by Donald Davidoff | Jun 18, 2013 12:00:00 AM
There are many different opinions about the value of social media in multi-family housing. Readers of this blog should be pretty aware of mine. But the one thing that everyone seems to agree on is that ratings sites are important. Theres a lot of debate about what to do with ratings sites, but everyone seems to agree theres some there there.
So I thought it would be a good idea to get a sense of exactly how important ratings sites are. The first step I took was to dig up some research I had done for a client back in February. In it I wanted to identify whether there was a clear category killer or whether multiple ratings sites were important. In an admittedly un-scientific way, I just looked at 10 communities in the Washington, DC market.
Although this is a limited dataset, I think it makes it pretty clear that apartmentratings.com is the category killer. We can talk about Yelp, and we can opine whether Google+ will grow, but at least for right now, its clear that we really only have to focus on one rating site.
So the next step was to dig into ApartmentRatings.com. Given that I dont have access to their database, I had to limit my search to the amount of time and energy to manually collect data. So I collected 147 markets over a broad rangesmall vs large, core vs non-core, sub-market vs SMSA, etc. For this analysis, I focused entirely on counts and penetrations; the notion being that high counts with high penetration mean we should care a lot and low counts and/or low penetration probably mean prospects wont care too much (e.g. I take a restaurant rating based on 57 reviews a lot more seriously than one based on 6 reviews).
The results are fascinating (at least to me) and summarized below. The full white paper ApartmentRatings.com: Critical for Marketing or Just an Interesting Sideshow? is available free. Simply email me at Donald@imaginellc.com, and Ill send it you. (I knowa sophisticated marketer should have a registration-based auto-download on a website, but Ive just been too busy to set that up J so Id rather offer this information up the old fashioned way as opposed to procrastinating further)
As an executive summary, heres what I found:
- Theres a large degree of variation by market in virtually all relevant statistics
- Theres a small head set of communities with many (even hundreds of) reviews and a very long tail with relatively few reviews
- Engagement varies significantly by both geographical region and demographic type of market (see Methodology section for description of market types)
- I wish there was a clear answer that the public is either highly engaged or not highly engaged, but that is simply not the case. The reality is:
- Engagement varies by market
- In most markets, engagement is modest at best
- Even with modest engagement, there are individual properties that have significant engagement
For the modern multi-family housing marketer, this suggests the following guidance:
- ApartmentRatings.com is more relevant than many other social media channels; however, its typically not (yet) likely to affect leasing nearly as much more primary marketing and communication channels
- Given the variation by market, its inmportant to review the actual engagement of the markets a marketer is responsible for as well as the individual communities they support
- Each marketer/salesperson should be aware of the number, timing and content of any reviews about their community so they can respond appropriately to prospects inquiries