Apartment Rating Sites: Friend of Foe?

For years now, restaurants and other service providers have used Yelp as their local review site. They’ve learned how to not just take the good reviews with the bad reviews, but also figure out how to manage those bad reviews so that people will still trust them and try them out. With review sites like Yelp.com—many people can just be plain mean, using the site to (sometimes unfairly) rant about the vendor in retribution for what they saw as a huge problem during their experience. Sometimes they’re based on true stories. Sometimes they’re not. And now there’s the whole scandal of business owners paying members of the public to post negative reviews on competitors’ Yelp pages.

Property managers of apartment buildings and other multi-family properties have had to deal with similar problems on the review sites for their industry, like Move.com, ApartmentReviews.net, ApartmentRatings.com and yes, even Yelp.com. In fact, these sites were once completely dismissed, filled as they were with only negative (and sometimes overwrought) reviews of communities. This was especially true for ApartmentRatings.com, a site that gained a reputation as being the terminus for particularly unpleasant reviews.

But now, property managers should take note. Whether or not you approve of the review sites’ content, or believe everything they say, you should still be checking them out. According to a 2012 report by J Turner Research on Trends in Resident Technology and Communications Preferences, your potential tenants are using these online review sites when deciding where to live. In fact, over 74 percent of people interviewed not only said they used the review sites, but also that the sites had a significant impact on which communities they would consider renting in.

While business owners, including property managers, should take all negative reviews with a grain of salt—as they say, there’s usually a “type” of person who posts negative reviews repeatedly—they should also see all the reviews as an opportunity to engage with your residents, past, existing and future.

Take a page from Madison Apartment Group based in Philadelphia, who has started a “Rate, Review and Recommend” program. The program actively encourages current residents to post their opinions on many forms of online review sites and social media outlets, including Yelp, Facebook, Foursquare and ApartmentRatings.com. Another smart move by the group is to distribute resident satisfaction surveys the old-fashioned way—on paper—at key times during the residents’ experience: move in, move out, after maintenance has been completed, and so on. By posting the results on their ApartmentRatings.com community pages, they show potential tenants a more in-depth look at how life is at their community.

It has also been noticed that the more property managers encourage their residents to review, the more positive reviews they receive. But remember—this process is like a garden. You can’t expect others to do all the work, nor can you neglect it and expect it to thrive. Here are some tips to get involved in the online reviews that are being written about you—whether you like it or not:

1. The first step is to proactively claim your properties’ pages on Yelp, ApartmentRatings.com, Google Places and every other site that you can.
2. Take advantage of the sites’ features, like ApartmentRatings.com’s Manager Center that sends an alert when a review is submitted.
3. Assign one person to respond to reviews. This way there is someone not only with the responsibility to manage and reply to reviews, they also have the power to do so. That way reviews are consistently monitored and answered—especially if they are negative or untrue.
4. If you see an especially negative review, do what you can to take the conversation offline and on to a phone conversation. That way you can have a real-time discussion with the disgruntled reviewer, and prevent an online argument from happening. And you should never let that happen.
5. Post your best reviews on your website. See if your website designer can add a scrolling function for quotes from happy clients. If not, you may want to look into companies like AppFolio, that will build websites for a reasonable fee with a host of features, including search engine optimization, full integration with their property-management software, Google Analytics, social media sharing, and more.

Face it—the Internet is not going away. If anything, today’s renters are using it more and more frequently in their search for a new home. Sticking your head in the sand and hoping for the best is not going to work, so sign on and start facing these reviews head on. If you do your best to follow our advice, and you may even be pleasantly surprised with an increase of positive reviews.