The Do’s and Don’ts for Reputation Management in Your Rental Property
Put yourself in your tenant’s shoes. What will you do when looking for a property? You’ll aim straight for online reviews and social media pages to see what you’re getting into. You’ll be turned off if you find one-star reviews and inactive/barely active social media accounts.
The same applies to your prospective tenants. If they find negative content about your multifamily home, the prospective tenants will simply go elsewhere.
That’s why you need a strategy to plan reputation management for your rental property. This means taking the right steps to ensure you don’t get held back by negative content.
Here are the do’s and don’ts for reputation management in your rental property.
The Do’s
Promote Engagement
Property managers need to promote interaction between residents and staff. This will help you monitor their opinions about your property before it gets to the point where you spend all your time doing damage control. You want to be the first to know if someone is disgruntled enough to leave a terrible review on Trustpilot or Google or one of your social media platforms.
This will put you in a better situation to handle things before they get out of hand. There are many programs that can boost engagement, such as polls, events, and encouraging sharing of photos to provide a sense of connectivity and community.
Improve Your Search Ranking
Given the importance of search engines, it is a foregone conclusion to rank at the top of the first page of Google and Bing. This means having your own website, rewriting, and optimizing your website copy to create high-quality blog posts. You should also create a content plan for social media with relevant, high-quality posts that can engage users.
Ask Your Residents to Spread Positive Engagement
Unfortunately, people are more likely to share a negative review than a positive one. This means you’ll have to encourage positive reviews by gently reminding them: something as simple as, “Will you share your experiences about living at this apartment? Please write a review!” Request them to include links to your review sites. Another way to encourage residents to talk about your property in a positive light is to organize parties, fun events, and occasions.
Don’ts
Incentivizing Positive Reviews
This is a negative practice that could get you penalized by review sites and search engines alike. Rating sites have designed algorithms that can pick up fraudulent or incentivized reviews and will hurt your ranking. Incentivizing online reviews could mean offering money or discounts on rent in exchange for good reviews. Instead, you should try to encourage reviews organically instead of manipulating them.
Ignoring Bad Reviews
A bad review can be used as an opportunity to show that you care. In fact, people tend to become skeptical when they find far too many 5-star reviews because it’s simply not possible to please every single person. When you do get a negative review, make sure you are responding to it. Take the time to respond to every bad review, making sure not to lose your cool when doing so.
Sometimes, a negative review would be unfair – but that isn’t grounds for you to disengage from professional discourse. Prospective tenants would be reviewing your response to negative feedback before working with you.
Buying Reviews
It’s extremely easy to tell if a review has been faked. Prospective tenants will usually figure this out by seeing account activity, the total number of reviews made (fake accounts usually only leave one or two reviews), and overwhelmingly positive words. Most disingenuous reviews reek of fakery – they seem to use the same ideas and writing style (as if the same person spun them around).
It goes without saying that managing your property’s online reputation is one of the most profitable things you can do to improve revenue. Consider hiring an online reputation firm for property managers to get personalized solutions and tips.
