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Top Complaints & Praises in Online Reviews of Property Managers

Top Complaints & Praises in Online Reviews of Property Managers

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

*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:

Landlords

Common Complaints

  • Delayed reaction time to phone calls and e-mails
  • Failure to promptly send out checks
  • Excessive and/or unexpected fees (especially maintenance fees)
  • Incompetent maintenance staff or contractors (slow, shoddy, overpriced work)
  • Took too long to find a tenant
  • Placing low quality tenants

Common Praise

  • Quick placement of tenant
  • Placement of quality tenants
  • Made the landlording process easy
  • Professional demeanor and rapport
  • Knowledgeable staff, understand the law and finer points of dealing with tenants

Tenants

Common Complaints

  • Long-standing maintenance requests – Tenant feels ignored or like they’re being passed from person to person in an revolving door of personnel and empty promises and excuses.
  • Run down dwelling – Everything from bugs to water spots. The worse the circumstances the more upset they are and the more explosive and colorful the review.
  • Rejection of maintenance or upgrade requests
  • Hard to get ahold of management. Took multiple phone calls and emails.
  • Failure to return all or a portion of the security deposit.
  • Rent increases – too often or a sharp jump.
  • Unfair enforcement of lease violations, fees and evictions.
  • Poor interpersonal skills – Property manager was rude, condescending etc.
  • Bait & switch – Showing a unit different than the actual unit issued, making false or misleading promises or move-in incentives, etc.

Common Praise

  • Friendly caring staff
  • Property manager was understanding and genuinely wanted to help tenant
  • Quick response to maintenance requests

It likely comes as no surprise to property managers that the list of complaints is longer than praises from tenants. The reasons for this are important as tenant reviews shape the overall atmosphere for online reviews of management companies. I’ll be covering this soon in a post titled “Why people love to hate their property management company”.

Want to beat me to the punch and provide your own explanation of what influences the online reviews we see in this industry? Let me know in the comments. 

Originally posted on managemyproperty.com under, "Top Complaints & Praises in Online Reviews of Property Managers"

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This comment was minimized by the moderator on the site

When evaluating "tenant" comments do not forget what they are not telling you.

My survey of 3,000 units over 10 years is complaints quadruple when the tenant is slow with their rent payment.

The 2nd observation is the tenant will say "I told the office about the problem but they ignored it" however, after checking the maintenance request log we can confirm no such request was ever made.

  Glen Ruffner
This comment was minimized by the moderator on the site

@Glenn - Yes, you are spot on. In going through the online reviews it was pretty clear that the people who don't pay their rent or committed some other kind of violation were some of the loudest decriers of the MC.

  Jordan Muela
This comment was minimized by the moderator on the site

I think that you are failing to parse other socio-economic aspects that play into a tenant's complaints when they are slow on rent. One of their defenses is that the landlord is not responding so they go on rental "slow-down" akin to a worker slow down when job managers fail to respond to worker demands. If the property manager is slow or fails to adequately address issues, then it is likely that a percentage of the observed slow payers are doing so in direct response to such failures. In hippie terms, this creates a "negative feedback loop", which the property manager has a duty to rise above and rectify.
Additionally, in hard times, when tenants get slow in payments as a result of economic downturns, they fear having to leave a unit. They anticipate problems with the unit being blamed on them upon move-out and start to put in maintenance requests on things that they've lived with for a long while; many minor, but each of which can be a piece out of their deposit. This creates a laundry list of repair notes that, if not done, create the basis for a complaint. The best thing we can do is to handle the repairs, as that is our job, and to do so effectively, efficiently and in a timely manner.
Our job is to be responsive and to keep the landlord from incurring liability of a bad reputation on Yelp or otherwise. We need to always rise to our best and if we cannot hire staff that can do so, then we need to replace that staff and apologize abjectly for our own business failures. We are business professionals people. God knows that I can't think of any other industry where you blame your client or your suppliers for your own failures.

  [email protected]
This comment was minimized by the moderator on the site

@BrassServices - Wow, those are some really helpful insights, especially the bit about the backlog of maintenance requests that get unloaded close to move out. This post is really just a list of objections with out attempting to explain why these kinds of complaints appear. I've laid out the "why" behind tenant complaints here:

http://www.multifamilyinsiders.com/home/myblog-admin/why-tenants-love-to-hate-their-property-management-company.html

  Jordan Muela
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There are two major factors that influence the kind of reviews properties get on review sites: 1) The general tone of the site owner and 2) how the reviews were solicited.

With regard to tone, let's take ApartmentRatings.com for example. When the site started a decade ago, it was begun by a person who was unhappy with a property and their management. This person created a site to rant about the property and wallah (or however you spell it), a rant site began. So nearly every person that came to the site after that saw it as the perfect place to post their frustrations. Over time that has slowly begun to change on ApartmentRatings as more and more people are trying to provide a balance. To date it's about 80% negative, 20% nuetral or positive.

With regard to solicitation, sites that simply sit and wait for the fish to bite and post a review, are usually just going to get the people angry enough to take the time to write something negative. However, sites and survey companies that develop programs that pro-actively solicit existing and past renters should get a fair mix of good and bad. At RentWiki the reviews have been about 70% positive to 30% negative. Having some negative is good as it validates the legitimacy of the positive reviews and also helps weed out non-qualified renters.

  Robert Turnbull
This comment was minimized by the moderator on the site

@Robert - The nature of the reviews over all has little to do with the sites themselves (more here: http://ow.ly/1TatB), but when looking at the differences in reviews from site to site I think you make some valid points. Every review site is going to have people with an axe to grind as well as companies that fake positive reviews. The exception being Yelp which does a markedly better job at filtering out fake reviews via their filtering mechanism.

I totally agree that soliciting positive reviews is the way to go. Flipkey.com did a great job with this in the vacation rental space by partnering/integrating into the software used by management companies to radically reduce the friction costs in soliciting the reviews.

Regarding your last point, businesses across the board have struggled to understand that it's ok to have some bad reviews and that it can actually help for the very reason you mentioned. This industry is no different and has room to grow in both understanding that A) you don't control your reputation and B) you should be proactive in reputation management (sounds contradictory, I know).

  Jordan Muela
This comment was minimized by the moderator on the site

Hi all. I co-founded ApartmentRatings.com and just wanted to clarify, I was not "unhappy with [my] property and [its] management," and my goal wasn't to "rant about the property."

It was much more simple: apartment hunting sucked. ForRent.com sucked. ApartmentGuide.com sucked. It was all the same glossy blah blah blah. In the Bay Area in the late 90's, more than once we found ourselves signing leases with very little opportunity to research apartments, so we realized how valuable an "Epinions of apartments" would be to renters. We didn't know how to monetize it, but we knew the demand was there. Moreover, we knew the the existing ILS's would be powerless to copy us because the REIT's had them by the short & curlies (for Porter fans, there's your barrier to entry). Since I had the programming background to create it, viola, now it exists.

Anyway, just wanted to clarify that because I think that's a myth some folks in the apartment industry has labored beneath for too long. ApartmentRatings.com was designed for one reason and one reason only, because the existing information available to renters wasn't doing the job.

  Jeremy Bencken
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We find that our complaints go up radically when the tenant has violated the lease in some way and wants the management to make an "exception" for them. This gets into a fair housing nightmare for management that tenants do not understand. Sites like Apartmentratings.com would do a better job for their followers if they offered some education on topics such as these.

  April Zimmerman
This comment was minimized by the moderator on the site

@Jeremy - Thanks providing clarification the background of ApartmentRatings.com . Any thoughts on April's suggestion?

@April - The ratings we surveyed clearly confirm your comment about residents in violation of the lease. I haven't even looked to see what AR provides in regards to tenant education, but even if the ratings can be unfair at times, at least all companies are universally judged by the same yardstick on the site. This means that it is still possible to make a relative judgment between companies.

  Jordan Muela
This comment was minimized by the moderator on the site

Concerning ApartmentRatings.Com's stated purpose (to provide real information vs. slam landlords). I own a complex in Texas. I purchased it from a guy who let the pool turn green, the parking lot get full of holes, the carports crater, etc. I spent a small fortune bringing things up to a high standard, improved the clientele, turned the pool a beautiful blue, and I even take the kiddies out for ice cream and show movies to them so mom and dad get some time to themselves. What did I get in return? A nice young man rents an apartment on a 1-year lease...then promptly finds a house to buy. He gives me a sob story about drunken fights, and nosey neighbors...and wants to break his lease. I don't want problems. I let him out of his lease for a single month's rent and a deposit forfeit (a few hundred $ total), and I wipe slate clean, showing him paid in full. Nice, right? Wrong! He "felt" that I should have just allowed him to move and refunded all his money outright! And he made up a story about the complex being a pig sty, management being overlords, fellow tenants being nothing but trash, and criminals and perverts taking over...and published in in ApartmentRatings.Com. I contacted ApartmentRatings.Com to explain that none of this was true. They refused to do anything!

So...do I rate ApartmentRatings.Com as a legitimate business and a positive influence to the industry? Hell, no! I place them in the same category as the porn sites that profit from posting pictures of unsuspecting coeds, taken in restrooms and public showers. They're not out for fair and balanced information...just for profit...regardless of who it hurts financially.

  Dean

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