J Turner Research announces the fourth edition of The Mechanics of Online Review Sites and ILSs, the only quantitative resource featuring the growth of online reviews, the sentiment of reviewers, and the market share of review sites in the multifamily industry. The report offers historical trends in the progression of online reputation from 2015 to Q1 2020. To download the report, please visit https://jturner.us/mechanics4.
As of Q1 2020, there are 9,777,352 online reviews for the 115,948 properties we monitor across various review sites and ILSs monthly. Eighty-six percent of our database of properties—99,579—has at least one review. In the fourth edition, all analysis is based on these 99,579 properties. This report offers industry members a perspective on their online reputation efforts as compared with the national trends.
Online review volume continues to grow at a healthy rate in the multifamily industry. In the first quarter of this year, the review volume has more than doubled since Q4 2019—from 218,547 to 462,718. Google has edged out ApartmentRatings to emerge as the No. 1 multifamily review site with the highest market share of apartment reviews. Google has a 28% share of the 9,777,352 reviews, followed by ApartmentRatings at 27% and Modern Message at 10%.
More key findings:
- Number of reviews per property: The average number of reviews per property in 2019 was 93.32, in Q1 2020 it is 98.19.
- Source of reviews: With regards to the review volume in Q1 2020 alone, Google has the most reviews (37%), followed by Rent.com at 30%. Next in line is Modern Message, with 13% of the total volume of reviews for this quarter.
- Sentiment by site: Modern Message has the highest sentiment of all review sites at 4.31 on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the highest.
In 2015, we monitored 55,700-plus properties. The number of reviews has grown 3.5 times from 2,741,818 reviews in 2015 to 9,777,352 reviews in Q1 2020.
Additionally, the fourth edition of Mechanics outlines an update to the ORA™ score calculation and highlights changes in the policies of some significant sites, including Google, ApartmentRatings, Yelp, and Facebook, among others.
J Turner Research is the only company to conduct this prodigious research. The first edition of this report was released in 2017 based on the collection of review data since 2012. J Turner will publish this data on a quarterly basis moving forward.
