Why Reputation Monitoring Alone Isn’t Enough for Multifamily Property Operators

Your reputation is what people say about you when you’re not in the room—but that doesn’t mean you don’t have any control over it. 

Good multifamily property operators keep tabs on what people are saying about their communities. They listen. They learn. They observe. This holds true for individual landlords and large property management companies needing a corporate reputation management team alike. 

Great ones steer the conversation. Some via well-trained internal resources, and some through working with a reputable review management service. 

In this post, we’ll discuss why monitoring your reputation - while good practice - isn’t enough to make your community stand out. To build trust with residents, increase lease conversions, conduct surveys, and ensure long-term growth for your community, you’ll need to actively manage your reputation. 

What is Reputation Monitoring?

Reputation monitoring involves tracking online mentions, reviews, ratings, and other content related to your community across various digital platforms. 

Many Property Management Systems (PMS) offer add-on features for reputation monitoring: features like centralized dashboards to view reviews and ratings, automated alerts for new mentions, and review response tools. 

While add-on features are a great starting point for tracking how your community is perceived online, they are just one part of the overall strategy needed for effective reputation management.

Where Reputation Monitoring Falls Short

1. Not Proactive: Monitoring add-on tools don’t allow for the active management and improvement of your reputation. Instead, the focus is on existing reviews or mentions rather than generating new content to propel your community’s reputation forward.
   
   
2. Insufficient analysis: PMS solutions offer basic sentiment analysis and reporting features that may not provide the depth of insights needed for effective reputation management. To understand your residents, you need to measure and track what they are saying in reviews and you need to do it on a grand scale.
   
   
3. Lack of Customization: To reach residents, meet them where they’re at. This is hard to do if you can’t customize automation, event triggers, or your review request campaigns/submissions. How you ask for a review matters, and you need to be taking advantage of every review opportunity.
   
   
4. Not Efficient: PMS tools place all of the responsibility of review generation on your onsite teams, who are likely already stretched too thin. Manual review management is not scalable for communities looking to build their reputations. It leaves room for human error and inevitably results in delays in asking for and responding to reviews, making the efforts ineffective.

How to Actively Manage Your Community’s Reputation

To win the reputation game, you need to take an active role in your reputation management strategy. Here are some key strategies to enhance your reputation management efforts and avoid inefficiencies:

Use Multifamily / Property Resident Survey Software

Surveys are popular in this industry and facility improvement benefits extend to resident loyalty and lease renewals. 79% of multifamily managers use tenant surveys to gather feedback, and we recommend you start doing the same. Multifamily resident survey use cases include: 

• Pre-Leasing Surveys: Understanding potential resident expectations for categories like amenities before they visit your property.
• Post-Maintenance Feedback: Gaining insights on repair service quality, speed, and identifying areas for maintenance department improvements.
• Move-In Experience Surveys: Efficiently capturing valuable feedback on the move-in and leasing processes to refine your team's effectiveness.
• Staff Performance Monitoring: Using resident feedback to evaluate individual and team performance to look for training opportunities.
• Amenity Feedback Surveys: Gaining invaluable insight on your property's amenities to ensure you're meeting existing resident demand.

Ask for Reviews

70% of consumers will leave a review for a business when asked. This translates to your residents as well. Regular interaction with your residents shows that you value their opinions and are committed to their satisfaction.

Utilize SMS Automation

Research indicates that 90% of SMS messages are read within 3 minutes. If you’re not already texting your residents, you need to start. Automation makes the review request process via SMS easier for your teams, eliminating the need for manual review requests and helping you reach more residents.

Know When to Ask

The transactional period between multifamily operators and residents is much longer than that of a typical sales interaction. It’s ongoing, and there are several key touchpoints throughout the resident lifecycle.

Monitor lifecycle stages via your PMS system to trigger review requests at proven optimal moments. Reaching residents when they are most engaged will encourage positive feedback. The best times to ask residents for a review:

1. Tour: First impressions count. Ask for a review directly after a prospect completes a tour to gauge impressions of your community. Positive reviews during the tour stage mention onsite teams 73.53% of the time. Your onsite teams are your strongest asset. Their efforts should be focused on creating positive experiences for your residents rather than managing reviews. 
   
   
2. Move-in: Check in a few days post-move-in to see how new residents are finding their new homes. Moving into a new apartment is exciting; residents will be more encouraged to share how welcome they feel in their new homes during the move-in period.
   
   
3. Maintenance: Ask residents for reviews directly after completing maintenance requests. Maintenance is the #2 driver of positive reviews, making it crucial to the review management process.
   
   
4. Renewal: The renewal stage offers an opportunity to gain valuable feedback about the resident experience. Ask residents for reviews during lease renewal to activate the voice of those already invested in your community.
   
   

Your reputation can be your most valuable asset or greatest liability, depending on your strategy. Taking an active role in reputation and review management will set up your community for success.