Apartments.com's new way

So, curious what people think of Apartments.com. Of course they have beefed up with TV ads, and have gotten more advertisers. However, I wonder if property managers/regional managers etc. are aware that even advertisers are powerless over the consumer reviews posted on a property website?

Here is an example (not from my company): www.apartments.com/cypress-legends-fort-myers-fl/1zpy2h5/

So, for instance, you can pay $675/month for an ad, and your paid ad is broadcasting the bad review. Admins cannot delete it. What do you think?

Are managers, etc. able to respond to the review, at the very least?

Also, I just noticed that there are properties with 3 to 5 star ratings but no reviews...who decided on those???

I have to admit; When apartments.com announced their ad campaign with the flashy brochure, I was excited.

However, now that it's been around for some time, and I have had some communities advertise with supremely lackluster results, it's just not worth it. The commercials are weird and hard to understand. The un-paid listings are very unflattering to our communities (really, snow covered lots and close ups of dumpsters?!). Throw in the "write a review, win free rent" campaign, and I am completely over it.

With that being said; Apartments.com has felt rather sneaky to me concerning online reputation management. As a paid advertiser, you have the option to "Follow Reviews" which will send you an email notification when a new re‪view of your community is posted. You also have the option to "post a comment" to the review which would be the same as a response - Just curious as to why we are not following reviews by default? Hmm?

Thoughts as a Social Media & Marketing Manager: There is no clear-cut way to dispute a review on apartments.com. However, I would personally contact Apts.com support and ask to have one that I felt was inappropriate removed. If they weren't agreeable, and I were seriously bothered by said review, I would pull the "cancelling our contract" card. (And to be fair, I am not crazy about their product to begin with.. so if we cancel, we cancel and hopefully save some dollars and online face..)

Because they were the community linked (not because I am picking on them) - Cypress Legends is obviously not monitoring their online reputation nor are they paying attention to their advertising. I think a better question is why are they interested in a premier ad pacakge when they aren't going to take the effort to manage? Wonder how it's working for them?

Also, as a reference concerning apts.com reviews, their moderation/rejection policy and how it all works (if you don't already know!):
s.csgpimgs.com/webinarpdfs/Apts_Webinar_ReviewsAndRatings.pdf

I haven't been impressed with apartments.com's results at the property I help manage. We get a lot of inquiries through apartments.com, but only a small percentage of our leases are coming from those leads - not near enough to make it worth the money, in my opinion. However, the management company I work for keeps renewing our contract. Apartments.com is very good at selling itself.

I was so happy to read the other comments because I was beginning to wonder if I was the only one who was upset with apartments.com! It's all about them and they don't really care what the advertiser would like. I have gone round and round with them on all sorts of issues from day one - those unflattering photos (which I went through our whole portfolio and uploaded new ones), the reviews - really, we're paying for the ad and we can't say whether we want the reviews or not? On the 'old' apartments.com we had that option. Come to find out, they don't even verify if it is a resident at the complex or not who writes a review - they only do if the person wants to be entered into the free rent drawing. Then they verify with the propery.It seems like some of our reviews are bogus - noone talks the way these ads are written - I wouldn't put it pass apartments.com to be doing some of them.

So how about all the spam calls - at one complex out of 15 calls, 10 of them were spam calls. Again, apartments.com reponse was, 'sorry, we can't do anythng about it'.

Then on the free ads, they have 'their people' calling all the properties to update rents and availablity. Really? Customer service admitted managers are complaining about that but again there was 'nothing they could do'. His suggestion was to update your ad once a month and maybe then 'their people' won't mess everything up.

I canceled a couple ads - rule is then you can't put a free one on for 6 months. Even have to wait 6 months to even get back on the site even if you want to pay for it! Doesn't sound like good customer service.

Let's all cancel our ads and see what they do!!! Maybe then they will get their head out of the sand and treat their advertisers better and listen to what we want.

Hi all – I’m part of the Apartments.com team. Thank you for the thoughtful discussion here, this helps us to get better. I’m going to take your comments back to the development team to see what we can improve on based upon your conversation.

Here’s our thinking on why reviews are useful:

-The objective is to create the best site to list multifamily properties on. That objective requires an outstanding renter user experience and is why we include technologies like Matterport and features like reviews.

-Internet-savvy shoppers expect to see reviews. We believe that renters view sites without reviews as lacking in credibility and they will choose sites that offer review functionality over those that don’t

-For the record, most reviews on Apartments.com are positive. 82 percent of reviews on Apartments.com score three or more out of five stars.

-We know that some reviews aren’t accurate representations of a community’s character. We balance reviews with industry-leading property data from CoStar ( you can find the weighting in this deck ) and use several moderation layers to filter out inappropriate content.

If you do encounter a serious issue with a review we want to hear about it and do our best to resolve it, reach out to us at support[at(@)]apartments.com.

I advertise with Apartments.com but I opt out of having reviews on my ads despite Apartments.com steady pressure to allow them. I don't want and will not pay an advertiser and have a less than flattering review posted on the page that I am paying for. I am full at all of my communities and having no reviews has not reduced my traffic from Apartments.com. I also opt out of reviews on all of the other major sites as well, the day they don't allow me to opt out is the day when I cancel my ad.

How did you opt out?? I was told there was no way we could. I agree 100% - if we are paying for an ad we should have the right to say if we want reviews or not. Reviews aren't as important as apts.com is trying to say they are.

I understand the validity and need for honest reviews, but my thinking is that there are other opportunities for people to post apartment reviews -- like ApartmentRatings.com or Yelp.com. This is the first concept I've heard of where one pays for an ad that contains reviews that could be highly negative and you cannot control them. Several people have told me they do not want to pay for "bad press" -- who would?

Jack from Apartments.com, I appreciate your response. But 82% are "positive" reviews is very hard to quantify. For instance, some people think they are going to win the free rent for life by putting 5 stars on the review--then they write negative things. Or, some people might not even get it that five means good and 1 means bad. (Truly, some people do not get that.)

Also, even if by anyone's standards that 82% of reviews were positive, what about the 18% that aren't? Those advertisers are still paying to "broadcast" their bad reviews. We all strive for high quality and good customer service, but it seems like even a rogue competitor could take you down a notch by putting a bad review on Apartments.com

I agree with Chuck that Jack, from apartments.com, statement that 82% of reviews are good is not accurate. We all know people tell about their bad experiencs more than their good ones. Just look at apartmentratings.com, the majority of complexes are way under the 82% range. If that is true on apartments.com then it is motivated by their free rent promotion or it even seems like some reviews aren't quite real. It's all about apartments.com and no one else.
I was wondering why me as an advertiser would want my happy residents to go online and while posting a review see all of our competition - don't we usually want our residents to stay away from looking at other apartments...just a thought. Not sure how this helps the person who is paying for an ad.

Jack,
Just out of curiosity, in what capacity do you work in at Apartments.com? Your response is kind of an "anonymous-ish" response. I use my real name in this forum and usually vendors do as well.

I have confirmed with Apartments.com. There is no way to opt out of these negative reviews, to opt out of allowing reviews to be posted, and they are never removed.

Interesting thing happened today.
I signed up a few of our communities on Apts that were already advertising with Finder (despite not really digging the service, a deal is a deal, especially if it's essentially free..)

When I logged into the manager dashboard, ALL of our communities were listed; The free and the paid. I can now make edits to all of our ads and answer all of our reviews, even if the community is not presently a paid advertiser. I can even see the Ad Analytics.

Hmm.

These are likely changes that were intended for customers all along. But, responding to negative reviews doesn't eliminate them, unfortunately.

Has anyone heard that Apartments.com is getting rid of the free basic listings?