Insights from Turner: Case Study - How 5 Companies Differentiated Themselves in 2024

J Turner Research recently released its Top 10 Student Housing Companies ORA Power Ranking on Multifamily Executive. This ranking showcases the student housing companies that consistently deliver strong resident satisfaction. The power ranking is based on ORA, which considers lifetime reviews across all 13 relevant review sites for each property within the companies’ portfolios, giving a 30,000-foot view of satisfaction. 

However, just below the surface there were five companies that made massive strides in both their resident satisfaction and online reputation in 2024. While the student industry as a whole was seeing their reputation get more negative (see last month’s blog), these companies moved the ball forward. My question is how? What did these companies do differently than everyone else? 

In this blog, we are going to do a deep dive on the five companies that improved the most between 2023 and 2024’s ORA Power Ranking, discussing what specifically made the difference.

 
Introduction  

The Big Picture: having your operations team tackle opportunities in your company’s satisfaction data works.  

Despite Gen Z’s pessimism, especially in their perception of the student housing industry, there are companies that are seeing improvement. The five case studies below are designed to be educational and encouraging, to showcase that improvement in a tough market is not only possible but also definable.  

When stepping back, it is apparent that most of these companies have made wholistic changes to better service – results like these don’t just happen. But as you will read below, there was not a one-size-fits-all roadmap. These companies identified specific areas where they could improve and made changes to their day-to-day operations.  
 
Despite some differences in approach by company, there was one key commonality: all of them have done a better job at meeting student residents’ demands for available and well-conditioned amenities. This was an area we highlighted as critical last month, explaining that contrary to conventional renters, it is an expectation for Gen Z and a driver of overall satisfaction.

Why it Matters: these companies improved their company ORA Scores by an average of 5.20 points in 2024. Per RealPage, this translates to an average increase of 48.38 basis points to market per property. They have deemed focusing on your satisfaction the single best thing a company can do that does not come with a capital expense. Asset Living - Student led the way in this respect, improving their ORA Score by 6.37 points which forecasts a 59.24 bps return to market per property.  
 

Five Companies that Made Strides in 2024 
 

1. Redstone Residential: Redstone’s dramatic movement from 17th into the top ten of the ranking is reflective of a total shift in resident satisfaction procedures. When looking at the complaint rates of the 22 operational areas J Turner Research’s Einstein tool tracks, Redstone saw a reduction in 20 of them. This included seismic reductions in key areas like Customer Service (40.81% reduction in complaint rate), Communication (38.18%), Financial Clarity (34.54%), Condition & Availability of the Amenities/Common Areas (38.17%) and Security (54.60%).
   
   In fact, on average, Redstone’s complaint rate went down 35.70% for a given operational area, meaning that one out of every three reviews avoided a complaint that would have been there in previous years. The improvement with Security is truly noteworthy, as not only did they cut their complaints in half, but it actually made them the #1 student company in the nation at avoiding complaints regarding safety at the community. All of this ultimately equated to a star rating improvement from 3.49 in 2023 all the way up to 4.02 in 2024, clearly justifying their meteoric rise in the ranking.  
2. Asset Living - Student: Asset Living - Student has Google reviews dating back all the way to 2008, but 2024 was a landmark year; they reached their highest review sentiment ever (3.89). For them, the success can be primarily tied back to marked improvement in an incredibly key area: Communication. As we have discussed numerous times, conventional and student renters alike are much more sensitive to communication post-COVID than they were pre-COVID. Gen Z, a generation that has grown up with services like Amazon, are particularly sensitive, expecting not only fast, but also good communication every day. However, catering to these demands does not happen overnight. Asset did a better job than most student companies in 2024, reducing complaint rates in Communication to their lowest level ever sans the peak pandemic year of 2020. In fact, 2020 excluded, it marks the fifth consecutive year Asset has seen improvement in this facet, perfectly correlating to improved review sentiment over this epoch.  
   
   In addition to their successes with Communication, Asset saw improvement with Move-In Quality, increasing compliments and reducing complaints at this critical touchpoint. They also saw similar trends with both Landscaping & Grounds and the Condition & Availability of the Amenities/Common Areas, meeting Gen Z’s desire for well-conditioned common spaces around the community. Asset is further proof that focusing on your residents’ specific and sometimes unique demands, a lot of times uncovered in satisfaction data, yields reputation and financial returns over time. 
   
3. Article Student Living: Article saw a reduction in complaint rate in 18 of the 22 categories. For them, their success can be primarily chalked up to improvement in maintenance feedback. Specifically, they greatly reduced complaints in Condition & Availability of the Amenities/Common Areas (37.75%), Condition of the Unit (36.87%), Move-In Quality (26.44%), and Maintenance Timeliness (22.93%).  
   
   Possibly even more impressively, Article is also getting more compliments than any year since COVID regarding their Maintenance Service, Maintenance Timeliness, and Move-In Quality. This movement is completely inverse to the rest of the industry; most Gen Z students think of maintenance as an expectation, rarely doling out compliments and hitting the staff over the head with complaints. Article found a way to deliver on Gen Z’s demands for immediate, good service, resulting in a jump up the ORA rankings and the highest overall sentiment Article has seen in any calendar year since its first review on Google.  
   
4. University Partners: while University Partners is no stranger to strong performance (also finishing in the top ten in the 2023 ranking), there is always room for continued improvement. Like many of the other companies in this case study, University Partners saw success with keeping their residents satisfied with the property’s Amenities. As Gen Z has shown heightened sensitivity to having these facilities available and in good condition, University Partners did an excellent job meeting them in the moment in 2024. Complaints reduced by 24.67% in this area, setting them up for a successful year.  
    
   In addition to better delivering on their residents’ key needs, University Partners did a tremendous job working with their vendors on tackling key multifamily operative areas. Namely, they reduced complaints in almost every category that typically has some level of outsourcing or vendor partnership: Packages & Mail, Parking, Pests, Pet Waste, and Trash. While all of these involve a commitment from the onsite team, it also highlights that a company’s evaluation of their vendor partnerships can provide tangible benefits to both online reputation and, consequently, a company’s bottom line.   
5. American Campus Communities: to properly do them justice, ACC’s resident satisfaction improvement story should be looked at on a larger scale. In the four years pre-pandemic (2016 to 2019), ACC averaged 3.35 on their Google Reviews. Remarkably, over the last four years (2021 to 2024), this number has skyrocketed up to 4.05. A total opposite of what the industry has witnessed, ACC’s sentiment turnaround is a testament to wholistic change. ACC has seen a reduction in complaint rate that spans across ALL 22 categories. In fact, they have cut complaints in half, going from worse than the national average in many respects to better than average in most.  
    
   Of all the areas they have improved, the most notable are improvements within Customer Service, Communication, and Financial Clarity. Given these operational areas are incredibly predictive of overall satisfaction, it should be no surprise that greater satisfaction within these areas translates to success in the bigger picture, as seen in their ORA Score increase.   

 
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.