The fact of the matter is: If you live in an apartment community, you are going to have to deal with neighbors.

These interactions can be mostly positive, but just one nightmare neighbor situation can completely ruin your apartment living experience. Loud music? Cigarette smoke? These small daily disturbances are not conducive to a peaceful living environment.

So what do you do when confronted with a challenging neighbor? Some of us may be compelled to confront immediately, while others will try to avoid the person at all costs while bringing the situation to the attention of his or her management office. However, neither of these options are the most effective communication strategies and communication is the key to dealing with a neighbor conflict.

ApartmentGuide offers some great tips for communicating with your neighbor in the event of a conflict:

1. Start with “Hi…”

We get it, you move into an apartment and you’re surrounded by strangers. Your first instinct is to avoid interaction. However, if you do this, you will be put in a difficult situation if there is ever a conflict. That is why it is important to offer a simple “hello, how are you?” to your neighbor to break the ice. After all, he or she may be more willing to come to an agreement with you over this conflict if you are friendly instead of cold and avoiding.

2.Common Ground

Do you share any interests with your neighbor? These are natural inquiries after your initial “Hello” conversation. It will be much easier to negotiate with this person if you have more in common than the fact that you live next to each other and also disagree on something.

3. Negotiation

Here is the trickiest part to coming to a resolution, but obviously also the most important part. It would be helpful to have this discussion in the prescense of a property manager or someone who can help guide the conversation peacefully as a third party. At Champion, our property managers are more than happy to help in these processes. We want all of our residents to feel that their living environments are peaceful, so not only do these discussions further your mission, but ours as well.

Check out the ApartmentGuide blog for great pointers about this negotiation process. It is important to stand firm, but also understand that a compromise may be the only option and the “bigger” person should be willing to accept that compromise in order to live peacefully.