Apartment Resident Complaints Rising Steadily

Apartment residents talk most often about customer service and maintenance within their online reviews, suggesting that when residents think about their living experience, most residents think of their relationship with the onsite staff.

Similarly, when analyzing low-scoring reviews, residents expressed that they were most dissatisfied with customer service, communication, financial clarity, maintenance service, condition of the unit, security, and general cleanliness.

It’s at this point where there can be a disconnect between a community’s marketing and operations departments.

While operations teams are focused on improving efficiency, residents have an increased desire for operators to do the basics well – the things marketing has always sold as part of a “home.”

Turner Batdorf, Senior Strategist, J Turner Research; and Kadi Mancuso Rice, Vice President, Sales & Marketing, JVM Realty, addressed the disconnect as well as residents’ opinions during a session last week at the Apartment Innovation & Marketing Conference in Huntington Beach, Calif.

Complaints in all these categories have risen ​during 2022 into 2023, indicating that there is a growing frustration with how residents feel like management companies are doing the basics well.

“A lot of these findings are in opposition to what a large percentage of the industry is doing operationally,” Batdorf said, such as moving to decentralization, call centers, reduced staff onsite, and a less personal experience.

“This is in direct conflict with what marketing is seeing and selling, which is a huge problem,” Mancuso Rice said.

The five topics that appear the most frequently in unprompted reviews about apartment communities (based on a sample of over 2 million reviews) are Customer Service (66%), Maintenance Service (23%), Condition & Availability of the Amenities/Common Areas (22%), Condition of the Apartment (20%), and Communication (16%).

In the operator’s efforts to improve online ratings, J Turner Research said that basic math shows that avoiding 1- and 2-star reviews is often a better tactic than driving the staff to receive 5-star reviews.

Driving people to be dissatisfied (leave a 1- or 2-star review) are the areas of Customer Service (59%), Communication (32%), Financial Clarity (28%), Maintenance Service (27%), and Condition of the Unit (23%).

Driving residents to be satisfied (leave a 4- or 5-star review) are Customer Service (69%), Condition & Availability of the Amenities/Common Areas (23%), Maintenance Service (20%), Condition of the Unit (15%), and Maintenance Timeliness (14%).

Batdorf said that lately, the same five categories appeared the most often in 2023 as compared to lifetime data.

“But sentiment has been getting more negative since 2020 and there has been a higher ratio of complaints compared to compliments,” he said. “That’s because expectations have not been met as well in many of the key areas (the things that drive satisfaction the most).

“We are seeing a higher rate of complaints in security, general cleanliness, condition & availability of the amenities/common areas, maintenance timelines, maintenance service, the unit’s condition, financial clarity, and communication.”

Mancuso Rice said marketers should be working with operators to ensure they are working together to the community’s benefit.

“We all should see things through the lens of the customer,” she said, adding, “It’s easy to get ‘score locked,’ but you must understand the why behind your scores in order to improve.”

Using AI, marketers can objectively and measurably prove what is driving satisfaction through the analysis of open-ended feedback – what the reviewer said in words, not numbers.

Using efficient, new tools such as text categorization AI allows “marketers to marry something as emotional as how residents and prospects feel with metrics operations can buy in into and strive to improve,” she said.

AI-based tools such as J Turner’s Einstein technology can review 100 written reviews in seconds and can determine the pain points (and successes) reflected in the reviews. This drives efficiency in acting upon them.

“As we see in the data, these are not high-cost things that need to be addressed,” Batdorf said. “It’s back-to-basics stuff related to customer service. Given the rise in resident complaints the past few years, the industry is at a make-or-break moment.”