How you respond to maintenance requests and how well apartment maintenance responds to tenant needs is a key to positive resident reviews.
By Richard Berger
Apartment communities can keep their reputation solid by providing great service and encouraging resident feedback.
An apartment community’s maintenance team is a virtual doorway to operations, and when its technicians perform well, it’s the best way to garner authentic, positive resident reviews.
The Federal Trade Commission recently focused its regulatory efforts on consumer reviews, cracking down on fake reviews and imposing hefty fines for companies that do so, including potentially the apartment industry.
While multifamily is not prone to false reviews, online reputation has been a key digital marketing element in increasing tours, applications, and signed leases.
Online reputation was a prominent topic among panelists at the National Multifamily Housing Council’s OpTech Conference in October.
If All Else is Even, They Look at Resident Reviews
Lia Nichole Smith, Senior Vice President of Education and Research at ApartmentRatings.com and SatisFacts Research, said that when rents are fair and even, prospects will look at reviews, and that’s how apartment communities can remain more competitive.
“Often, the only thing that prospects have to go on about your property is what they see in your responses to online resident reviews and comments.”
Smith suggested apartment companies have their employees take a “risk management approach” to handling reviews to improve writing those replies.
“Require mandatory staff training, just like you would for fair housing,” she said.
Additionally, Smith raised skepticism about apartment companies using local influencers’ reviews and comments to garner attraction.
“We are now at the point where influencers are also being held accountable for what they provide you,” Smith said. “Besides, is there really an ROI for this?”
Christina Steeg, SVP Marketing & Communications, Waterton, said reviews convey what’s going right and what’s going wrong.
“Take advantage of what your residents are saying to you,” she said.
Satisfacts said that 13 percent of residents who post positive or negative comments don’t expect the apartment company to respond.
There’s also been a lot of attention paid to review gating or buying reviews.
Fashion Nova, a California fast-fashion retailer, will pay the Federal Trade Commission a $4.2 million settlement over allegations that it blocked negative product reviews from being posted on its website, theverge.com reported. The agency says this is its first case to challenge the practice of suppressing negative customer reviews.
Incentivizing Residents to Leave Reviews Frowned Upon
One strategy is asking apartment company employees who live in the community to post reviews, and another is incentivizing residents to do so. The panel discouraged both practices.
According to Smith, incentivizing residents to leave a review is a poor strategy because the property must disclose that a “gift” was given to the reviewer in the review.
Residents reading the reviews view this unfavorably; worse, it “sabotages all the hard work your onsite team is doing to drive resident reviews,” Smith says.
Communities may hand residents a card with a QR code during a grab-and-go lunch event or after a maintenance tech performs a work order instructing them to post a review.
The mobile maintenance app AppWork makes it easy for residents to leave review comments for the on-site team and technician after completing a work order. The resident can also choose to share that review with a public-facing review site.
AppWork said among its clients, the average rating maintenance techs receive upon completion is 4.2 on a 5-point scale and that approximately 10 percent of completed work orders earn resident online reviews.
The mobile app adds cohesion to the daily work-order process, enabling supervisors to assign maintenance technician specialists to the most appropriate jobs.
About the author:
Richard Berger is a freelance journalist who has 20+ years of experience covering commercial real estate for various media sites and CRE-related associations. He lives in Northern Virginia.