Surveying 3000 Property Management Reviews
Over the last five years customer rating and reviews sites have exploded onto the scene as a major force in the buying and decision making process for consumers. From sites built around reviews like Yelp, to internet yellow pages (IYP’s) which have incorporated them as an important feature, online reviews abound and consumers are using them to decide where to buy.
Much has been said about the good and evil of rating & review sites which often struggle to balance the interests of the businesses being reviewed, the users leaving the reviews, and their own financial interests. No matter how you feel about these sites it’s clear they are here to stay and affecting the businesses being reviewed. It’s not uncommon to see sites like Yelp ranking on the first page for searches on company names, or to see reviews from multiple sites aggregated in the search results of Google Maps.
Property management ratings on Yahoo Local
Every industry has a unique set of dynamics that influence the average customer sentiment, and while we had a pretty strong hunch of how property managers fare on these sites, we decided to do the research required to get some more concrete data.
We decided to use Yahoo Local as our source for reviews because of it’s size and reputation as one of the largest, longest standing sites in this space. We surveyed their reviews for property management companies in the following cities:
- Austin
- Atlanta
- Boston
- Dallas
- Denver
- Indianapolis
- New York
- Orlando
- Phoenix
- Portland
- San Francisco
- St. Louis
- Tampa
Of the +15,000 property management companies listed in these cities, roughly 7% had reviews. These 1,022 companies had a total of 2,118 reviews which we used to generate the following charts:
Yahoo Local’s ratings and reviews for property management companies
As you can see there is a very strong polarization with 90% of all reviews being either 1 or 5 stars. The average company rating further validates this strong trend of highly polarized sentiment toward property management companies.
Because of the anecdotal research we had done in the past, we were prepared to find polarization, but we were still surprised to see just how strong it was.
The stark nature of these results piqued our interest in understanding how they would compare against another review site, as well as how these ratings for property management companies would compare to other industries.
CONTINUED: Follow the link to read the rest of the article on property management reviews.
Comments (2)
Yes and no, emotions prompts action, but the results were clear that the average rating is much lower for this industry. On a qualitative level, the actually comments people make in the reviews were at times staggeringly harsh. Thats what Im going to cover in the next post. Thanks for the comment!
Jordan Muela, about 14 years ago
Interesting results. It seems that people willing to state an opinion are either very happy or very upset in general. I would venture to guess that would be a common reaction with people go to a polling site. If I am very upset about how a company treats me, it is more likely that I will go looking for these places to spread the word. Likewise if I was very happy.
Account Closed, about 14 years ago