What is YEXT?

Have you ever had a problem with a property having the wrong address, hours, or phone number listed online? In a nutshell, YEXT provides a simple solution to this problem for multi-family property managers. While the name sounds funny, YEXT is an incredibly useful online marketing tool for multi-family property managers. Founded in 2006, YEXT is now publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange and the leading platform for managing online business information. In addition to solving problems with online business information, YEXT will also monitor online reviews about your property.

How does YEXT work?

From a marketing standpoint, having the wrong phone number or website listed for a property is a major problem. How do prospective residents contact your property? YEXT provides a dashboard where property managers manage their property’s information, including:

• Property address and phone number
• Property description and hours
• Website and email contact
• Map location marker
• Photos and videos
• Social media profiles

Once the information is updated, YEXT connects to 100+ publishing partners to publish the updated information. They publish information to every major online site you have heard of, including Google, Facebook, Bing, YELP, YP, plus Apple Maps. In addition to the major sites you are familiar with, they publish your information correctly on sites including local.com, 411.com, 2findlocal.com, HotFrog, and more. Not sure how your property’s information is currently listed? Click here to run a free scan using YEXT.

Saving property managers time

Consider that your property has the wrong phone number listed on YELP and the wrong address listed on BING. To fix this problem a property manager would create an account with each site, claim the profile, and update the information. What if the phone number was wrong on 10 sites? What if the phone number changes next year? What if you renovate units and want to update your property’s description? Every time you want to change online business information, it requires updating each site individually. This means keeping track of username and passwords. This problem explodes for property managers responsible for a multi-family portfolio. Updating information on 10 sites explodes to 100 total updates if you manage 10 apartment communities. Ask any property manager that has fixed these issues and they will explain how it is a time consuming and challenging process. With YEXT, property managers can fix any existing issues quickly and avoid time consuming updates or changes down the road.

Setting up YEXT

YEXT is easy to use and set up, plus they have a great customer support team. The software is not free, with prices starting at $449 per year per property. If you sign up multiple locations, the price per location goes down on a volume basis. While this number might seem high, consider the amount of time, and what that time costs, to manually correct any existing issues.

DISCLAIMER: In my current role as a property manager and blogger for Property Manager Insider I have personally used and written about YEXT, which is why I wanted to share it with this community. I am not affiliated with YEXT in any capacity other than being a customer that has seen its benefits for a multi-family property first hand.