Brian Ericson, Cortland Partners

A key motivation for the review gathering efforts that we’ve done stems from the resident satisfaction surveys that we do on our own. We get thousands of data points in our resident surveys, and based on those scores, it became readily apparent to me that we were tremendously selling ourselves short in our online reviews, particularly our Google and Yelp reviews. In the last couple years, we’ve seen a lot of improvement in our own resident satisfaction scores, but unfortunately the Google scores did not naturally follow that trend. We did not feel that our Google scores were giving a fair and accurate representation of what our residents really felt about us, based on all of the direct feedback we were getting through the surveys

Our decision to initially focus on Google is based on a combination of some of the research that J Turner has done about the importance of Google and how much weight and authority apartment shoppers are lending to it these days. We’ve also seen a couple of other national industry studies that have shown a significant shift over the past four - five years. While earlier, Apartmentratings.com and some of the apartment specific sites were the dominant source of resident feedback; today Google is becoming increasingly influential and popular, followed by Yelp to a lesser extent.

Google naturally gets so much airtime or face time. So many of us spend such a large portion of our lives on it and the fact that Google ratings are so front and center when anyone searches for a specific apartment. Unlike a lot of other rating sources, Google is hard to avoid; it’s hard to miss that big shiny Google star rating when you do a search. We believe Google’s popularity with our potential customers will only increase going forward

In the short term, Google is the biggest area of opportunity for us – it feels clearly like the lowest hanging fruit. Like the rest of the industry, we’ve gotten caught up in the inertia from what was true five years ago, and until recently continued to focus almost exclusively on ApartmentRatings.com. Almost all of our community associate incentive programs and the tracking we did in this area focused only on Apartmentratings.com reviews.

Frankly, until recently, we at the community level or as a company have done a pretty poor, if not non-existent, job of encouraging Google reviews from the residents who we know really like us. It became an obvious opportunity for two reasons. First, our existing Google scores were pretty low and far below where we wanted them to be. Second, because we had very few Google reviews.

Prior to running promotional efforts, the majority of our communities only had about 20 Google reviews. This, combined with fairly low average scores, created a fantastic opportunity to move the needle a lot with a relatively small number of great reviews.

To aggressively move the needle on Google reviews, we ran a Five Day Regional Contest in the markets below. The contest was very short, very intense, as we did not want to risk it being lost among the other hundreds of things the associates have to do on a day to day basis.

1) Houston (plus San Antonio)
2) Columbus, OH and four communities in Atlanta 3) Dallas and Ft. Worth
4) Florida (primarily Tampa and Orlando)
5) Atlanta (all affordable, tax-credit communities)

We initially ran the Google review contest in Houston and a few communities in San Antonio and saw immense success with it. We felt like this was a good formula before extending it to other regions.

The objective of this contest was twofold:

• To see who could gather the most Google reviews in a five-day time period. • To improve their average Google scores the most as a result of the contest.

What the community teams did to boost was surprisingly “old-fashioned.” The teams had some success with just about every solicitation method you could think of - emails and text messages and others. At the end of the day, the method that almost everyone found to be most successful was the more personal one. Managers sat in their offices, picked up the phone, and called people. They made a very personal, friendly request – “Hey, we are taking part in this contest; we would love for you to share some of your thoughts and leave us a review on Google.”

So picking up the phone and calling people, as well as engaging with almost every single resident (or prospect) that came into the office to ask a question or to pick up a package was most successful. The actual personal interaction with residents had a much higher success rate than just sending an email.