Would Brad Pitt Respond to Apartmentratings.com'

Apartmentratings.com is the National Enquirer of the apartment industry. It has given an anonymous voice to the general public to speak out against their apartment management and expose their dirty little secrets. Actually, come to think of it, I would be doing the National Enquirer a huge disservice by comparing them to an organization that doesn t make any effort whatsoever to check it s facts. Unless you are paying close attention to the information posted about your apartment communities, a great deal of misleading and inaccurate information may be posted about your community and, unfortunately, in some cases about your staff.

One of the worst things that a celebrity can do is respond to attacks in the media. As a celebrity, you know going into it that your character and personal life will be under scrutiny. One of the most talked about celebrities of course is Brad Pitt. There is almost always a headline about gossip from his personal life in the news. What you rarely see from Brad Pitt and a lot of big name celebrities, is a reaction, written or verbal. It s very rare. In the cases where you do see a reaction, it tends to blow up in their face. They are misquoted or it is found out later that they were lying to cover something up.

I have found this to be true when reacting to negative reviews on Apartmentratings.com. When you respond to a review, the person who posted that review is immediately notified by email that a comment has been made. They will typically respond to your response and call you out as being associated with ownership in some way. This immediately discredits your response.

Another issue with Apartmentratings.com is that thier scoring and rating system is totally flawed. I question if there is a system to it at all other than dividing the number of bad reviews by the number of total reviews and creating a score. They do not account for the number of residents NOT complaining. They do not account for time. They do not account for the fact that an angry customer will tell more people about their experience than a happy customer will tell about theirs. I dealt with a prospect who had read a review of a 1,500 unit property on Apartmentratings and that community had received 8 negative reviews in the last year. That is just about one half of one percent of all residents. This community had a score of 34% on Apartmentratings. So, a community with upwards of 3,000 residents gets 8 complaints in one year and have a score of 34%. Take it one step further and factor in an annual turnover ratio of 50% and an average of 1.5 occupants per unit, you have an additional 1125 new residents eacy year. Over a 5 year span, you actually have approximately 6,000 customers. Hmmmm. Seems a bit unfair considering less than .00016% of residents complained over the course of 5 years. I m not a mathmetician, so I don t even know what you call this, but I do know it s not a statistically significant number. I m not saying the community deserves a 99.5 percent rating, but a 34% is obviously inaccurate. On the opposite side of that example, there is another community that has an overall rating of 98%, yet it hasn t had a review since September of 2008 and only has 26 total reviews.

Do we really want to spend time as an industry giving credibility to a website that doesn t seem to give us any' I m all for customer service and feedback and like the full disclosure approach, however I feel that this scoring system may be doing just as much harm to prospective renters as good.

Here s an example of how it could be harmful. Let s say a prospect has limited transportation and limited income. They go to a property that is close to their work and public transportation and is the only one in the area they can afford. After they tour, they go to Apartmentratings and see a 34% score and they begin to read through complaints (some of which were probably posted by the competition). Now that prospect is second guessing living in the one community that truly best meets their needs because of a flawed scoring system.

User Responses
From: Anonymous	Date: 09/17/2009
What a novel way for management to post a review of Apartment ratings, and not the crest, while still giving 5/5 for every possible measure.
From: Anonymous	Date: 09/23/2009
The fact is that there is also a lot of people that does not complain in public even if they arent happy with the building. What is concerning is that there is people that dislike the crest (in this case) so much that are willing to use their time to inform other persons about the bad conditions of the building.
From: nycrenter13	Date: 01/01/2010
The way to use apt ratings is to look at the number of bad reviews. If there are any number of complaints, the place must really have problems. Most people won't post positive reviews if they like the place, and won't post negative reviews unless there are BIG problems that aren't resolved by management to their satisfaction. If there are negative posts, the apartment must be terrible. In the case of the crest, that is the case. Hopefully, the crest staff will spend more time fixing the problems with the building rather than writing endless 5 star reviews on apartmentratings.com. Having moved out during the last year, I can say with confidence that there are amazing apartments in NYC for less than the crest. My only regret is that I didn't move out sooner.

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