Insights from Turner: 2025 Check-In- Is Multifamily Focused on the Wrong Thing?

2025 is halfway in the books, which means it is time for us to take a step back and look at the national trends. This year was setup to be an exciting one: back in January we highlighted that resident satisfaction was on the mend. Numbers improved between 2023 and 2024, marking the first year with an increase in satisfaction since the pandemic. The theory at J Turner Research was that this was a testament to the industry “figuring it out.” To be more specific, we accredited improved satisfaction to the industry finding a more suitable product/service to meet the post-pandemic renter. 

That leads us to this blog in July 2025. The goal today is to see if the industry has maintained this upward trend or if 2024 was just a blip on the radar. And in either case, we need to identify why and use it as an opportunity to continue to tailor what we are doing onsite to make residents happy. 

Note: in an effort to continue to improve the quality of these findings, J Turner Research has expanded the number of reviews it is analyzing. Einstein has now analyzed over 12 million reviews across all top review sites and ILS’s dating back to 2003. As a consequence, some of the historical numbers have changed relative to previous blogs. If you have any questions about these findings, please email research@jturnerresearch.com.  

Introduction

The Big Picture: Satisfaction appears to be optimistically stagnant. While satisfaction numbers in 2025 are up in comparison to 2024 (and still well above the numbers from 2021-2023), they remain flat in comparison to this time last year. Frustrations with Customer Service, Communication, and Pests are keeping us from seeing continued improvement, with the former two standing out.   

Why it Matters: According to our 2025 Leaders Survey, the c-suite of management companies came into 2025 primarily focused on reducing operational costs. However, the downside is that efforts to cut back or be “more efficient” may result in residents feeling less of a personal touch. This is contrary to consumer trends which suggest that giving customers feelings of trust, transparency, and comfort is only continuing to grow in importance.

Satisfaction Concern: Stagnation

At a surface level, looking at the satisfaction numbers of H1 2025 in comparison to all of 2024 may make you think that numbers are continuing to improve, but I am not getting ahead of myself. The main reason is that the first half of 2024 trended almost exactly as positively as the first half of 2025. 

This analysis is important because of the cyclicity of multifamily satisfaction: the first half of the year almost always outperforms the second half. Outside of many companies’ ambitious efforts to make online reputation a focus ahead of peak leasing season, complaints peak in multifamily seasonally. For example, the peak of summer presents large scale Maintenance Service and Timeliness concerns, a high volume of Move-in Quality complaints, and frustrations about things like the pool not being available or in good condition. Then, later in the year, the holiday season often comes with Security and Package issues. So, we never want to get too far out over our skis – even 2023 showed improvement at the half-year point despite being the lowest performing year since 2018.  

Therefore, comparing H1 2025 to H1 2024 is a best practice, and the numbers being similar to this time last year has me wanting answers about why we are not seeing a continuation of last year’s uptick and, most importantly, what we need to do to ensure 2025 is not a down swinging year. 

The Desire for Human Connection

While the data presented in the previous section would suggest that our theory of the industry “figuring it out” is perhaps true, most importantly, we did correctly identify the straw that moves the drink both positively and negatively: the staff-resident connection. Only three categories have been mentioned more often in 2025 than they were in 2024, two of which have been the highlight of many previous blogs: Customer Service and Communication. Both of these categories are seeing increased frequency in compliments, complaints, and reviews in general. In other words, residents even more strongly equate the onsite team’s performance in these two areas to their entire experience. 

Customer Service

Communication

This is not J Turner on its high horse – it’s actually unprecedented territory. Customer Service complaints are at their highest frequency since 2019, and Customer Service compliments are at their highest rate ever! Likewise, Communication complaints are at their highest rate since 2016 while compliments are also at their all-time high. In other words, we can definitively say that Customer Service and Communication matter more to the apartment industry than they have in at least 10 years and maybe ever.

Serving Two Masters

Every month it feels like I come back to these two categories, uncovering another way they correlate with overall performance. It feels repetitive to type at times, but I do believe it really is indicative of a larger point: no matter how much executives are focused on reducing operational costs or trying to find places for improved efficiency through tools like AI, you need to have strong staff onsite. Empathy, transparency, and personalization are unable to be fully replicated with AI in a way that elicits the “warm and fuzzies” people still expect with their home.

This desire for “warm and fuzzies” is real among Gen Z and Millennials. Go onto YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok and watch a few room or apartment tours; a lot of them mention words related to their space being a sanctuary. In the titles and descriptions you will see themes like “Minimalist/Clean,” “Cozy/Homey,” “Aesthetic,” “Vibey,” and “Functionality/Wellness Space.” With that in mind, it is very easy to see how the responsiveness, closeness, or emotional touch of your onsite staff could greatly impact residents’ perception of the community.

This heightened focus on service is not just limited to the multifamily industry. According to CMSWire, “56% of marketing leaders reported a rise in expectations for customer service interactions.” It is a product of an evolving consumer. The article goes on to say that “Global reports show that 60% of consumers believe trust and transparency are the most important brand traits, and that figure is increasing annually.” As this number continues to go up, so must the apartment industry’s focus on making the staff-resident relationship as emotionally positive as possible.   

Anjli Raval at Financial Times theorizes that our obsession with cost-cutting and efficiency improvement keeps some companies stuck in mediocrity, trying to use tools like AI to put band-aids over something only genuine empathy can solve. I tend to concur: I went to NAA and saw plenty of AI tools dedicated to improving the leasing process, but left pondering what is being done to help communicate and service people once they go from prospect to resident? Our 2025 Leaders Survey told us that 63% of the C-suite in multifamily thought that reducing operational costs was the biggest challenge they were facing heading into this year, so we can assume that is where the focus was placed for many. But, so often, we see the juxtaposition of management companies serving two masters: the residents and owners. Can you really be laser focused on appeasing owners and reducing operational costs without hurting your resident relationships in the process? It is, at the very least, a risky proposition.

You would have to have your head in the sand to believe that AI does not have a worthwhile place in multifamily, but our data keeps suggesting the need for a balance. Our team at J Turner maintain our position that the recipe exists: there are plenty of management companies hitting satisfaction highs! But, if you remove human connection for the sake of cutting cost, you are missing the mark. 

The industry’s (and especially each management company’s) success lies in continuing to adapt to ever-growing demands for strong service and communication. Make it a priority, and you stand out amongst your competitors. Fail, and you risk being in a budgetary position that no cost-cutting initiative can save you from.  

Two Other Trends to Keep an Eye On

It’s a Bug’s Life: Pests is the third category that is seeing an increase in all types of reviews, both positively and negatively. This is not terribly surprising – many of the cleanliness related categories have had higher sensitivity since COVID. We had predicted Pet Waste continuing to become more important in 2025, but so far, Pests is the biggest facility issue driving satisfaction issues.  

Amenities Continue to Move the Needle Less: For the third straight report, we highlight residents’ lessened association of the Condition & Availability of the Amenities/Common Areas with overall satisfaction. They are especially less likely to be complimented in a positive review. Residents mostly expect to have them and are unlikely to have their entire experience made by them.  

All Reviews

Compliments in 4/5 Star Reviews

ABOUT THIS BLOG: 

The insights in this blog came from utilizing J Turner Research’s text categorization tool, Einstein. Einstein uses Thought Analysis, a proprietary Ai software, to objectively show you your operational strengths and weaknesses based on anything anyone has ever said about you online in reviews. What is being said is incredibly valuable because it is essentially the "why" behind your scores. Reviews are unprompted descriptions of why a resident is satisfied (left a high star rating) or dissatisfied (left a low star rating). This means that what is being complimented and complained about can be seen by owners and operators as drivers of satisfaction/dissatisfaction.