repairs completed within target timeframes. [3]

When and why to add the "Other" choice? Including “Other” lets tenants surface needs or concerns you didn’t list. If you follow up, tenants can elaborate—often revealing unexpected but critical building safety issues for you to address.

NPS-type question: does it make sense for tenants survey about building safety?

NPS (Net Promoter Score) measures how likely someone is to recommend your building as a safe place to live. It’s widely used for benchmarking satisfaction and predicting loyalty in housing as well as many service industries. In tenant safety surveys, it’s a great pulse-check: when tenants are confident about building safety, they’ll promote your property to friends and family.

You can instantly create a tailored NPS survey for tenants and building safety using this preset survey builder, or build your own custom set of questions and add NPS as one of them.

The power of follow-up questions

Follow-up questions in surveys are magic when it comes to gathering full, actionable feedback. Instead of guessing at vague or brief answers, you unlock clarity right away. Open-ended followups allow you to explore tenants’ opinions just like a skilled researcher would in an interview—going deeper on the spots that matter most. Specific makes this seamless with its AI-powered follow-up feature, which reacts and digs naturally within the survey conversation.

• Tenant: “The fire exits are sometimes blocked.”

• AI follow-up: “Can you describe when you noticed the fire exits blocked and what happened next?”

How many followups to ask? In most cases, 2–3 targeted followup questions are enough to gather clarity and context. Specific lets you configure this—collect just enough detail, but move to the next subject when you have what you need.

This makes it a conversational survey, not just a form—your respondents engage, and their feedback is richer.

Analyzing open-ended responses with AI is simple—even if tenants write a lot. Tools like AI survey response analysis make sense of long, unstructured text effortlessly, surfacing main themes and actionable ideas.

These real-time followups are a new breed of survey question—if you’re curious, try creating a conversational survey and see what kind of detail you can capture right away.

How to prompt chatGPT or other GPTs to generate tenants survey about building safety

One easy way to generate strong survey questions is to ask AI to do it for you. Try this prompt:

Suggest 10 open-ended questions for tenants survey about building safety.

But you’ll get even better results if you give the AI a bit more background. For example:

We manage a mix of high-rise and low-rise residential buildings. Our goal is to ensure tenants feel safe and heard, especially about building maintenance and emergency preparedness. Suggest 10 open-ended questions for tenants survey about building safety.

Next, you can ask AI to organize its output:

Look at the questions and categorize them. Output categories with the questions under them.

Then, review the categories—maybe “security features,” “emergency protocols,” or “maintenance/repair”—and keep iterating:

Generate 10 questions for categories emergency procedures and building maintenance.

This approach lets you drill down and shape the survey to target exactly what you need.

What is a conversational survey—and why does it matter?

A conversational survey isn’t just a long form—it’s an interactive experience that feels like a genuine conversation. Each reply is acknowledged, and the AI agent can clarify, probe, or follow up, just as a real researcher would. Specific’s AI survey generator takes care of the heavy lifting: building, editing, and customizing complex survey flows in seconds via natural language prompts.

Here’s how AI survey generation compares to manual survey creation:

Why use AI for tenants surveys? Building safety is nuanced and personal. A conversational AI survey adapts in real time—making it easier for tenants to share concerns, while letting you collect more useful feedback. Survey fatigue drops, insights go up, and—since everything is analyzed with AI—you’re not buried in a pile of notes afterwards. If you want step-by-step tips, check out our guide to creating a tenants survey about building safety.

Specific offers an unmatched user experience in conversational surveys—effortless for you, easy and even enjoyable for every tenant respondent.

See this building safety survey example now

Ready to discover how tenants really feel about building safety? Start your own AI-powered conversational survey, capture deeper insights, and unlock actionable improvements within minutes—only with Specific.