5 Ways to Get Reviews To Boost Your Property Value
If you have shopped for anything online, you already know that product reviews are always helpful in helping us make the decision and hit that “buy now” button. Online retailers know that good reviews provide an edge to moving their product and even beat the competition, and the same is true for the real estate market.
If your property has good reviews, it will attract more prospective tenants. From there, you are able to increase the price because of the increase in demand of your property. However, when you list your property on the various Internet sites, you are going up against every other landlord and property manager on that site. If all things are equal between your unit and the others in a similar location, good reviews and ratings can be your way of differentiating yourself from the competition. And because it impacts your occupancy, also has a direct impact on the valuation of the property.
If a good review increases the property value, then a bad review can have a negative impact as well. So it’s critical to understand when and how to motivate your tenants to submit a review.
Getting tenant reviews is not easy, but it’s not impossible. Here are 5 ways to get reviews to boost your property values.
1. Get Professional Real Estate Promoters
If you have a property manager, they more than likely have access to a property marketer or promoter. There are also online listing companies like Foursquare where tenants will post their comments on an apartment community. You can also engage companies like Crowdly where they can leverage their strong online presence, influencer marketing, and high-quality SEO to promote the positives of your apartment community.
Services like Crowdly create unique campaigns that reward customers in unique ways and help find customers that help in producing positive feedback. You can get these reviews and connect them with your website or your Instagram or Facebook page and increase your market value.
All this is part of your overall digital marketing plan. These days your primary tenants are Millennials and Generation Z’s. This means getting in front of these people where they hang out online. So you are opting the services of third parties like Crowdly and Foursquare. I will include links in the description so you can check it out.
2. Getting Feedback After the Maintenance Call
Simply put, after each maintenance call, you can send an automated text message with the link for posting the feedback online. Tenants can do it with their phones, making it easy and less time-consuming.
When you are doing this you need to make sure your staff is on-point and they are able to resolve the tenants’ issue quickly. This will also help maintain the high standard of maintenance work and increase the level of satisfaction of the residents. If you tie rewards to tenant feedback, you will be in good shape.
3. Tenant Satisfaction & Follow-up
Having good relations with your tenants is important. You should be very responsive to any complaints and needs of your residents regarding the property. Make it easy for the residents to interact with you and take care of their needs. When you do, they will leave a good review upon the completion of the requested task.
The best retailers and etailers have great customer support and are always available via phone or email. For good feedback, you should always be available to attend the calls or reply to the emails within a few hours to address the concerns.
4. Rewards for Reviews
People love free stuff, so go ahead and give away free stuff in exchange for a review. Things like key chains, hats or football jerseys are very popular and if given free, appeal to your tenants.
To make it easy for your tenants, you can send an automated text or email with a link that sends them to the review page.
When you give something to someone, it is human nature to return the favor. Before you do this, make sure you do your best to identify major issues and handle them quickly to minimize bad tenant pushback. Also, the cost of items like key chains and jerseys are small in comparison to the boost in valuation you will get. Additionally, the higher the rating of the property more will be the rent you can charge.
5. Community Events
Organizing a community event, barbeque or block party for your tenants can spread healthy and positive vibes. To make it cost effective, tenants can bring their own food, and you arrange for the chef and other functions of the venue, like tables and chairs.
From there, you can place an interactive touch screen kiosk or a small stand with an iPad with someone standing by to answer questions.
What innovative ways have you used to get positive reviews? Please let me know. I’d love to hear from you.
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