After a blizzard in February 2010, a young law student walked out of her apartment at Bellemeade Farms in Leesburg, Va., to find her car blocked by a fallen tree and snow. “I’m freaking stranded here as I wait for Waterton Residential to remove their tree off my car …,” wrote Liz, who does not reveal her last name in her personal blog, www.LizinLife.com. “If I don’t hear something soon, I’m going to start making some serious noise.”
Serious noise is exactly what many apartment managers are hearing as residents like Liz share complaints and criticisms on public Internet blogs, websites such as ApartmentRatings.com, and even social networking sites, including Facebook and Twitter.
A growing number of apartment executives are listening—and responding. To protect their brand names and reputations, many now respond rapidly and professionally to comments online by, for example, improving service issues and systemic problems that lead to negative feedback. And once they fix the service problems, multifamily firms are even publicizing their growing focus on service in their traditional branding efforts, in hopes of getting their own, positive message to the masses.
Traditional Branding Still Matters
Traditional branding—the consistent look and message of a company’s communications—isn’t just about company colors and logos anymore, though those elements still matter. Today, branding encompasses an entire conversation between apartment managers and their customers.
“When I started in the business, people were talking about getting your logo on everything and your ‘signature color,’?” says Brenda Hvambsal, director of marketing for Minneapolis-based Steven Scott Management, which manages more than 6,000 apartments in the Midwest. “It was all about tulips in your front lobby, or whatever you thought your signature was.” Such elements of a traditional branding strategy are still important. Companies like Steven Scott still pay branding consultants to research and construct a consistent look and message (in fact, nearly all the companies contacted for this story have updated their branding within the past four years, with new, carefully designed logos, tag lines, and service promises), but that effort, as Hvambsal implies, entails more than just pretty colors and icons.
Two years ago, Dallas-based Lincoln Property Co. spent “quite a bit of money” to freshen up its traditional branding, including a new signature color. “For 40-plus years, we were green. We’re now blue,” says Jennifer Staciokas, director of marketing for Lincoln, which manages 140,000 apartments in 31 states.
To put it another way: No one is throwing out their tulips. But even though traditional branding still has a measurable impact on prospects, an apartment firm’s reputation among its customers—including its online reputation—can matter much more, says Doug Miller, president of Lutherville, Md.–based research firm SatisFacts. In a recent online SatisFacts survey, renters rated the impact of a management company’s brand name on their decision to rent at only 2.8, on average, on a scale of 1 to 5. That means potential renters do care about branding—but not that much. A score of 3 represents “neutral” in the survey.
Reputation makes a greater difference than branding, especially with young renters, says Miller. Nearly three-quarters of renters read customer feedback or reviews online when deciding on a purchase or lease. “They’ll validate every decision they make through some kind of reputation website,” says David Seiler, EVP of San Diego–based Trinity Property Consultants, which manages 15,000 apartments in several states.
Modern Reputation Management
Because of the importance that today’s renters place on online critiques, apartment professionals now work overtime to protect their reputations. That means responding to comments online and fixing systemic problems that can lead to negative remarks.
Our law student, Liz, for example, posted her initial comments about Waterton Residential’s failure to remove the tree at 3 p.m. Less than 12 hours later, at 1 a.m., the following comment appeared on Liz’s blog: “Liz, my name is Peter Larson, and I’m the regional manager for Waterton … .” Larson explained that the company would remove the tree as soon as possible and would “be in touch with her tomorrow.”
“I got in touch with my property manager today,” Liz wrote soon afterward. “I know they’re trying their best … . I’m very happy with this turn of events.”
All the apartment managers interviewed for this story say they now carefully track and respond to criticism, including online comments such as those in Liz’s blog post. The methods managers use to track those comments can be very simple. Several say they use a free “alerts” service from Google that sends them an e-mail whenever their company name or the name of one of their communities is mentioned on a public website. However, not all apartment managers are enthusiastic about responding to negative comments online—at least at first.
“There’s been a lot of resistance,” says Seiler. “In the apartment industry, there are people who have advocated not empowering these review sites.” Eight months ago, after much testing and discussion, Trinity began its “reputation management” program, in which managers respond to every comment about their company that appears online, including misspelled, late-night, anonymous rants.
“It’s easy when you first read a review to get defensive and think you didn’t do anything wrong,” says Staciokas. “But all of them need to be responded to—negative reviews and positive reviews.”
The response to a negative comment should be polite and concise, say multifamily experts. If possible, the reply should also lead as quickly as possible to a solution of the resident’s problem, if the problem can be solved. “Always, no matter how negative the comment, you thank them for it,” says Hvambsal. “[The idea is], let’s get it fixed so someone else doesn’t have the same issue.”
Often, as in the case of Liz, residents who post negative reviews or comments will edit them after managers reach out to them. But not every negative comment can be turned into a positive. “You can’t make everyone happy,” says Virginia Love, vice president of training and marketing for Chicago-based Waterton Residential, which manages more than 15,000 units in 12 states. “It’s not all going to be a basket of kittens.”
Addressing negative reviews almost always requires addressing the service problems that lead to bad reviews. “How do you know you’re giving great service?” asks Greg Lozinak, Waterton’s COO. To answer that question, Waterton surveys residents at four pivotal times: When leasing an apartment to a resident, when the new resident moves in, when the resident submits a service request, and when the lease comes up for renewal.
The surveys help Waterton identify service problems and fix them before residents express their frustration online. “It’s brand protection—not in a defensive way, but in a proactive way,” Lozinak says.
Managers in general also pay attention to reviews and comments to identify systemic problems that annoy residents. “I can embrace the negative review and try to learn from it,” Seiler says. “If it’s a bad review, we’ve got to fix the system that created it.”
A Dual Focus
Apartment companies that focus on providing great service and responding to customer feedback are using that focus to brand themselves to both their customers and their employees. Denver-based REIT Aimco bases its messages to customers on its service, with a long list of promises and guarantees. The firm has a reputation for communicating its offerings by avoiding some of the more prominent branding techniques used by other real estate investment trusts. It does not, for example, typically splash its name in print ads, and the Aimco logo runs small on its properties’ websites. The firm avoids flashy language, as well.
“We’ll say ‘Olympic pool’—we won’t say ‘shimmering’ Olympic pool,” says Keith Dodds, senior vice president of marketing for the firm, which owns and manages a portfolio of 105,000 apartment units in 38 states. That doesn’t mean Aimco doesn’t take a lot of care to craft consistent, branded messages to its customers, however.
For instance, Aimco promises residents they can “Move With Confidence,” assuring them their apartment will be ready for move-in and will have been inspected by the property’s managers. If a resident isn’t happy with the apartment after 30 days, Aimco will cancel the lease obligation. “It’s a tangible example of standing behind your brand,” Dodds says. The REIT even promises customers its employees won’t enter a resident’s apartment without wearing shoe protectors to avoid tracking in dirt. Service promises like these are part of the Aimco brand, Dodds says. Waterton Residential uses a similarly comforting branded message. The company conveys the message “Waterton Brings You Home” consistently, repeating the tag line in all its ads, with the same colors and logo placement. But most important, the message is consistently reinforced by the service Waterton’s employees provide to residents, Lozinak says.
Waterton also entices customers by mining comments from social media for use as quotes in its marketing efforts. Visitors to the website for Bellemeade Farms, for example, immediately see a rolling display of comments taken from sites including Twitter and Facebook. “If you’re looking for a place to live in Leesburg, check my apartment complex. It rocks!” says one of the Facebook quotes. “Great place to live!” adds another.
Perhaps equally as important as conveying the company brand to one’s customers, apartment execs say, is communicating that message to the firm’s own employees. “The brand in a strong company gives the associates something to rally around,” says Lozinak.
Aimco has a page on its intranet for employees called “Moments That Matter,” which includes feedback from residents who have been pleased by good service. “The positive feedback provides reinforcement for our employees,” Dodds says.
Clearly, to differentiate one’s apartment communities from the many competitors in today’s growing multifamily industry, sophisticated brand and reputation management make all the difference.
Bendix Anderson is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn, N.Y.
VALUE PROPOSITION
Social media matters less than customer service in creating positive perceptions about an apartment company.