Wholeheartedly agree and have voiced concern regarding same - I will not pay to be listed on an ILS if it portrays my community as anything but 5 stars!

I TOTALLY agree. I've been upset about this since it started but the advertisers have a nice prepared speech about how it can be a good thing. Absolutely ridiculous that this isn't optional when we pay them thousands of dollars.

I came from 13 years in property management. Through the beginning stages of Apartment Ratings to the transition in which property management professionals could no longer turn a blind eye. It’s truly overwhelming & our product is helping these professionals manage the uncontrollable.

This is no different than any other consumer based product. For example, Dove soap. You can review the same dove soap on multiple platforms (target, Walmart, Amazon, cvs, etc just to name a few). While convenience for us as PM’s is to have all reviews under one central umbrella, that isn’t the way the world works. All reviews should have a variety of perspectives which is gained by interfacing multiple channels/platforms. This provides the consumer (potential resident) with a plethora of opinions and view points to make their decision before making the expensive commitment of choosing a housing provider. Not to mention, if all of your resident reviews were 100% perfect, everyone would question the legitimacy of the reviews themself. Even if ILS’ didn’t allow reviews and you wanted to only allow them on your website where you can pick and choose which ones to post (

Thanks or no thanks to googles creation of ratings/reviews, RentPath implemented a product that focuses on promoting positive reviews, along with many other features. There’s no way to dodge reviews these days so RP assists in promoting positive reviews from certified residents. So it sounds like it’s of upmost importance to use RP’s program. Yes there are negatives ones on ILS’s but it’s all in the way they are managed.
Contact RentPath or your rep for more info.

I won’t mention an sites by name, but there was an outlet in recent history that allowed their paid advertisers to filter their reviews received and only promote/show the reviews they choose to show. It was a big advantage over all of the other sites. But unfortunately, that site was bought and changed. There is whispers that this function might be implemented into the ad network that bought said site, but I highly doubt it. Reason being, they offer reputation management products that allow them to help manage those bad reviews that they allow to be posted on your paid ads. More revenue for share holders. Sad but true.
Basically, you are paying for bad word of mouth and then paying to fix the bad word of mouth you are already paying for. Harsh realization indeed.
-Former Ad Rep