How to Convert Online Reviews Into Onsite Action for Property Management Companies

Online reviews are a valuable source of information for your property management companies. Online reviews are places where residents share information, write about their experiences, post unique content, and ask for recommendations. If you’re not paying attention to the reviews your properties receive, you could be missing out on a wealth of knowledge. When used properly, these insights can be leveraged by any property management company to better cater to the needs of residents. 

Within this blog, we’ll take a look at how multi-family marketers can take online reviews and convert them into onsite action for your property management companies. 

Ensure that You Have A Strong Review Strategy In Place 

If you’re looking to make changes to your property management company based on the conversations had about your businesses online, you must have a strong review strategy in place. Research suggests that consumers are 2.4 times more likely to view user posts as authentic compared to your property itself. If a customer leaves a positive review, it’s crucial to quickly identify this review and share it externally to build trust and credibility with current and potential tenants. If your properties aren’t receiving reviews at the local level, it’s time to change that. For tips on how you can encourage your residents to leave reviews about your properties, check out our blog on the topic. 

Once you have reviews coming in for your properties, it’s essential to manage them properly. Social listening is a great tool that you can use to monitor the conversations around your property management company. If a customer leaves a negative review about your property, you will be able to see that review quickly and respond appropriately by utilizing social listening. By using social listening, property managers and corporate can set up alerts and notifications to quickly identify any potential crises and formulate an appropriate response before the situation gets out of hand. 

On the contrary, if you notice that residents are leaving rave reviews about your management or the amenities offered at your property, you can use that information to inform your marketing efforts. We’ll dive more into that later in this blog. 

Listen for Leads

Once you have a strong review strategy in place and have started monitoring the conversation around your business, you can then start listening for leads. Social listening can be used as a great tool to drive new leads. You can drive new leads by monitoring the conversation around your individual properties and listening to the conversation around competitors. If a resident posts an unsatisfactory review on a competitor’s page and shares that their lease is about to expire and needs a new place to live, this presents an opportunity. 

Through social listening, you can also set up keywords to follow on Google My Business or other platforms and follow these mentions along with associated mentions. For instance, as a multi-family marketer, you may want to follow the keywords “lease” or “apartment” and see what conversations are happening around them to gain more leads. If you notice specific conversations around these keywords, your local property managers can provide a thoughtful response, including an online application form or a link to a virtual tour. By paying attention to your online reviews and similar conversations, your properties have the potential to gain new leads and ultimately sign more leases. 

Make Changes Based on Review Feedback 

As we mentioned previously, by monitoring your reviews, you can get some great insight into the conversations around your properties. You can better understand what consumers like and don’t like about your properties and areas where there’s room for improvement. If you see several reviews complaining about the maintenance team, you can resolve this efficiently after a quick conversation with maintenance. Without looking through these reviews, though, you would never know that residents are unhappy. Similarly, if you see a lot of positive feedback about the virtual events you’ve been hosting, that affirms that the events are working well and should be something you continue. Monitoring these reviews can help your property management team prioritize what needs to be done at the property and ensure you’re making informed decisions. 

On the other hand, if you’ve recently made a big change to an individual property or are about to start renovations and are looking to get feedback from residents, social listening can be used for this too. A property could set up keyword searches for “renovations” or “amenity updates” within a social listening tool and quickly identify any associated mentions throughout key review sites. This could be used to gather, centralize, and share critical learnings across your team to inform business strategy. For example, suppose many reviews say they “love the renovations” for a specific renovation at an apartment in town. In that case, you can use these insights and consider undergoing similar renovations to your properties to build value and demand.

Find Your Own Social Listening Tool

Now that you fully understand the importance of social listening and how paying attention to reviews can help you gain leads and keep happy residents, it’s time to get started. If your property management company isn’t already utilizing social listening, you’re missing out. While monitoring your property management company’s conversation and its competitors can seem overwhelming, it doesn’t have to be. SOCi has a soon to be released listening tool. Through this tool, you’ll be able to discover what residents are saying about your properties and competitors, plus activate local engagement across all properties with localized listening capabilities, sentiment analysis, and user-generated content. 

If this isn’t enough, SOCi can help you beat the competition in all aspects of your localized marketing strategy. SOCi is the central command for multi-family marketers. We have everything you need to help you succeed in the property management world and gain more residents. For more information on how SOCi can help you, request a demo today!