Jordan Muela's Blog

Search engine optimization is one of the things we’re passionate about, and periodically we like to do a deep dive and get a handle on what is happening in related industries. Recently we ran across Andrew Shotlands’s post “IYP SEO Rankings Report 2009” ranking the different internet yellow pages sites by their share of competitive search engine rankings, and decided to apply a similar methodology to see how the different rental sites stacked up against each other.

Since many of you use these sites to publish your rental listings, we thought you’d be interested in seeing which of these sites perform the best for the most important rental keywords in the search engines.

In brief, here is the methodology we followed:

This is a follow up to our survey of almost 3,000 reviews of property management companies on Yelp and Yahoo Local.

Why is it that management companies seem to get such a bad rap in online reviews? It would be easy to dismiss these review sites as being platforms for libel by disgruntled people with an axe to grind, but the reality is rating sites are a useful tool that are widely used by consumers.

61% of people rely on user reviews for product information or research before a buying decision is made. (Razorfish, 2008)

*The above word clouds are comprised of actual words and phrases from the 3,000 reviews we surveyed.

In my last article we covered some of the results from our survey of almost 3,000 reviews of property management companies on Yelp and Yahoo Local (read it first). We found that while there was a mix of tenants, owners, contractors, and realtors leaving reviews, the vast majority of the reviews were left by tenants. This makes sense if for no other reason than the fact that there are far more tenants than any of the other groups.

The fact that the reviews are highly polarized (love or hate) was easy to pick out, but beyond that there were a number of other common themes that came up over and over again. Here were the key issues that for tenants and landlords:

Over the last five years customer rating and reviews sites have exploded onto the scene as a major force in the buying and decision making process for consumers. From sites built around reviews like Yelp, to internet yellow pages (IYP's) which have incorporated them as an important feature, online reviews abound and consumers are using them to decide where to buy.

Much has been said about the good and evil of rating & review sites which often struggle to balance the interests of the businesses being reviewed, the users leaving the reviews, and their own financial interests. No matter how you feel about these sites it's clear they are here to stay and affecting the businesses being reviewed. It's not uncommon to see sites like Yelp ranking on the first page for searches on company names, or to see reviews from multiple sites aggregated in the search results of Google Maps.

Property management ratings on Yahoo Local

Every industry has a unique set of dynamics that influence the average customer sentiment, and while we had a pretty strong hunch of how property managers fare on these sites, we decided to do the research required to get some more concrete data.