If you’re an operator of multifamily real estate, there’s one metric that will cut across all your assets and teams: reputation. Whether you’re a centralized team focusing on luxury high rises, or a decentralized team focusing on Class C garden-style complexes, your reputation will reflect how your residents perceive their experiences.
And yet, reputation management often takes a back seat to other priorities, perhaps because reputation is an abstract concept, as is the cost of a bad reputation. But the best operators manage reputation just like a tangible asset: they invest in it, care for it, insure it against the worst outcome becoming a reality.
In this post we explore how the top operators are doing in this task.
Data source
We used ApartmentRatings (apartmentratings.com) data and the 2025 top 50 managers as ranked by NMHC as our sample. Three out of the 50 operators had no records on ApartmentRatings, leaving 47 operators in our sample, collectively managing 4.7M apartments and with 48,000 renter reviews on ApartmentRatings.
ApartmentRatings was accepted as the data source for several reasons. The domain:
Is the #1 organic search result on Google for “apartment ratings” and “apartment reviews” searches
Has a Semrush Authority Score of 59, indicating that Google believes the site is authoritative
Generates about 500K in organic monthly traffic
Gets 81% of its traffic via non-branded keywords, indicating a high degree of discoverability with new users
We point out the above to demonstrate that ApartmentRatings is an established presence and Google considers them an authority. Some operators bristle at having to engage with these kinds of platforms (see more on that below), but the simple reality is that operators should engage, or seriously consider engaging, wherever their renters and prospective renters are looking for information. Especially if it’s a high-authority site that will continue to attract traffic.
The metrics we included in our analysis are components of ApartmentRatings’ “epIQ” grade, which is a composite of grades for renter ratings, review count, the property manager’s review engagement (percent of reviews responded to), and the property manager’s review reply time.
The question we wanted to answer was simple: how are the top 50 managers taking care of their reputations? How many are clearly engaged vs. clearly not engaged? What patterns can we find?
Review platforms overall
Before we dive into the findings we want to acknowledge that review platforms have no shortage of detractors and we want to highlight a few reasons why:
Many multifamily operators view such platforms simply as conduits of negative renter feedback. Such is the psychology around most review platforms, from Yelp to Google, in that a negative experience is more likely to spur a user/renter to spend the time to type out and submit a review. It’s much harder to spur that same conviction after a positive experience.
There is a pay-to-play component to many reputation management platforms, meaning operators may need to pay a fee to unlock additional value or permissions allowing them to respond to reviews. With limited marketing budgets, this means that operators must decide where to allocate their dollars. A decision to NOT allocate resources to a specific platform is still a decision and that’s a tradeoff that all operators need to make.
Tracking issue resolution is tricky. If a consumer leaves a negative review, and that issue is subsequently resolved, it’s a heavy lift to get that consumer to then update their review. And even then, some damage has already been done.
Why reputation is essential
Reputation matters so much that according to Reputation.com’s recent 2024-25 Trends in the Property Management Industry report, 81% of apartment seekers say reviews are an important factor in their search. 71% of apartment seekers say they can decide to not even tour an apartment due to negative reviews. If 7 in 10 prospective renters won’t even tour a unit due to negative reviews, that is reason enough to actively engage in reputation management.
Think about the math here. Let’s assume you need to pay a platform like ApartmentRatings $300 a year to become a verified manager and have unlimited ability to respond to renter reviews. You manage a unit at a monthly rent of $1,600, or $19,200 per year. Vacancy loss for that unit equates to about $53 per day. If stronger engagement on ApartmentRatings, or any similar platform, prevents even six extra vacant days over the course of a year, that $300 “pay-to-play” fee for that property has already paid for itself. Turnover in many properties can be 50%, so you need to fill every apartment in the property every two years. That’s a lot of potential vacancy loss that could be mitigated by shoring up online reputations. Of course, the math depends on the fees these platforms charge, but the cost/benefit analysis should be a very straightforward calculation to perform when budgets are being created and approved.
Analysis headlines
Below are four takeaways from our analysis:
Size ≠ reputation (statistically)
There is no significant relationship between portfolio size and either ApartmentRatings’ overall epIQ score or renter rating score. The largest and smallest operators both occupy top spots when ranking for epIQ scores. Reputation is agnostic to size, and other factors matter much more.
Reviews scale with units—dramatically
This may be obvious, but units under management and review volume have a strong 0.82 correlation. Larger portfolios simply generate more digital feedback. This can lead to distortions as smaller operators are penalized with smaller review volume, but this can be mitigated by normalizing review count for units under management to create a more comparable metric.
Engagement is the secret sauce
The operator’s review engagement score is the single best predictor of the overall epIQ grade, with a statistically significant correlation of 0.89. And the operator’s review engagement score is driven by speedy reply times (statistically significant correlation of 0.86).
Translation: operators that reply quickly will drive up their engagement grades which will drive up their overall epIQ grades. An operator of any size can leverage speedy engagement to improve their reputation in this kind of algorithm.
And yet, as can be seen above, 27 out of the 47 (57%) operators in our sample had a reply time grade of F. 22 out of 47 (47%) had an engagement grade of F. This is the low-hanging fruit those operators should be focusing on.
Timely replies matter—but only for engagement grades
Reply time alone has no statistically significant relationship with renter ratings alone. The correlation is low at 0.38. What this means is that reply speed does matter for engagement, which in turn contributes to the overall epIQ grade. But the renter rating component of the epIQ grade moves mostly because of other factors, namely the underlying quality of their renting experience and whether an issue they had was actually resolved.
This ties back to one of the critiques of these platforms, which is that issue resolution doesn’t directly map back onto renter ratings. But it can, indirectly: if over time renter ratings are staying low, despite a very high engagement grade, that signals a disconnect: reviews are getting responded to, but the issues aren’t getting resolved.
Conclusions:
If you’re an operator, ignore these kinds of platforms at your own risk. You may balk at paying a fee, but think of it like Google. Google doesn’t charge to appear in organic search results. But the Google algorithm rewards you if you invest in your technical site health and content strategy. Is that not pay-to-play as well? If a fee paid to reputation platforms can actually result in successful, proactive management of your reputation, that’s the prize to factor into your cost/benefit analysis when its budget season.
Our analysis highlights that reputation is always a moving target. It’s never something that is locked in or complete. But it also shows that review platforms offer easy opportunities for operators to drive the reputation management process. After all, they want you to have success using their platform so you stick around. Yes, you may have to pay a fee for full access. But if renters are already on the platform in large numbers, what choice do you have? Remember the Reputation.com survey: 81% of prospective renters look at reviews in their decision making.
Even if you have a great engagement grade, make sure your renter ratings are improving as well over time. Engagement is important, but resolving issues is more important long-term. If your renter ratings deteriorate or don’t improve with your engagement grades, there’s something out of alignment.
JDF Management Consulting is not affiliated with ApartmentRatings in any way and this post is not an endorsement or evaluation of their platform.