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Since the beginning of 2023, only about 15.5% of reviews have been a 4-star. Most people (71%) either leave a 5-star or a 1-star review, so it is always worth investigating why someone falls into the middle of the satisfaction spectrum (2, 3, and 4-stars). Today, we are diving into 4-stars to understand what types of operational areas cause residents to not be fully satisfied living at the community.
4-stars often provide incredibly valuable feedback because 49% of them do mention something negatively. These are the things we should interpret as the areas keeping the resident from being fully satisfied. They obviously enjoy living there, as evidenced by their 4/5 score. But about half of these reviews have a “but” in them. The resident says something like, “I love living here, BUT…”
The question is what is the “but?”
Note: to provide relevant takeaways, the analysis is limited to looking at the 12 categories that appear the most frequently out of the 22 Thought Analysis categories (the 12 mentioned in at least 5% of reviews).
Do Only Inconveniences Drive 4-Stars?
For the most part, the “but” moments are inconveniences. They are the operational areas that live in the periphery of the core apartment experience, which we know relates to a well-functioning unit, a friendly/caring staff, and feeling safe/welcome in your home. The top five negative mentions in 4-star reviews are:
The ones that fall into this inconvenience bucket are Noise, the Condition/Availability of the Amenities/Common Areas, and Parking. These operational areas can often be somewhat out of the staff’s control, making them difficult to impact. The staff can’t re-do the thickness of the walls, get the Peloton rep to immediately come out to fix the bike, or add substantially more parking overnight. Moreover, we can legitimately question that if a resident loves every aspect of the community but occasionally hears Mr. Smith from down the hall scream at his TV during football season, are they really going to move out?
That’s a difficult question to answer, of course, but calling these “but” moments “inconveniences” and noting that they are many times “somewhat out of the staff’s control” should not diminish their validity. The reality is that if prevalent enough, these areas can still really hurt your online reputation and ability to retain residents. The companies at the top of the ORA rankings consistently average above 4.30 on their reviews, so a 4-star is harmful despite the common perception of it being a “positive review.” Management companies must have a strategy for addressing these types of inconveniences to ensure they do not negatively affect the bottom line.
The other two categories in the top five, Maintenance Service and Condition of the Unit, are different because complaints in these areas typically damage online reputation in a bigger way. A previous blog in this series discussed the wide variance in average star rating between compliments and complaints for these two categories (which is not present with categories like Noise). Namely, even though a complaint did not always equal a 1-star, Maintenance Service and Condition of the Unit were still make-or-break moments because they correlated too strongly to overall satisfaction. These categories appearing so often in the 4-star bucket somewhat challenges that notion, suggesting that it could take multiple failures to really move someone to the boiling point of leaving a 1-star. It is also possible that there needs to be other operational failures like poor Communication on top of a poor maintenance performance to create a totally unsatisfied resident.
What Doesn’t Drive 4-Stars?
We must also dive into what 4-stars are not. These are operational areas that move residents past the “but” stage and immediately into totally dissatisfied (1-star reviews). They do not get mentioned negatively in 4-stars because the average resident does not see the positives outweighing the frustration they have with these areas. It should be no surprise that residents do not have any patience for failures with misinformation and feeling like they have been deceived. Here are the five least frequently complained about categories in 4-star reviews:
Most notably we see Financial (being clear about the charges at the property) and Communication demonstrating this point. Complaints about these categories reflect broken trust and accordingly have incredibly low star rating averages when complained about. Cleanliness also cracks the top five, a topic that has objectively gained sensitivity in reviews since the COVID-19 outbreak.
Lastly, we should note the least frequently mentioned topic in 4-star reviews is Move-in-Quality. This makes sense because if the resident just moved in and is dissatisfied enough to leave a review, they are probably ripping the property and leaving a 1-star. They, in fact, have no other experiences living there outside of that process. On the flipside, if the resident moved in a while ago and is still bringing up their move-in months or even years later, it was likely a pretty traumatic experience.
Management companies need to understand that there is zero tolerance for underperformance in all five of these operational areas. Any failures will damage online reputation and resident satisfaction, so strong performance onsite should be an expectation.
What Do We Do About This?
At the end of the day, a property management company should address the 1-star reviews they are getting first and foremost. They should ensure they are doing the basics like Communication very well. But, 4-star reviews add up, and there are plenty of properties and companies that have an abnormal number of residents in the “everything is great, but” state of satisfaction.
The biggest takeaway is the need to have a gameplan to address the operational areas that may be somewhat out of your control. When residents are complaining about Noise, what do you do? Can you offer something like a white noise machine, or do you at least have some way to show empathy to the resident? Likewise, if you have limited parking or the Peloton is frequently going down, what are your teams going to do to help?
While these “but” moments are not going to tank your scores in the same way Communication failures would, there is clearly training to be done onsite. There is no reason to allow these inconveniences to be brushed off to the point where it hurts your scores and resident retention. Now that you know what they are, hopefully you’re off and running to a strategy that keeps happy residents only saying, “I love it here [period].”
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 what is being complimented and complained about can be seen by owners and operators as drivers of satisfaction/dissatisfaction.