How to build serviced apartments in Hanoi that won the residents over.

Toan Tien Housing builds, runs serviced apartments for rent in Hanoi. In 20 years doing business, we came up with patterns that guide our ways of building our apartments and serving our customers right.

Great Location is key.

People get candid about home not just about their home, it’s also about the surrounding setting of their home — how many greens can they get, do the neighbors let you live in peace…

Hanoi counting only for the most prestigious heart districts is small enough for us to know which neighborhoods are the most ideal. There are certain areas which are clearly good — the neighborhood floating in the Truc Bach lake, somewhere in the West Lake, there are two lakes sitting close to each other which are near the Japan embassy, with a neighborhood in between…

Locations locked-in, we have to build our apartment buildings in the alley, as far from the main street as possible to shield away from the street noise.

Bathroom with a West Lake view? Seal the deal!

Then the first guide from our boss Tien is done — a private, quiet, and serene place to return to.

Location serves our customers from Japan and the Western blocs well, our alley serviced apartment serves their first concern about the ambient noise level. Our locations are really near lakes, or have the awesome West Lake view, or really near their workplaces among the diplomatic blocks.

Compact apartment buildings.

Our business model is to lease the private house estates from the homeowners who are moving to their next home which has been usually an apartment, and build big apartment buildings on top, run the business on that building for up to 15 years. Good business for both sides, since homeowners are usually not real estate developers.

So technically, to the residents, we are rather their houselord than a landlord. 

So the apartment buildings are rather compact, not so cramped with many people, and feel more private. We dominated a neighborhood as others landlords got onboard, some other companies jumped into the area to get a piece, only to prove the business model right.

A Toan Tien apartment building in the corner of a lake, and a house.

Each area we managed to pull off some estates that enable buildings that look great. There’s the 11 Ton That Thiep estate that was big and checked all the location criteria. We built an apartment building that felt so good that we moved our head office there. There’s the Apricot building in Ba Dinh that has two facades for two sides of windows. Those in West Lake are so side by side that together they all look well.

Maximum natural lights, efficiently designed interior with understated beauty.

Let’s talk about natural lights first, as it’s easier to say. At every chance, we utilized glass slide doors opening up to a veranda, adding some trees, enough to flood the lights into the kitchen-living space.

It’s subjective when talking about interior design.

The top end serviced apartments we build don’t look like novelties found on architecture websites that make your jaw drop at first glance, but are more low-key beautiful to us. And frankly, our visitors, eventual residents enjoy the design as well (sometimes, lakeview helped tons).

A three-bedroom, top-end apartment in 11 Ton That Thiep executive apartment.

For our customers, they all long for minimalism, then some sense of culture when they are living overseas, something that belongs to Vietnam but not so far off with what they were used to. -> Indochine style — the dark wood tone, vignettes from Vietnam, in Western form factor, slide door dividers to remind of Japan.

We need to understand what our customers look for in their home as well for a home design that seals the deal.

Our Japanese customers working overseas on their own so they don’t need a big apartment, compact and efficient design will serve them right, along with the equipment that make them feel like not far off from their home country that pioneered super high tech toilets.

In between two lakes, utilizing a compact living space with two sides of windows.

The Western home finders visiting ours would usually find such an apartment a tad small, though they really like the look. We have bigger options for them nearby as well.

Most importantly, excellent customer service.

Renting a serviced apartment means a living home that saves you from cleaning the floor, the tedious laundry work, or whenever something provided broken.

From the customer testimonial videos for us we could imagine our customers’ conversations with their fellow expat friends — their friends would groan about their landlords while our customers would talk about being serviced excellently.

Our boss, the founder of the company, preaches hard on the staff how important it is to understand the customers from their perspective and act accordingly.

The expats who work and live in Vietnam would always feel wild when it comes to fixing stuff. We dispatch our in-house technicians to fix them within a day. The logistic is eased since the apartments are clustered in an area, which sometimes surprised our residents by fixing on Sunday.

The male experts living alone, for example, would find doing laundry daunting, they would find in a Toan Tien’s serviced apartment their concerns are well listened to, a clean floor and ironed clothes squarely put on the bed throughout the week by our maids.

Excellent ethics in serving our customers, creating a healthy and warm relationship are the decisive factors to gain years long loyal customers. And the relationship between our residents, boss, our customer services, building staffers will get more endearing years gone by.

By Trung, for Toan Tien.