Apartment ratings Web sites are the tabloids of the apartment industry. They provide an anonymous voice to the general public to speak out against their apartment management and expose their “dirty little secrets”. Unless you are paying close attention to the information posted about your apartment communities, a great deal of misleading and inaccurate information may be posted about your community and, unfortunately, in some cases, about your staff.
One of the worst things that a celebrity can do is respond to attacks in the media. As a celebrity, your character and personal life will always be under scrutiny. One of the most talked about celebrities, of course, is Brad Pitt. There is almost always a gossip headline from his personal life in the news; however, what you rarely see from Brad Pitt or other celebrities is a reaction, written or verbal. In the cases where you do see a reaction, it tends to blow up in their face. They are misquoted or later found to be lying to cover something up.
I have found this to be true when reacting to negative reviews on Apartment ratings Web sites. When you respond to a review, the person who posted that review is immediately notified by e-mail that a comment has been made. They will typically respond to your response and call you out as being associated with ownership in some way. This immediately discredits your response.
Another issue with this type of Web site is their flawed scoring system. I question if there is a system to it at all other than dividing the number of bad reviews by the number of total reviews and creating a score. They do not account for the number of residents NOT complaining. They do not account for time. They do not account for the fact that an angry customer will tell more people about their experience than a happy customer will tell about theirs. Do we really want to spend time as an industry giving credibility to a Web site that doesn't seem to give us any? I'm all for customer service and feedback and the full disclosure approach; however, I feel that this scoring system may be doing just as much harm to prospective renters as good.
Apartment ratings Web sites need to service the prospects better and should show up and take part in our industry. By eliminating the scoring factor from their site and sticking with a message board and opinion/review approach, everyone would be better served. In the meantime, my recommendation is to take the Brad Pitt approach and not react. Instead, spend the time and resources you would battling with these Web sites on training your staff to follow up on service requests in a timely manner and properly handling customer service issues. Your scores on these Web sites may not increase, but your resident retention will.
Now, the inevitable counterpoint to my opinion is to embrace the apartment ratings Web sites. I'm sure some communities or management companies have tremendous success stories about their experiences and strategies with these sites. I hope they will share them within the comments section of the blog. If you do respond to negative or positive reviews you should never hide the fact that you represent the property. Make it crystal clear who is responding and make sure you have an intelligible response. Do not make excuses. Do not blame the resident. Do not undermine the resident's complaint as this could result in further retaliation. Encourage your happy residents to write reviews. Again, please feel free to share your success stories here.
Brian Owen - Managing Member, Home Run Purchase Program