Reputation management is your effort to monitor and manage the public’s opinion of you online. It’s an ongoing job for multifamily marketers and property managers because once your residents share their experiences online, their comments can significantly influence whether or not prospective renters decide to tour your property.

To find out how multifamily marketers can lead the conversation about brand and property reputations, we asked the following industry experts for tips on requesting and responding to reviews:

• Jeremy Lawson, reputation manager at Fogelman
• Destiny McMahon, marketing director at Affinity Property Management
• Jodi Mott, digital marketing strategist at Pinnacle
• Kristie Polito, resident relations manager at Security Properties

Why you need an apartment reputation management plan

Residents talk about you online, so prospective renters already have opinions about your properties before they even contact you. According to the Zillow Group Consumer Housing Trends Report 2018, 3 in 4 (73%) total renters use online resources when shopping or searching for a home, and 50% of Gen Z renters (ages 18-23) find online reviews very or extremely important — a higher share than older generations.

A bad reputation affects your company’s bottom line. Residents might not renew leases at a property that doesn’t measure up, and prospective renters won’t bother touring a community that gets nothing but complaints. And don’t forget investors:

“I don’t have to bring up reviews with investors anymore — they bring them up, and they’ll turn down a deal if they read negative reviews about a property,” Jeremy Lawson noted. “It’s not like a restaurant where you can risk losing a two-dollar order; it’s potentially tens of thousands of dollars from a resident, and it can make a big impact on your bottom line.”

How to lead the conversation about reputation management

Our stakeholders agreed that tackling the hard stuff right away is the key to staying ahead of your reputation rather than reacting to issues because you avoided dealing with them.

“When you see going awry walk right toward it, because if you don’t cut things off at the pass it’s not going to go well.” Kristie Polito warned. “You’re not going to run the conversation, someone else will. It’s hardly ever as bad as we think, but if we avoid it, it’ll be worse than we think.”

How to build your apartment reputation management plan

Establish guidelines for responding to resident issues

Show your team how to respond when residents bring up their concerns, ideally before it becomes an online review. Other industries can provide inspiration on how to solicit feedback.

“Hotels have really embraced the idea of reviews. For example, I’ll walk into my room, immediately get a text asking me to rate the check-in process, and they get instant feedback because they made it easy,” Lawson remarked. “You stay in a hotel for just a few days, but we want an apartment resident. We want them to stay forever.”

Polito thinks good interpersonal skills should also be a priority. “It’s teaching composure, tone and presentation,” she noted. “In the first instance of someone coming in, you let them know, ‘I have time for you.’ Giving someone the opportunity to be heard is a basic part of how you get ahead.”

Get outside help

Two of our industry experts said they use third-party companies to help with apartment reputation management tasks. When requesting and replying to reviews, an outside party can help speed up your response time and ensure each reviewer gets the appropriate attention.

“We employ partnerships with social reputation management companies, but even so, my job is to see that whoever services our communities understands how we approach reputation management,” Jodi Mott explained. “If they’re responding to reviews on our behalf, they’re doing it our way.”

“We have a partner who aggregates all our data and pulls it into a dashboard,” Lawson remarked. “Then we can dig into sentiment analysis and what people are saying about our properties.”

Use your tools

“We establish a dashboard for each property the moment we start reputation management,” Mott said. “We identify qualitative and quantitative metrics to give us an indication that we’re doing well, including response time, volume of reviews, sentiment analysis and online engagement.”

Provide regular training

All of the industry experts we talked to have training in place to so their teams know how to handle their roles in reputation management.

“Just like fair housing training, we created two annual courses for social media and reputation management that are assigned to all new hires and certain title levels,” Mott explained. “The training covers what we expect of them as a company and how they should consider our reputation in social media as an industry.”

“Training is primarily through self-attended webinars, and I’ve spoken at local multifamily seminars,” Destiny McMahon noted. “We also have a senior team that trains our operations side.”

Commit to making reputation management part of the culture

“Everyone on the team has to be committed to providing the best experience to everyone they touch,” Mott pointed out. “The number or rating online is just a façade — we’re not doing this for a number. We have to reset that perception and reshape that mindset.”

“Reputation management is pretty simple, but as humans, we make it harder,” Polito observed. “Be human to each other. You can bring it all down to treating others how you want to be treated.”