What's up everybody? I'm looking a little homeless here. Got my beard on. It's Sunday afternoon, so, obviously, I hadn't shaved in a few days. Today, we're going to talk about reviews, property manager reviews in Birmingham, Alabama, Nashville, Tennessee, Chattanooga, Tennessee, Little Rock. Those are the places we are now. Wanna talk about how to read reviews. This is not me positioning for you to look past our bad reviews. We definitely have some consistent reviews that people have given us that aren't bad and things that we're making decisions to change, but want to understand for you how to look at our reviews and how to look at everybody's reviews.
So first thing I wanna state is,
the star rating does matter. There's a lot of people in our industry that say, "Well, there's no way I can have a good reviews and the star rating doesn't matter." And those are the people with the two and three-star ratings. Star ratings do matter. It's very important that your property manager have a high star rating. What I would say is somewhere north of four stars. Now, keep in mind, you're not going to have a property manager with five stars, very few of them. It's just a hard business to get five stars and because you have residents and you have conflict and there's gonna be places like Google that they'll voice their negative comments about something that we've done. But the star rating does matter.
Number two,
Read the content of the reviews. And I'm looking at my notes over here. Are residents complaining about the refund check or is there something to the review? So this is where, you know, if a resident's like, "Well they didn't give me all their money back," and have a disagreement with us. Well, that happens a lot. Okay? So you need to know that that's very normal. You need to know that typically that's us looking out for our clients who are the owners. But is there a consistent message in the reviews that is a problem to you? So, one of the consistent messages in our views is that resident prospects get frustrated because we don't pick up the phone and answer the phone for a rental house. We have our self-showing system and we have a way that they can get to that through our website, but one of the...but they get frustrated that they can't pick up the phone and talk to somebody. And so we've seen that consistently throughout our reviews and so now we're starting to change that. We're making changes. We don't have those yet, today, but we're making changes to communicate better with our residents that wanna tell it to us on the phone. We've started basically chatting with people on our website. We've started hiring people to man that communication with the hope of picking up the phone in the very near future.
The third thing
I would say is are there any owners on there that have legitimate complaints or consistent complaints? If you got all residents complaining and very few owners and owners are typically pretty excited about the review or about the company, then does that really make sense that that would be something to be scared of for you? I really don't think it does. I think an owner who... Owners will typically be very objective. Obviously, not all owners will be objective, but most owners are very objective about whether a property manager is doing a good job for them or not.
The last thing
I would say is take some of the reviews with a grain of salt. I've been called many horrible things. My wife and I like to get on there and every time she's mad at me, I can point out to her that other people think that I'm that bad too. But we're not ax murderers or anything like that, we're very simply property managers doing our best to do our job and you need to know that you need to take those with a grain of salt. So, that's it. Those are questions that owners ask. How do I... Today's question was, "How do I look at reviews?" I'm Matthew Whitaker with Evernest.
