J Turner Research made an enhancement to its proprietary ORA Score Algorithm in February, updating it to account for changes in both the review landscape and renter behavior. The big addition to this year’s algorithm enhancement was adding the actual content of the individual reviews to each property’s ORA Score. This data has been the focus of this blog for over two years now, providing tremendous value as we sought to understand what drives renter satisfaction. The change to ORA was monumental: no longer is a Google rating being taken at face value, but rather, J Turner Research is using its Einstein tool to assess what each property does well and where there are operational opportunities, especially ones that could detract prospects or hurt resident retention.
We have put out a lot of content related to the switch itself including these two videos:
Full Webinar on the Changes
2-Minute Summary
However, over the course of 2026, I wanted to publish a few blogs that speak to why this change is beneficial for you. We understand more than anyone that any form of change is challenging (these enhancements take a toll on the JTR team just as much as they do yours), but we do it because we believe it is 100% necessary to ensure you are working toward a number that is meaningful for your business.
In this blog, I will turn to the experts and debut the initial findings from RealPage’s independent study of the new ORA score, where they sought to understand the financial impact of improving or decreasing ORA Scores relative to a property’s direct competition. To provide further context to their findings, I will also look at J Turner Research’s satisfaction scores to assess whether the new ORA is more reflective of resident satisfaction.
The Big Takeaway: Whether you use ORA or not, considering the content of reviews is a 100% necessary part of your reputation strategy in 2026. RealPage found that the old way of just looking at star ratings has deteriorated in its ability to be predictive of financial performance. In contrast, supplementing stars with qualitative data not only predicts financial health but forecasts revenue growth.
The elephant in the room is the market we are operating in within multifamily. Occupancy is high across the board and rents are not increasing pervasively, so the margins for “strong performance” have thinned. The properties that are seeking to find edges versus their competition must be laser focused on retention and prospect attraction. Many of the REITs have come out this month and said that this environment makes it even more paramount that property managers have a strong understanding of their online reputation and resident satisfaction. While any focus on satisfaction is “good” inherently, being blinded to underperformance creates bad decision making and J Turner’s belief is that the way we have historically looked at online reputation is outdated. The old way of doing things fails to account for a messy review landscape and a more skeptical prospect.
As we have pointed out before, Forbes has been recommending going beyond the stars for years (read article here) and multifamily has been slow to adopt. Typical online reputation management in multifamily has been limited to tracking star ratings like those on Google which are calculated overly simplistically. Specifically, Google tends to treat reviews as the same to one another when context can matter an incredible amount. For example, Google does not weight a 1-star review about the landscaping being poor as any different than a 1-star review about a pest infestation or a shooting onsite. Think about that – we all know that those two things would produce massive differences in how we assume that property generally performs, but Google says they are equal. Likewise, Google still heavily weights historical reviews, making the published rating less about what is currently happening onsite. Here in 2026, we are talking about 10-15+ years of reviews piling up for some properties, making the ratings relatively unable to be changed with both improving or worsening service. A 4.5-star property with 800 reviews will not change whether they get twenty 1-star reviews or twenty 5-star reviews. That makes absolutely no sense!
Personally, I would much rather live at a 4.4 rated property with landscaping issues and recent positive reviews than a 4.6 rated property that has gotten complaints about pests over the last couple of months. This is very similar to how I am much more likely to dine at a restaurant getting complaints about parking than one complaining of food poisoning. If you are like most people, you fall into the same boat as I do, which therefore necessitates that the published Google Rating cannot be our only evaluation point of overall performance.
Google ratings are still important, but they are not the end-all-be-all because outside of poor calculation logic, like us, our prospects are also diving deeper. 50% of prospects use AI tools such as ChatGPT to do things like “identify red flags” or “find what property x does well and poorly.” Moreover, 64.4% of prospects spend more time reading reviews when searching for an apartment than they already do for a normal purchase. Your prospects know that these ratings are not to be blindly trusted and they are using tools to truly understand what it is like to live somewhere. Therefore, we MUST leverage the same data prospects and AI are using to have an accurate understanding of how well we perform – the content is directly impacting our business, so looking just at the stars is like sticking our head in the sand.
Our renter has gotten more skeptical and the landscape has gotten messier – what does this mean? Well, it means that the Old ORA Score’s correlation to bottom line performance has completely deteriorated over the last two years. In an effort to buoy their own rent algorithms, RealPage independently conducts a study to assess the financial impact of improving or worsening ORA Scores. Specifically, they look at assets in a variety of markets and within different classes to understand the impact of improved service as measured through ORA (you can read about the scope of the original study here). This allows RealPage to bake in satisfaction data to prescribe rent prices.
After seeing substantial growth in its basis points to market predictability with each algorithm enhancement (which was essentially a manipulation of the star rating data) since 2021, J Turner Research hit a breaking point. In an environment where margins are tight, there is not much meaning left to be pulled from these overly simplistic metrics if just taken at face value. To go into detail, RealPage found that the Old ORA has dropped dramatically from its once very high correlation of 9.3BPS return to market. Even more importantly, they found that improvements to the Old ORA could no longer accurately forecast revenue growth over the next 12 months. In other words, the increased skepticism of prospects navigating a diluted review landscape of less meaningful star ratings has reared its ugly head in this tight market; just being focused on the stars lacks meaning.
However, with the content of the reviews factored in, there is still an incredibly high correlation between not only revenue versus competition, but also revenue growth. The New ORA is 2.38x more predictive of revenue versus direct competitors and infinite times better at looking to the future.
Rich Hughes, the Head of Data Science at RealPage, said that the New ORA unequivocally “identifies properties that are 'accelerating' past their peers.” Moreover, Hughes said this correlation “is 100% not by accident.”
Specifically, he complimented J Turner Research’s ability to cut through the noise and provide a meaningful KPI and strong correlation despite a tighter landscape. The content of reviews had to be factored according to Hughes. Without it, you would naturally be working toward something that is just surface value.
We already covered that prospects are taking into account the content of reviews to make their decisions, but the other reason that the New ORA predicts financial performance so much better than the Old ORA is that the content of reviews makes ORA more reflective of resident satisfaction. At J Turner Research, we go beyond NPS (Net Promoter Score) to report on resident loyalty through our proprietary TALi (Turner Apartment Loyalty Index) score. When we added the content of reviews as measured in Einstein, the correlation of ORA to TALi improved dramatically, increasing by 19.4%.
This 0.62 correlation is incredibly meaningful as 0.5 is often considered the benchmark of a very strong relationship in behavioral sciences. In contrast, looking at a site’s ratings is much less predictive. This includes Google, which sits atop the review site ecosystem.
| Metric | Correlation To TALi |
| New ORA | 0.62 |
| Old ORA | 0.52 |
| 0.45 | |
| Veryapt | 0.41 |
| Yelp | 0.36 |
| RENTCafe | 0.34 |
| Apartment Ratings | 0.32 |
| 0.29 | |
| Apartments.com | 0.20 |
The purpose of this blog is to encourage you to take a more dynamic look at your online reputation and satisfaction data. Whether you use ORA or not, I would highly recommend that you not limit yourself to just looking at quantitative ratings. Even with our expertise, which expands back fifteen years, we could not manipulate the ratings enough to forecast future revenue growth. And if we are all not working toward something forecasting financial growth, what’s the point?
RealPage’s findings only proved it – what worked as recently as two years ago will not work as well in 2026. At the end of the day, it is a new dawn where content is king. Let’s embrace it!