The first thing that we all do when we are looking for a new apartment is to look at the reviews for the apartment complex as a whole. One of the best ways we can determine if something is going to be worth our time and money is by checking the reviews that other people have posted.
We do this for food and restaurants and virtually anything we purchase online. Apartments are no exception. But finding an apartment complex that has more than 2 stars is like finding a unicorn! It’s virtually impossible.
So, are all apartments just the worst? Or is there some phenomenon that is at work here that skews the reviews to the downside?
Moving Soon? Get quality cardboard moving boxes for less! – Click Here – Fast and Free Shipping!I’m going to go through why apartment reviews are so bad all the time, if it matters, and what you can do to read between the lines of perpetually bad reviews.
Why Are All Apartment Reviews Bad?
There are a couple of reasons why apartment reviews tend to be skewed negative.
Primarily, people tend to speak out more when they are dissatisfied than when they are happy, so negative reviews can dominate any particular service or product, especially ones that can be polarizing.
Without linking a ton of other articles and research papers here, the research shows that unless there are a considerable number of reviews on a particular service or product, and there are substitutes in the area that can readily compete with that product or service, that negative reviews really don’t have that much correlation to the actual product or service.
The fact is that people are going to be unhappy no matter what you do. This isn’t some sort of thin excuse for running a business poorly, it’s just the simple fact that there are different strokes for different folks.
For example, the vast majority of people can agree that Pizza Place A has the best pizza in town, and no matter HOW good it is, there is going to be a portion of the population that just doesn’t think it’s that good. They aren’t wrong. They simply have a different opinion and different set of expectations than others.
Next, there is the phenomenon of people complaining more about bad service or product than raving about a good one. I remember in a marketing class in college they would tell us that if you do a quasi-bad job, 9 people will talk about it to other people, but if you did an amazing job, only 5 people would say something to someone else.
Now, I know that isn’t quantifying the number very well, but the point is still made. People are much more likely to be vocal when something doesn’t meet their expectations. Where this impulse comes from and why humans behave this way is something for a psychology paper or two, but we can still apply the results to filtering through reviews online.
Additionally, when people are going online to look for a new apartment, chances are, a good number of them are either staying in an apartment currently or have lived in one in the past. This makes it extra easy for them to click on a past apartment complex and tear them a new one when they are browsing through new places to stay.
With the constant back and forth between customers and businesses fighting for control over reviews, it is hard to know whether a set of reviews are legitimate or not for any given business, including apartments.
Do Apartment Reviews Matter?
So, should you trust apartment reviews?
Just like anything else we read online, we need to take in everything with a grain of caution, and then ask why the person is posting a review, good OR bad.
There are just as many businesses that get friends and family to post 5-star reviews to help their business out, when really, it may not be a 5-star business. The same thing happens on the other end of the spectrum as well.
REMEMBER… The information you are given with the reviews is only a starting point for where you should begin your search.
If you are speaking of yourself as a tenant, you may see half the reviews being great reviews and this is the destination of choice in an area for people looking for apartments to live in. But what you also have to keep in mind is the due diligence that you as the consumer need to do before ever signing a lease contract.
After you have gone through the application process, you will want to do a walkthrough of the apartment complex yourself. This is the BEST way you are going to be able to get first-hand information on the apartment complex you want to move into.
You will be able to determine whether the reviews you read online have any merit or not. If the concerns other tenants had about the place seem to be founded in reality, then maybe this isn’t the place you want to stay for a year or more.
On the other hand, you may do a walkthrough at a perfectly reasonable complex that has had bad reviews by tenants for a variety of reasons.
In my own apartment complex, I deal with the same exact phenomena. Most of the people that comment on the review portion of Google give our apartment less than stellar marks. But if I go through these reviews, 90% of them are by people who not only we don’t know, but have never stayed with us…..EVER. They are from throwaway accounts, and now the black mark they gave us is on our record whether we like it or not.
And the people that DID stay with us and wrote a bad review ALWAYS, let me say that again, ALWAYS, didn’t pay their rent, caused trouble for their neighbors, and had to be asked to leave. In that case, these people had already broken the lease three ways to Sunday, and have a large debt left at the apartment complex that they just chose not to pay.
In these cases, all I can do is laugh them off. I give no compensation for a good review at all. If the tenant liked living with us, they will tell us, or just keep renting with us, as we have had tons of people stay with us for more than 10 years, which is quite a fact considering turnover in an average apartment complex.
When it comes down to it, the best information you are going to get is in person, NOT from online reviews. This is not saying that online reviews have no value whatsoever, they absolutely do. But the way they are currently done, you have to do some intense reading between the lines to see how that particular apartment complex actually runs and operates.
It may be that the reviews were completely correct. Which is something you can verify when you go to check out the complex in person. But if you don’t, you are missing out on verifying which complexes were in fact bad, and which ones were unfairly given bad reviews for no fault of their own.
Long story short, you shouldn’t trust online reviews over the personal experience you have at the apartment complex you are looking at yourself.
