As a society, reviews are now a permanent part of our culture.
In fact, you’re being reviewed whether you decide to participate or not.
Yep! Did you know that sites like Zillow, Facebook, Google, and Yelp all have directory listings for your business already?
If you’re like me, you scroll directly to the “reviews” section to see the number of reviews, the overall rating and to read customer feedback. If the product has too many negative reviews, I pass and move on to the next brand. These factors hold the most weight on my purchasing decisions.
Reviews are now the level set for credibility.It is applied to real estate as well. When someone sees your rental listing on Craigslist, or if they search your apartment online, they are going to see reviews. What do you want a prospective resident to see? Do you want them to read raving reviews, or the one or two people that had a bad experience? What’s likely to command higher rents – good or bad reviews?
1. Make Your Profiles Easier To Find
Mostly agents have incomplete profiles on all of these review sites, because they think they can’t get business from these sites.
This is a big mistake.
I worked with one real estate agent client that got almost half of her business directly from her FREE Yelp profile!
Yes, people ask Siri and Alexa for things all the time – And both smart devices pull almost exclusively from review portals!
To optimize your profiles on these platforms, always include keywords like “Miami Real Estate Agent” or “Portland Realtor” so you come up in more searches results.
Do seo optimization for getting on top of search results, and get the main attention to buyers.
2. Hire A Company To Manage Reviews
You can hire a company, like Modern Message, that has a rewards program that makes leaving reviews like a game. Then when you get these reviews, you link them to your website, Facebook, or other platforms, similar to a testimonials tab you see on websites.
Since you are linking the reviews to these external sites, it increases the seo keywords for your company’s name that if you search company’s name, the first link is your company’s Yelp! page.
3. Giveaways In Exchange Of Reviews
Give away gifts to residents in return for property review, do all kinds of innovative schemes to encourage buyers to leave reviews.
Of course the gifts themselves are fairly low value items and it would surprise me if the cost of mailing out the free product cost more than the item itself. It’s still free for the buyer however and leaving a review doesn’t seem too much work if you fancy one of the items on offer.
It’s clear that a products with more user reviews will get more exposure and my guess is that the formula is not able to asses the general rating of the reviews. So as long as a product is “hot” and has many reviews it will show on the top of the search. just don't forget to include a link to the reviewing site, which will increase the chances of the resident leaving a review and takes a step out of the process.
4. Post your reviews everywhere!
An superb online reputation is strong social proof.
So send links to your online profiles to your real estate leads before meeting with them to solidify yourself as a local leader, post your reviews of one platform to every platform.
Use these positive client reviews as a strategic part of your marketing arsenal to get more potential clients.
5. Conduct a survey
New method is to survey your residents. “Send survey to your residents, asking for feedback on maintenance of the building, cleaning, response time etc. After you fix their concerns, send a survey out a couple of months later with a link to review at the end.”
It may not seem like a big deal for some, but completing your due diligence when it comes to the property survey can save you from making a very costly mistake, it will help you in getting better into business and get 5 star rating reviews.
6. Be responsive and ask for review
The last but not least method, to achieve positive and strong position.
Responsiveness is a quality of a real estate business process which indicates your concern and expressing empathy, so always answer phone call, be responsive to your residents calls and fulfill their need, and never forget to ask them for leaving a review for you.