Insights from Turner: We Proved You Have Control Over Security, Financial Clarity, and Pests

Oct 14, 2025 by Turner Batdorf

The last few months of this blog have been focused on the impending enhancements with the ORA model, where what is being said within your reviews will take center stage. Last month we detailed the “Apex Threats” – the three categories (Security, Financial Clarity, Pests) where any type of volume of complaints drives poor bottom-line performance. Specifically, we proved that as few as two negative reviews will result in a high percentage of people second-guessing or even eliminating living at your property regardless of how good your star ratings are or how many 5-star reviews you have.  

As we continue to work with our third-party stats team to wrap up the new version of the ORA algorithm, I wanted to keep the conversation going on the research behind the change. There has been a lot of positive feedback to this update in ORA (and relief in not having to keep pressuring property managers to acquire a ton of reviews), but in all of the dialogue I got one question I wanted to make the focus of this month’s blog: “aren’t all of these apex threats somewhat out of my control?” 

Introduction   

The Big Picture: Through a statistical analysis, we proved that performance in Security, Financial Clarity, and Pests is much more about the operations of the property than factors outside of their control. No matter how much crime is in your area, how you structure your fees, or where your property is located geographically, good properties will avoid complaints and bad properties will receive them.  

Why it Matters: Hiding behind myths that it is out of your control only puts your business in danger. We know that prospects are reading reviews and using AI to evaluate your communities. The reality is that this digitally native prospect will detect issues and make decisions based on whether they see complaints in these areas or not. Using this data to motivate your teams for improved performance only helps you in the long run whether you are invested in ORA or not.   

Security

Security is the quintessential taboo topic in multifamily because it is risky to promise anything to residents and prospects. But performance is still incredibly important. I have noticed that there is a tendency for multifamily management companies to hide behind the misconception that “crime has no zip code” or that because their property is in an urban or high crime area, they have no control over the perception of safety at the property. 

“Crime has no zip code” is a myth! You do have control over how safe residents perceive themselves to be and there is no evidence that where your property is located is the driving force of getting Security complaints. I highly encourage you to check out this presentation from our 2023 J Turner Research Summit where we actually broke it down in detail, but in it we observed various clusters of properties within a one-mile radius. We found no correlation of the respective cluster being predictive of performance in Security. In many clusters, one property would struggle with Security while all others performed well, and vice versa. Here are some examples where the green icons indicate properties that get less Security complaints than the national average and the red icons are properties that get more. Orange indicates on-par with the national average. 

Image 1 and 2

As you can tell, the difference comes down to what properties are doing on a day-to-day basis to make their residents feel safe. Yes, specific Security enhancements like cameras, courtesy officers, gates, and fob access can only help, but the biggest correlation to Security performance is cleanliness. Keeping an orderly and clean property results in residents perceiving the property to be cared for and safe. In addition, good/transparent communication is paramount. Whether it includes bringing in law enforcement to encourage and inform the residents or just being forward about your policies, residents respond to when you show you take their safety seriously proactively.  

Financial Clarity 

Financial Clarity is one that gets questioned less than Security, but there is still the perception that it is “out of our control.” I commonly hear two excuses:  

  1. It is the fault of resident that did not read their lease or listen clearly enough to the fee policies.
  2. Managers can’t do anything about how their management company structures charges.

I certainly understand both of these challenges, but the truth is that regardless of how your company structures fees/charges, the onus is on the onsite team to make it clear to the prospect or resident and you can control that! 

I find it incredibly interesting that even though a lot of the industry has recently adjusted how they present fees due to the FTC’s new regulations, we still see complaints at similarly high rates to when it was common practice to “hide fees.” At the end of the day, it boils down to what you do from a Communication standpoint. Are you good at proactive communication and are you empathetic, transparent, and honest? Then, you likely don’t hear a peep about Financial Clarity issues.  
 
Communication and Financial Clarity complaints are not only incredibly correlated with each other (4th highest correlation of the 231 possible category relationships), but they both correlate very highly to overall performance. Here is a breakdown of how predictive Financial Clarity issues are to overall satisfaction/reputation/financial forecasting over a 12-month span: 

  • Properties with 20+ reviews complaining about Financial

Average ORA Decrease = 1.87 

  • Properties with 10-20 reviews complaining about Financial

Average ORA Decrease = .63

  • Properties with less than 5 reviews complaining about Financial

ORA went up .98 on average

In conclusion, if you are good onsite and care about your residents enough to communicate well with them, you won’t have issues with fee complaints that derail prospects from considering you; it will, however, take making resident/prospect understanding of these fees a priority.  

Pests 

Pests is one that has been questioned because of ORA’s national presence. Because we are scoring and ranking properties versus each other across all 150,000+ known properties, there was some concern that a property’s regional location might negatively impact how many pest complaints they receive. For example, does being in the south lead to more bug complaints or does being in an highly urban area lead to more complaints about rats? 

To look into this, we performed an MSA (Metropolitan Statistical Area) analysis of complaints to see which regions are more likely to struggle with Pest complaints. Here was the top 10 (after a minimum review threshold was applied):

  • Jonesboro, AR  
  • Yuma, AZ 
  • Fort Smith, AR-OK 
  • CA NONMETROPOLITAN AREA 
  • Visalia-Porterville, CA 
  • Sioux City, IA-NE-SD 
  • Pueblo, CO 
  • WV NONMETROPOLITAN AREA 
  • Florence, SC 
  • Racine, WI 

As you can see, the ranking of Pest complaints is fairly random in the scope of the entire United States and is mostly concentrated in rural, not urban, areas. Even when we isolated to the top 25 MSA’s, there is incredible variance geographically in terms of ranking. Here is the top 15 in order of highest rate of complaints:

  • Baltimore-Columbia-Towson, MD  
  • San Antonio-New Braunfels, TX 
  • Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV 
  • Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler, AZ 
  • Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD 
  • Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX 
  • Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX 
  • Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford, FL 
  • Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, FL 
  • Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA 
  • Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA 
  • Austin-Round Rock, TX 
  • Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN 
  • Denver-Aurora-Centennial, CO 
  • San Diego-Chula Vista-Carlsbad, CA 

Just like with the two categories before it, performance is property dependent. Where your property is located, whether north or south or around a lot of people or not, does not determine your reputation/resident satisfaction fate in terms of Pests. It is about the things you and your onsite teams do every day to handle these operational areas with the seriousness they deserve. 

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.

Knowing Your ORA® Score Leads To A More Brilliant Online Reputation Strategy.

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