Online reviews reflect the quality of customer service provided by a property. A high level of customer service positively correlates with high resident satisfaction, which then finds its way online as five-star reviews.
In our recent “How to Ride the Wave” study, released at the AIM 2022 conference, we found that resident satisfaction has been trending down over the past three years due to many factors. These factors include challenges by the pandemic and labor shortages, prompting renters to question the value of the rent they are paying. A key barometer of “value” is a high level of trust in the management. Trust and satisfaction are highly correlated. As trust increases, so does resident satisfaction and resident loyalty.
A key finding from the study was that knowing staff members by name significantly increases resident satisfaction and trust by 22% and 24.6%, respectively. The most satisfied residents know the cleaning and maintenance staff and the leasing agent by name. So, while companies sharpen their focus on upping their digital curb appeal, they must not lose sight of the fundamental principle—excellent customer service.
For more than a decade, J Turner has conducted extensive research on the growth of this “digital curb appeal” in the form of online reviews and the progress of review sites and ILSs in the multifamily industry. Our analysis originates from monitoring the lifetime reviews of over 128,000 properties nationwide across relevant review sites and ILSs each month. The key trends and statistics are compiled in “The Mechanics of online Review Sites and ILSs,” an unparalleled resource on the state of online reputation in multifamily. Below are the key statistics of the multifamily online review universe in the first quarter of 2022.
Key Online Review Statistics as of Q1 2022
- As of Q1, there are 12,912,850 online reviews for the 128,623 properties we monitor monthly across multiple review sites and ILSs;
- 93% of the properties we monitor—119,618—have at least one review. J Turner’s Q1 analysis is based on these 119,618 properties;
- In 2015, we monitored 55,700-plus properties. The number of reviews has grown over four times, from 2,741,818 reviews in 2015 to 12,912,850 in Q1;
- With a total market share of 33%, Google is the No. 1 site for multifamily online reviews, followed by ApartmentRatings at 24%, Modern Message at 13%, RentPath at 6%, and Yelp at 4%;
- Modern Message has the highest sentiment among all review sites at a 4.29-star rating. The average sentiment on Google is 3.63;
- Modern Message added an average of 269.19 reviews per property for its clients, followed by ApartmentRatings at 54.02 and Google at 42.12;
- With regards to the review volume in Q1, Google accounted for 60% of reviews for the quarter, followed by Apartment Ratings at 10% and Modern Message and Facebook at 6% each; and
- The average number of reviews per property at the end of Q1 2021 was 107.79. In Q1 2022, it is 116.77.
As multifamily companies keep an eye on the growth of their online reviews to successfully reach their online reputation assessment (ORA) improvement goals, we want to remind them of the recent enhancement to the ORA model. In September 2021, J Turner Research enhanced its ORA algorithm to give prospects an even more accurate representation of the resident satisfaction at apartment communities during an online search.
While ORA is still based on the star ratings and number reviews across various review sites, the enhanced formula also includes factors that better represent how the current management company is performing and how trusting prospects will be of a property’s online reviews. Specifically, this includes:
- Placing a higher weight on recent feedback;
- Rewarding properties with strong reviews across multiple review sites; and
- Analyzing how a property stacks up to their competition relative to the positive or negative bias that may be present within each site.
This allows ORA to not only be more reflective of the properties performing the best in resident satisfaction, but it also gives management companies a metric that is even more highly correlated to the bottom line.
