3 smart ways to manage your property’s ratings and reviews

• There are many facets to reputation management: ratings, reviews, social media presence, and even the leasing team’s customer service and response.
• New developments in reputation management tech have made this drastically easier for teams to manage.
• Leasing teams can keep reviews fresh and quickly respond with automated review requests and monitoring.
• Reputation management solutions can support leasing teams in tracking and responding to reviews so your team doesn’t have to maintain all of them alone.

Your property’s online reputation is vital to a renter’s final decision to lease. Ratings, reviews, social media presence, and even the leasing team’s customer service all impact your property’s online reputation.

Attracting the right renters comes down to a property team’s ability to maintain each area efficiently, simply, and repeatedly. Much like solving a complex formula with the aid of a calculator, having the right tools and processes in place will help you avoid extra effort and inaccuracies in reputation management.

Luckily, new developments in reputation management tech have made this drastically easier for teams to manage. We’ll talk about why reputation is critical for your property’s digital footprint and smart ways to address top pain points.

How reputation makes and breaks a property’s digital footprint

Reviews are your community’s chance to win over renters before they set foot in the actual unit. After analyzing close to 600,000 reviews of more than 80,000 multifamily properties, Reputation found that 88% of people read reviews before touring the property.

What are renters looking for in reviews? High reputation scores and above-average ratings. Properties with the best reputations (determined by Reputation Score*) generated 3X more views on Google. Similarly, 55% of renters wanted to see a rating of 4 stars or higher before even considering touring a property.

Build renter confidence in a way that works for your team

Critical pieces of reputation management can be easy to overlook or de-prioritize due to the tedious nature of the work. This is especially true for teams that don’t have the resources, tools, and time to manage all of these aspects efficiently. Some teams may be able to solicit reviews, but don’t have time to respond. In other cases, teams don’t have the systems in place to solicit reviews during key renter milestones. A common struggle for teams is keeping their Google Business Profiles fully updated.

1. Generate recent reviews and improve response speed

Renters look out for recent reviews during their search. Data shows that it drives their decision to tour. Communities with 10 recent reviews generate 4X more leads per property than communities that only have older reviews.¹

Building renter confidence in a community also requires quick responses. Properties that have recently responded to reviews generate up to 31% more leads from their listings.²

Property team next steps:

Easily automate review requests and responses. Leasing teams can keep reviews fresh and quickly respond with automated review requests and monitoring. Integrated reputation management solutions can send requests for residents to review via emails or texts at critical times like move-in, during lease renewal, or after a maintenance request is completed. Reputation management services can even support leasing teams with custom responses. To ensure speedy responses, you’ll also want to ensure your team has the flexibility to approve responses from a variety of platforms.

2. Develop a consistent, FHA-compliant, response strategy

While positive reviews are important, thorough responses will help your property drive activity from renters over the long term. 89% of consumers report that they will more likely use a business that responds to all reviews—positive, neutral and negative.³

For the rental industry specifically, renters have said that hearing back from the leasing office plays a role in their reviews. 56% of renters have said the professionalism of the rental office was the biggest factor motivating them to leave a review, noting “showing more empathy and responsiveness” as a key challenge that leasing teams tackle.

Property team next steps:

Craft personalized responses more efficiently. Sending effective responses for communities requires a balance of customer service, personalization and FHA compliance. There are also different approaches for positive, negative and neutral review responses to put your property in the best light.

Reputation management solutions can support leasing teams in tracking and responding to reviews so your team doesn’t have to maintain all of them alone. Just make sure leasing staff and all third parties that publish responses are well-versed in FHA regulations, your specific property’s policies and multifamily best practices.

3. Improve SEO with profile completeness and accuracy

Think of your property’s Google Business Profile as an extension of your community’s front desk.

Just like stepping into a half-empty office, incomplete listings generate renter questions.

Is this place still under construction?
Will anyone be there to answer my call?
Is it less popular than other options in the area?

Simply completing your Google Business Profile can put your property at a significant advantage. In a Rent. test, properties that completed all fields on their listings increased impressions by 67% and inspired 112% percent more actions from prospects.

You can also step up your SEO and earn trust with renters by consistently presenting your property’s contact information everywhere it appears across the web. Accurate NAP (Name, Address and Phone Number) across business listings has been found to be the fifth most important ranking factor for local search.

Property team next steps:

Ensure accuracy with integrations. Manually updating all of your property’s online profiles takes time. Find solutions that integrate with your property’s PMS and listings to automatically update information. When things change, these tools will also ensure that new information is refreshed across your Google Business Profile, review sites, and listings. This will help you get that bump in results while improving your overall reputation long term.

Reputation management services can fill in the gaps that many property teams have in handling their reviews, ratings, and even social media management. Technologies and services give your team more time to focus on human interactions to build trust with prospects, perfect customer service and build loyalty with residents.

Access the simple, effective and FHA-compliant way to boost brand perception with renters.

Rent.’s leading reputation platform just got more powerful with on-the-go approvals and carefully crafted review responses—all from one easy application. We are working with Reputation, to power the RentRep. Dashboard.

Our team of community reputation experts know what works for the rental industry so owners and operators get the most of their online presence. We do the heavy lifting so RentRep. clients can drive leads, improve SEO and reduce risk all while improving onsite operations.

Fill out the form to learn more about building renter confidence.

*Reputation Score looks at a location’s sentiment, visibility, and engagement across nine elements ranging from the volume of reviews accumulated for a property management firm to their star average. From there, Reputation assigns a location a single score ranging from zero to 1,000. Reputation: www.reputation.com/training/guides/rep-score-guide.pdf 

¹Rent. Internal Data, April 2022. Count of reviews since 2021; Leads Jan – Mar 2022; Props with 10+ reviews have LPP 4.5x greater than those with 0 reviews.

² Rent. Internal Data. July, 2021.

 ³BrightLocal Local Consumer Review Survey 2022.