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Welcome back from the holidays! Now that Santa has come and the ball has dropped, we are back in the thick of the data to provide you insights on what residents are talking about within reviews. We have been hard at work, putting together a full analysis of 2024 that we will publish on Multifamily Executive on Tuesday, January 21st.
This report gives you a lot – did you know that there are about 150,000 reviews in multifamily each month? That’s a lot of feedback but also a lot of gold that we can use to understand how residents perceive our service from a 30,000-foot glance.
What We Were Looking For
To bring you up to speed, the main question we have wanted to answer was whether resident satisfaction was truly on the mend. Resident satisfaction had trended down considerably between 2020 and 2023, and it was evident that the post-pandemic resident wanted something different. While the initial 2024 data showed signs of optimism (read here), we cautioned that the second half of the year typically results in lower satisfaction scores. We urged operators to really focus on their interactions with residents – to do the basics well – to ensure their bottom lines did not suffer because renters now have tons of options.
For a detailed look at the findings from 2024 and to see our predictions for 2025, please be on the lookout for the article we publish on Multifamily Executive next week. For being a reader of this blog, I am happy to provide you a sneak peek of some of the key findings here:
- With a year’s worth of data, we can definitively say resident satisfaction trended up in 2024. There were 50% more compliments than complaints left within reviews, making 2024 the third highest sentiment year on record since J Turner started tracking in 2003.
- J Turner Research’s theory is that improved sentiment can be primarily traced to the industry figuring out how to operate in a post-covid world. Not only does it take time to learn how to properly implement new tools like AI, chatbots, or centralization, but residents changed both behaviorally and psychologically.
- Customer Service and Communication are continuing to be talked about more and more often within reviews. Alongside Maintenance Service, these are the biggest areas that directly impact your online reputation. Frequency went up dramatically for both Customer Service and Communication in 2024. This, alongside trends within other operational areas, suggests that interpersonal relationships between staff and residents are more critical than ever for driving satisfaction, renewals, and tours onsite.
- On the flip side, the Condition & Availability of the Amenities/Common Areas is being mentioned less often. This suggests that a greater percentage of residents don’t think of amenities as being the sole determining factor in whether they are satisfied or not.
- Based on the trends and recent events, here are three key areas we predict will be critical operative areas in 2025 for properties wishing to maintain or strengthen their online reputation:
- Financial Clarity
- Pet Waste
- Parking
ABOUT THIS BLOG:
The insights in this blog came from utilizing J Turner Research’s text categorization tool, Thought Analysis. Thought Analysis is a proprietary AI software that will 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 owners and operators can see what is being complimented and complained about as drivers of satisfaction/dissatisfaction.