Resident Reviews: An Inside Scoop on the 2024 Voice of the Resident Report

Yolanda Muchnik:
Hello and welcome multifamily pros. I’m your host, Yolanda, and welcome back or welcome aboard.

Did you know that properties with strong online reputations see up to 20% higher resident retention rates in an industry where turnover can cost up to $4,000 per move out? This correlation could be the difference between thriving and struggling in the competitive multifamily market.

Today I’m sitting down with Katie Ritter and Jake Hughes from Widewail, a company that powers the modern shopping experience by leveraging automation to drive and directly manage conversations in consumer reviews, video and social media.

Katie and Jake, welcome to the show.

Katie Ritter:
Thank you so much. Happy to be here.

Jake Hughes:
Good to be here. Yeah, nice to meet you.

Yolanda Muchnik:
Great to have you here. Let’s start with a bit about each of you.

Katie, as the national director of multifamily and Jake, as the director of marketing, can you share how your roles at Widewail intersect and contribute to the development of the 2024 Voice of the Resident report? And what motivated you to create this report?

Jake Hughes:
Well, let’s start. It goes back six years, so this might take a while. But oh, man, so six years ago, I was not at Widewail, but my boss, now boss, worked with a student at Princeton to study reviews and study what content is within the reviews, what we can pull that out of. At that time, the sample size was 10,000 reviews, and they basically came to a couple conclusions. And then my boss was so excited by this that he wanted to.

His idea has stuck with him over the years and he wanted to do this, but do it for real, if you will. As Widewail has grown, as the technology has improved, AI was introduced. We can now track and tag and categorize reviews at scale. So we have millions of free text reviews within our databases. And this is how we created the reports that we’re going to talk about today that are, I guess, the foundation of the insights that we have.

A big part of Katie and I’s relationship on the day to day, just talking about this stuff going back and forth, and it’s like, underpins the marketing of Widewail and a lot of the fun things we have to talk about.

Yolanda Muchnik:
That’s awesome. So what were some of the most surprising findings from this year’s report that you think multifamily professionals should pay attention to. And why? Were these particular insights unexpected, or maybe even contrary to conventional wisdom?

Katie Ritter:
Yeah, I can take this one. The report itself, we analyzed 400,000 Google reviews in the last twelve months. And from there we were able to take a look at how often 49 topics showed up in a positive review or a negative review. And once we had that baseline, we referred to them as a benchmark. So, for example, communication is third, the third most mentioned topic in a negative review. In general, what was surprising to me and where it got really fun was diving into each lifecycle stage.

So which topics are more prevalent during the tour phase, or move in phase, or renewal or move out? And that got really fun because we had our baseline level of topics that were mentioned generally. And one of the things that really shocked me and stood out was in the tour phase. Scheduling came up in 840% more negative reviews than the benchmark. So with all of this technology, we have self scheduling, tours, things like that. This surprised me. This was shocking that this has continued to come up. And in that particular scenario, trying to schedule a tour, showing up for a tour, this piece was, was a big driver of negativity.

Yolanda Muchnik:
Interesting. And I mean, did you guys look at it through any other dimensions? Like, are there regional patterns or patterns in terms of, you know, property class or anything like that?

Jake Hughes:
We did not get into that much detail yet. That feels like phase two of this.

Yolanda Muchnik:
Project for next year.

Jake Hughes:
We should do that. Yeah, we should definitely do that.

Katie Ritter:
We got into a little bit of regional data with the Sunbelt states and understanding some volume patterns there, but, yeah, nothing to the extent that you’re saying TBD. TBD 2025.

Yolanda Muchnik:
Yes. Well, given the ongoing challenges of balancing occupancy and resident satisfaction, how do the insights from this year’s report translate into actionable strategies that can help multifamily professionals tackle some of these issues head on?

Jake Hughes:
So let’s see, I’ve got two client stories that I think are very useful here. Once we talk to a client at NAA, and I might butcher the details here, Katie, you can correct me.

Katie Ritter:
Basically that’s what I’m here for Jake, I got you.

Jake Hughes:
Please, please.

Putting together a new development, a lease up, and they had, I don’t quite understand the sequencing perfectly, but basically a section of the units had been launched, filled, and they were getting negative feedback that the galley kitchens were too narrow. It was an uncomfortable living experience, and they got enough of that feedback that they had decided, we have a problem here, we need to take action. So for the rest of the units or a different property, something along those lines, they actually altered their floor plans to make the kitchens more spacious and create better experiences. And the feedback as a result of that has been very positive.

So that’s one and then two. I love this one. The client has effectively discontinued secret shoppers because they have enough content from reviews that they can get the temperature of what’s going on at a community from the residents themselves over the course of the year, such that they do not need secret shoppers anymore. They save that expense and they can get the unbiased feedback of the collective wisdom of their community through the review content and the analytics.

Yolanda Muchnik:
I can absolutely see the need for that going away. That’s awesome. Well, Jake, as a marketing professional, curious to hear your thoughts here. How can multifamily properties leverage digital reputation management tools to enhance their resident experience? I’m sure that’s a big asset for them right now, right?

Jake Hughes:
So when I think about this, I like to start with what the goal should be in this scenario. What’s the goal? It’s more inbound traffic, higher lead flow of quality, incoming prospects and higher retention rates. Both these things help drive the business forward, save costs, all these things to get that going. Step number one is get your feedback engine going. So obviously there’s plenty of other stuff that communities are already doing to satisfy these needs, but within the context of reputation.

Step number one, get your feedback engine going. Get reviews coming in, because you can’t take action on feedback that you don’t yet have. So step number one, get that going. We work. A friend of mine loves to use this term data diet. Get your data coming in, build your feedback that will help market your property, but then also inform the analytics tools that are needed to say, like, communication is working, maintenance is a little bit struggling. Safety and security keeps coming up, what’s going on there?

So get those things going. We’re going to be tactical here. The basics of how to do that, automate it with integrations through your technology. Use SMS and start with tour. So we see within our research the tour lifecycle stage. It’s a great high volume tour. It’s the highest rated tour at 4.18. So you’re going to get good, positive feedback on that and you’ll start to get information that you can use right away, quickly by focusing on tour, whether you’re using technology or not.

Katie Ritter:
And to that point about frequency and getting more feedback, so it’s twofold. We find that by asking everyone and getting this feedback, you tend to have a more accurate picture of what’s happening online. And Google uses, if you were to search best apartments, San Diego, that qualifier automatically disqualifies anybody below a 4.0. So in the map pack that is automatically filtered out from there, it’s about frequency and volume.

Frequency driving volume. We want to signal to Google that this is a popular place, that people are interacting with the community, it’s vibrant. And reviews, they have a shelf life. People don’t really care what happened a year ago. It could have been different management company, could have been a totally different situation. So it’s really important to keep that engine going at a frequent clip because they do become irrelevant over a certain period of time.

So that’s just two things that we know Google uses in terms of marketers and local search to really help fuel that visibility. When we talk about inbound leads and traffic and things like that.

Yolanda Muchnik:
And just to follow up on that just a little bit, I mean, I’m curious, do either of you have anything to say regarding are there common pitfalls that properties usually face when managing their online reputation? And if so, what can they do to avoid them?

Katie Ritter:
Two come to mind. The first one is, and this kind of goes into another answer to a question, but the first one is avoiding asking people who might have had a bad experience or trying to filter out negative feedback. It’s against review site policies, it’s against FTC policies. And I think there’s this fear that if you ask everyone, you’re going to get more negatives. And that’s just a myth and that’s just not true. It’s not what we see.

It’s not what we see in our data. So that’s one pitfall of just avoid trying to get over the hump and that fear of opening the floodgates because gating isn’t going to get you there and it’s against a lot of these review sites policies. The second one is, and what I find as interesting is more and more the use of AI for review response. I think there’s a way to do it in an effective way to help support responses, but humans are smart and they can see when it’s the same type of language in every single response and they’re like, oh, this is just an automatic reply.

They’re not necessarily addressing my review to make changes or recognize the fact that I left this review and left this feedback. So those are two things. Those are just two things that come to mind in terms of pitfalls or things to watch out for and what to be mindful of.

Yolanda Muchnik:
That’s awesome. Jake, anything to add there or did Kate pretty much cover it?

Jake Hughes:
I would add be wary of overly tech forward strategies, especially in the context of review response. We like to always take a step back and say we are still interacting with our residents here. This is an important interaction. It might be through the interface of a review, but our residents see this, our prospects see this. This is a reflection of our brand and it requires our attention. Yes, doing it faster is useful to save everyone time, and there’s a process component there, but this is a responding to reviews needs some human component. Some of it can be helped with AI, but they’re still required human component at this point from my perspective.

Yolanda Muchnik:
Right, right, so moving on. Katie, curious if you could share what are some effective ways to gather authentic resident feedback there? And how should this feedback be integrated into a property’s overall operational strategy?

Katie Ritter:
Yeah, great question. So Jake, hit on it a little bit, ask everyone and automate, I think asking in key moments with context. So for example, I would think about each lifecycle stage. Someone just took a tour, someone just moved in, someone just renewed their lease, a work order was just complete. Those four elements are really good times to ask for that feedback and then get diverse content on your Google pages and the other pages you use to get reviews.

So using your PM’s and leveraging the information that’s in there and finding a way to automate that, ask as close to the interaction as you can. So if I, you know, I submit a work order and I get a text or an email a month later, I’m not really. I don’t know if I remember that interaction that much. I’m more likely if the, the sync gets fixed and I get a text and it’s hey Katie, it’s Yolanda. Hope everything went well.

I highly value your feedback. I’m so much more willing to be like, yep, Yolanda crushed it. Sync fixed. It was super quick.

Jake Hughes:
Awesome.

Katie Ritter:
And so I think we find that asking within the context of something happening is a really good way to get that great content. And then that last plug of asking everyone. Absolutely.

Yolanda Muchnik:
That makes total sense. And you did just mention that last plug of asking everyone. Maybe that’s all there is to it. But I am curious as a follow up here, is it possible to ensure that the feedback that is collected is representative of the collective and unbiased? If you ask everyone, ultimately, does it all shake out in the end?

Katie Ritter:
I think so. I think it’s if you think about survey, if you only survey, I’m thinking of those like, I don’t know why this just popped into my head, but like end of in college when you took a survey about your professor and it was like end of class course survey, and they only surveyed 20% of the class, that’s not an accurate representation and you’re going to get some bias opinions in there. But if you ask everyone, you’re getting 100% of the folks in the community and now you’re going to start to get those accurate aggregate scores and then that to me is more reflective of an unbiased opinion that makes total sense.

Yolanda Muchnik:
So the next one here is for both of you guys. I’m curious, looking ahead, what trends do you each foresee for tracking resident feedback and reputation management? Multifamily professionals who are listening should be prepared for.

Katie Ritter:
Jake, you want to take that one?

Jake Hughes:
Yeah, I’m wondering where to start here. I’m pretty interested in this concept of brand. How do we leverage resident feedback to inform brand? So we’ve been talking to a contact in the industry that’s looking at their review feedback and saying, wow, we, a strength of ours is maintenance. Maintenance is really important. We’re launching this new community. Can we incorporate that into the brand that we’re putting out into the market? Can maintenance be our slogan? Can maintenance be in the name? I don’t know. I’m not sure what they’re going to do. But the point being that they’re getting this signal from the residents about what’s useful.

They know from our reports and research that maintenance is the number one driver: negativity. So reducing that as a win, and then it’s an important driver of positivity as well. And so they’re putting that out into the market. Another topic we think about is PMCs are interested in learning from hospitality, in putting out a brand into the market that’s remembered and is valuable. Typically a PMC is a second layer away from the resin and might not be as visible.
And there’s this intention to make that more of a, I am loyal to this portfolio and I’m interested in moving from property to property. So we did a little research on this. How often is brand coming up in reviews? We looked at 380,000 of our reviews were relevant to this idea. The highest brand mention percentage was 7% for any brand. So for any brand, the highest, it came up with 7% of reviews. It’s a pretty low bar right now, and for ratings are not great.

Four major brands has zero mentions out of like a total data sample set of 15,000 reviews, zero mentions of brand. Which leads me to this idea of can reviews be a brand tracker? Being in marketing yourself, what are the normal ways you track brand? Organic search, visibility, aided awareness, unaided awareness.

There’s these kind of survey type tools, brand mentions and feedback. Could be that third metric. That could be a new trend and something that marketers adopt to inform whether or not their strategies are working.

Yolanda Muchnik:
I love that. Great idea to make it happen.

Katie Ritter:
Yeah, the measurement, totally, and I think the measurement, in terms of where we’re going, the measurement of these specific topics is really key. So using online reputation as a way to measure a whole host of things, brand, how your vendors are performing. If you have a communication tool, how often does communication come up in positive reviews, and how does that compare to the industry average?

How often? If I just instituted a new maintenance protocol where we need a QA check before someone moves in for their work orders, is that improving in unit condition over time? So I think that there’s a lot of different ways to leverage this data, and I would encourage, and I think where we’re headed as an industry is going beyond the one score, going beyond just one metric to measure a community’s health. There’s a lot more we can do and there’s a lot more that you can use to measure.

Yolanda Muchnik:
Absolutely. Now, typically, when folks create reports like this, I see, and I imagine it’s common elsewhere that you usually come in with some sort of a hypothesis or an idea that you think you’re going to find through the research, right? And so I’m curious for you guys, how does the feedback and data in the 2024 report compare with your own expectations before having released it?

Jake Hughes:
So we did this in automotive at the end of last year, and it’s sort of, I knew kind of what to expect. Honestly, we put this out and I was like, I hope people care about this. And I don’t know, I had no idea. And this is going to really not be good if nobody cares about this. I think I was surprised how much the industry cared about this. And the key problem that seems to have surfaced is measuring resident experience is hard, and there’s not really great tools out there that are specific enough.

The approach here seems to be specific enough. We’re uncovering something that is able to track movements and communication by 3% over a period of time. Like small little things that get into this realm of this is an early warning sign of a bigger problem that we can address. Before it’s an actual big problem. And I think that’s really interesting. In terms of expectations, people play a larger role in multifamily, more so than automotive, which stood out to me.

I kind of knew that people were going to be a big deal that this the most significant driver of positivity in automotive, and it’s even more exaggerated in multifamily. There’s this huge spread. It’s like 65% of positive reviews mentioned an on site team member, and the next topic is 14% or something. It’s just a massive drop off. So those two things stood out to me, which I don’t think is really what your question was, but there you go.

Yolanda Muchnik:
It’s still really interesting. Well, you know, you actually just alluded to this a little bit in your answer just now. Widewail has more recently entered the multifamily space right? But you guys actually have a strong background in reputation management across various other industries. And so I’m curious, how did you adapt your strategy for the multifamily sector? And I, were there any surprising differences or challenges that you encountered in this transition?

Katie Ritter:
I wrote down underneath this question in my own Google sheet. Oh, boy. How much. How much time do you have? That was the first. Yeah. So I could talk a little bit about this. So we. Yeah, automotive was our founding vertical, and then BH came on board in 2021, and that was our entry into the multifamily space. And from there, our boss, Matt, kind of looked at me and was like, all right, let’s go ahead.

This is like, let’s run with. Let’s see what we can do here. And it’s been really fun, but without, you know, not without some challenge. And I think one of the things that I had to get used to when talking to prospects and clients is this is an industry where you’re responsible for someone and their experience. For 365 days a year in automotive, you drive your car off the lot. See you later. Awesome. Thanks so much. Or you get your brakes fixed. Thank you. Perfect.

In property management, it’s not a one off thing. It’s this ongoing relationship that you’ve built. And so getting used to talking through lifecycle stages and demonstrating where you can really leverage and capitalize on some of that feedback. And I think initially, a lot of the hesitancy felt like, well, there’s so much that could go wrong in 365 days, but there’s also so much that can go right, too.

So I think that was a change for me to adjust and sort of understand. And then I think in general, just learning the industry, owner, operator, third party manager, who’s in charge of making these decisions. Typically in auto, there’s a lot of dealership autonomy, so one single location is able to make a decision. In property management, it’s totally different. It’s portfolio, typically portfolio wide.

Also depends on their clients. Also depends, so there’s just a lot of different layers that go into buying a technology and peeling back those layers has been a challenge, but you also meet a lot of great people on the way and build great relationships because it takes time. So it’s been really fun to be working in this industry. Everyone that I’ve encountered has been fantastic and it just seems like a really great group of people. So I’ve truly enjoyed it, but not without some challenge for sure.

Yolanda Muchnik:
Awesome. Well, curious to hear your thoughts on this one. For property managers who are listening in today, what’s one practical piece of advice from the 2024 Voice of the Resident report that they can implement immediately?

Jake Hughes:
My number one piece of advice is figure out tours first. Tours are high volume stage, highest rated. So of all the options you have, you’re setting yourself up for success in terms of sort of lower barrier to entry. Focus on getting tour reviews first. You’re going to get a whole bunch of variety and it will build your database of information, as I alluded to earlier. But I think it’s just the easiest win.

Start getting reviews during tours and then you can add other lifecycle stages after that.

Yolanda Muchnik:
I like it. I like it. Do you have any resources or tools that you might recommend to help them get started here?

Jake Hughes:
Mm hmm. You’re setting us up. Yes. Widewail, of course.

Yolanda Muchnik:
I mean, I mean, what could they use?

Katie Ritter:
I told Jake, I was like, Jake, that’s not going to be my answer. As a salesperson, that is not going to be my answer. I’m not going to walk into it.

Jake Hughes:
Security of vegan marketing.

Katie Ritter:
I would say in terms, my take was communication was so prevalent in all lifecycle stages that drove a positive or a negative interaction. And so my first thought was to do an audit of where the touch points are. If you’re using an automated system or your property management system or other, other technologies where the automation is. And at which point are you reaching out to residents? Is it just when something goes wrong?

Is it something when something goes right? Are you confirming appointments? Are you being proactive? And so I think that proactive switch to not necessarily communication in the sense of how can residents reach us? It’s how are we reaching them and what are we doing to be proactive. And how can we, can we leverage that? So that was my Katie, Jake, both.

Yolanda Muchnik:
Very helpful pieces of advice. Equally helpful. Go for it. Go for it.

Jake Hughes:
As I said, people are very influential of reputation. So if there’s one clear fact from our research, what’s driving positive resident experiences, it’s your staff that’s on site. It’s so broad, it’s hard to give specific tactical advice. But I guess one direction you could consider is what are my onsite teams doing that is critical and can’t be influenced at all or done by technology? And then what are some things that they’re spending time on that are not directly interfacing with residents in person that could be supported with technology?

So AI leasing solutions, reputation management, automation, things of that nature are a way that you remove some of the work off your onsite team’s plate because doing so, putting them in position to succeed is the most, I guess the highest leverage thing you could do to boost your reputation is to free up their time.

Yolanda Muchnik:
Yes, we all who doesn’t wish there were like 24 more hours to a day? Well, before we wrap up, I’m curious to hear, is there one key takeaway that you guys would point to from the 2024 Voice of the Resident Report that you think every multifamily professional should keep in mind as they plan for the next year, the year ahead?

Katie Ritter:
Maintenance. Thank your maintenance team. They are.

Jake Hughes:
Thank your maintenance team.

Katie Ritter:
That would be my first reaction. They are drivers of positivity. They are most often the people that are interacting with residents the most in terms of volume and touch points and I think empowering them and letting them know how much they’re driving a really great experience. And so when Jake says on site teams and people, I would also include the maintenance folks as well and really ensuring that they know how impactful they are.
So that would be my, and making their lives easier, too.

Yolanda Muchnik:
So absolutely. You’d be surprised the rollercoaster of emotions people go through when they have a broken sink all the way up to when the sinks working.

Katie Ritter:
Yes.

Yolanda Muchnik:
I have my life back!

Well, Katie and Jake, thank you so much for joining us today to discuss Widewail’s 2024 Voice of the Resident Report for our listeners. We will have a link to the report in the show notes so you can easily access it as well as links to connect with Katie and Jake and to stay updated with Widewail’s latest insights.

I had so much fun chatting with you guys today. Thanks again for joining us on the show.

Katie Ritter:
Awesome. Thank you.

Jake Hughes:
Thank you. You’re welcome. Good to be here.

Yolanda Muchnik:
And folks, hold on just one moment for some Good News.

The Good News

Amber Halteman:
Hey, multifamily pros. I’m Amber, your behind the scenes podcast producer, stepping into the spotlight. Now, what’s Good News? Well, really, it can be anything. We’re talking a successful work initiative, a fantastic resident review. I want to hear shout outs to your work colleagues, even a friend, personal updates, heck, even promote yourself. I love self promotions. Who else is going to do it but yourself? So this is your time to shine. There’s enough stress and anxiety in multifamily and the world. So help us shine a brighter light on what’s going right.

How do you submit Good News? Luckily, it’s simple. Go to the show bio on any platform you’re listening, or on our podcast page gozego.com/podcasts and click the contact the show link. You can leave a text or a voice message of your Good News, and we’ll highlight it on the following show.

All right, you know how to do it. I want to see those getting submitted. That’s it, everyone. I can’t wait to hear what our listeners have to say next week. Till then.