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As many of you are aware, reviews can be reactive. Not all reviews will be a full essay that eloquently touches on every aspect of living at the community. A review can be the product of one single experience, interaction, or thought that pushes a resident or prospect online to voice something. Today we will look at reviews that only discuss one operational area. This means that we aren’t looking into the page-long reviews that delve into every facet of what it is like to live there, but rather the quick hitters: the reviews like “my apartment sucks” or “Sally from leasing is the best.”
We will discuss how often these seemingly reactionary reviews appear in both a positive and negative light and then look at the operational categories that elicit these types of reviews.
Reactive Reviews can be Positive!
For this analysis, we reviewed a sample of about 1.5 million non-blank reviews to determine how often these one-category reviews appear. Of those, there were 166,117 reviews (11%) that only had one operational category mentioned. It may surprise you to learn that it is much more likely for these types of reviews to be left in a positive fashion. Specifically, there are 121,859 reviews that are a positive mention within a 5-star review. In comparison, there are only 11,140 reviews that feature a negative mention within a 1-star review.
That is an incredible 11-1 ratio, meaning that residents have a propensity to leave a quick, reactionary review to something good as opposed to something going wrong. This is great! It proves what we call the “Moment of Gratitude Theory” at J Turner Research. That theory says that anytime there is an incredibly positive interaction with a resident or prospect, we should train our teams to go in for the review ask because the resident has just told us “thank you” and expressed their satisfaction directly to us. Why not thank us and express that satisfaction online?
Moreover, it tells us that 1-star reviews are usually the result of multiple moments of falling short. For example, maybe there was not just a maintenance issue, but the team also forgot to call and provide an update- or maybe this was the third time the peloton bike broke down and our staff has not been very compassionate. This is good news for property management companies as the data indicates that most people will give you the opportunity to turn around a negative interaction before they blast you online. As long as you are taking their first issue/complaint seriously and showing empathy/commitment to a resolution, there is a good chance to keep them offline.
Drivers of Positive Reviews
For 5-star reviews with one category, there is an undisputed champ: Customer Service makes up 72% of these quick hitters. Clearly, this is a testament to how critical and impactful your staff’s interactions with the residents can be. Any incredibly positive moment, whether it is being kind, helpful, or servant-hearted, can lead someone to go compliment the staff member on the property’s review sites.
Outside of Customer Service, there are two other noteworthy categories. The Condition & Availability of the Amenities/Common Areas (8.0%) and Maintenance Service (7.7%) can also elicit immediate positive feedback. This is rational as the amenities are typically the “wow factor” of the community and could be a resident’s favorite part of living there. For example, there are plenty of reviews along the lines of “I love the gym” or “The pool is amazing.” Similarly, maintenance technicians are often called the unsung heroes of the community because they help residents get out of sticky situations like when a resident needs their stove fixed so that they can cook dinner for their kids. Interestingly, Maintenance Service (the quality of the maintenance team/work) gets mentioned 4.74 times as frequently as Maintenance Timeliness (how quickly the work is done) in these reviews. This showcases that it is the actual fixing that moves residents online to leave a quick review. These interactions become perfect moments of gratitude to target getting additional reviews online.
Beware of the Landmines
Regarding the 1-star reviews with only one category, the perennial landmines, which we need to navigate around, there are more operational areas that need to be on our radar. This is INCREDIBLY important because this is their only complaint, i.e., these are negative reviews we may not have gotten otherwise because these people are likely pretty satisfied (they have nothing else negative to say). While bad episodes of Customer Service can also quickly drive negative reviews, we need to be operationally sound in a handful of key areas. These are as follows:
Two themes are clear in looking at this data. For starters, a lack of or poor communication is a definite landmine. Both Communication and Financial Clarity (not making the charges/billing clear) rank within the top 3 most common categories. You must teach your teams to answer the phones, their emails, and do so in an accurate and timely manner.
Secondly, you need to have a handle on crisis situations. Both Security and Pests appear incredibly high on this list. This tells us that we need to handle these situations promptly, with empathy, with transparent communication, and with a commitment to resolve the issue. Otherwise, we should expect the affected parties to leave a negative review that may not have been left under normal circumstances.
The outlier on this list is Parking. In my experience, these are typically towing situations or when there is a day of no spaces being available. I understand that this a very difficult category to impact, but at the end of the day, you need your residents to be fully aware of any and all policies and procedures. No one wants their car towed, but we can all understand how frustrating it would be to think you are parked legally only to come outside and discover your car is gone and you owe hundreds of dollars. Require your staff to be fully transparent and protect your online reputation!
In Conclusion
Getting into reviews like these is so interesting because we get to learn more about the psyche of renters. We learned how impactful our staff’s interactions can be in both a positive and negative way and we also now have data to validate the landmine situations that can 180 an otherwise happy resident.
All humans have emotions and may default to doing something like leaving a review when they are “in their feelings.” Leverage where you can make residents feel good! Likewise, work to shore up the places that can make a resident quickly turn on the property. Doing both tasks well will make sure you won’t have a negative reaction toward your own online reputation scores.
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.