Beyond the Stars
Why Online Reputation Is No Longer About Ratings Alone
Multifamily needs to embrace the fact that we are in a new era of online reputation. After a decade and a half focused on driving reviews to achieve high star ratings across review sites and ILSs, a strategic shift is needed to ensure you remain competitive. Leasing traffic is still driven by online reviews, but the way quality is evaluated by prospects is very different in 2026 than it was throughout the 2010s.
The primary difference is that the content of reviews, i.e., what renters are saying about you online, has more influence on your business than an oversimplified star rating. Renters are no longer blindly trusting high Google ratings, and they are digging into what is being said within the reviews to determine what kind of experience they can anticipate.
In fact, J Turner’s 2025 research revealed that 78% of prospective renters find just two reviews complaining about pests a major concern even if the property is rated 4.5 stars with 100-plus reviews. Moreover, for half of those prospective renters, those two complaints are a complete deal-breaker regardless of all other factors.
While a 4.5-star rating would normally be celebrated, the data would indicate that this property is missing out on a significant opportunity for higher leasing traffic, occupancy, and rental rates due to the specific complaints they are receiving.
Let’s Back Up: Why Does Content Matter So Much All of a Sudden?
Two rising forces—consumer skepticism and negativity bias—are driving this growing intolerance for certain operational deficiencies. Skepticism manifests itself in an inherent distrust of online ratings. According to Backlinko, 75% of all consumers that use reviews are concerned that fake reviews are present.
Thus, for a purchase as big as monthly rent locked in over a 12-month lease, prospective renters are going to be willing to dig for more and more information to understand what the experience is like. Gen Z, the largest generation flooding the rental market, is more savvy and less trusting than Gen X, baby boomers, and even millennials.
Rajiv Gopinath, chief solutions officer at Publicis Media, reported in one his blogs that Gen Z “demonstrates what researchers called ‘informed skepticism’—distrust paired with active verification—at rates 3.7 times higher than previous generations.” They want verification of anything they believe has been potentially influenced by the company selling the product.
This desire to verify is not only influenced by skepticism in the ratings but is also a product of negativity bias. Laura Kegley, a writer for Forbes, emphasized the importance businesses must place in understanding what is being complained about. Specifically, she said in an article that consumers’ focus on the negative “aligns with negativity bias theory, which suggests that individuals are more sensitive to losses (negative sentiments) than gains (positive sentiments), leading them to weigh negative information more heavily in their evaluations.”
This manifests itself in two ways for multifamily: prospects filtering low-scoring reviews and their use of artificial intelligence (AI)tools like ChatGPT. Both methods make it really easy for them to understand the weaknesses of a property regardless of its published star ratings.
Note, this is not futuristic projecting—this is a reality today. According to J Turner Research’s latest study, 51.6% of prospects already use AI or will use AI in their next apartment search. Moreover, Social Pilot reports that “consumers read an average of seven reviews before trusting a business.”These changes in prospect behavior put the negative front and center.
It Makes Sense—Let’s Adapt Ourselves
Taking a step back, prospects’ behavior makes sense; a 1-star review about poor landscaping is not as serious to most prospects and residents as one about a critical safety issue, but review sites and ILSs almost always weigh those reviews exactly the same in calculating the property’s overall rating.
Forbes’ Kegley concludes her piece by suggesting that “ratings offer a convenient snapshot of consumer satisfaction and influence purchasing decisions significantly … [but] they fall short of capturing the nuanced aspects of customer experiences.” She goes on to say that “this underscores the need to embrace qualitative customer sentiment analysis as a way to complement quantitative user rating data and gain a more nuanced understanding of consumer opinions for better decision-making.”
Multifamily appears to be behind in this endeavor. Reading reviews and not just blindly trusting the star rating was a logical shift in prospects’ process to meet their desire for verification—now it is the multifamily industry’s turn to adapt.
With the stage properly set, it is imperative to understand the most important operational areas within reviews.
Free Rental Application
Get 20 Rental Forms for FREE, including a rental application.
The Apex Threats
The three most influential categories to prospects are pests, security, and financial clarity. J Turner Research determined this using its proprietary “Threat Score,” which looks at how prospective renters altered their likelihood to lease at certain properties based on what was being said within reviews.
After thorough analysis and a variety of testing methods, these three rose clearly to the top, ultimately culminating with the finding that a complaint about pests is 18 times more damaging to a property’s reputation and business than one about lesser deterring areas like amenities.
With the understanding that these are the critical areas, here are the trends and national benchmarks within each.
Pests
By all indications, Pests is a growing concern. Outside of the fact that complaints have only become more common since the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, pests are also becoming more of a common issue for American households in general. According to a Science Advances article, the global rise in temperature has increased the seasonal period in which both bugs and rats can thrive. This is poor timing, as according to PestPac’s report, resistance to commonly use pesticides has also increased.
It goes on to say that while the pest control industry has innovated with new types of solutions, there is hesitancy for implementation due to cost. In J Turner Research’s opinion, this is shortsighted, as the business implications for failure in pest management make it innately worth the cost to implement what works best.
Many properties within multifamily have had their online reputations and, therefore, their leasing traffic severely affected by not optimally addressing pest issues. Pest complaints rose 17% just last year, hitting their highest mark since 2018. In fact, since 2021, pest complaints have risen 41% and were mentioned as a driving force of 18.43% of negative reviews.
This data indicates that residents are noticing what pest experts are reporting, creating an urgent need for multifamily to look outside of the most affordable or common vendors to find solutions that can have meaningful success.
Security
On the other hand, security complaints within online reviews are headed in a positive direction. While still a common complaint in 1- and 2-star reviews in 2025 (24.09%), there is optimism for the industry in seeing security complaints reducing. While it is easy to point to improved crime rates as an influential factor, J Turner Research’s data suggests that the perception of safety is not driven solely by crime rates or where the property is located.
Instead, we believe it is largely a result of what the property is doing on-site. In other words, J Turner Research theorizes that trends in security complaints will correlate to trends within the controllable operative areas that ultimately make residents “feel safe.”
This theory comes from work with experts in the space. In an episode of The Multifamily Leaders Podcast, Nathan Burnett of Watchtower Security said residents feeling safe is largely a by-product of what you do to ensure the property is well-kempt; that it is less about fancy equipment and more about keeping the property clean and cared for. This has largely manifested in the review data.
Since the peak of COVID-19, complaints about operational areas like general cleanliness, landscaping and grounds, exterior lighting, and trash management have followed similar patterns to security. This was very evident when security complaints hit their nine-year high in 2023.
As security complaints went to their apex, feedback about the property’s care followed the exact same pattern. As complaints in these operational areas have mostly ticked back down the last two years, security has trended accordingly.
These trends further support Burnett and J Turner Research’s theory that security is not outside of a property’s control but rather is a by-product of everyday care around the property. While there is still work to do, two years of positive movement is a good sign.
Financial Clarity
Last, the trend within financial clarity is important to note. Complaints in understanding charges and fees trended up 7% in 2025 in comparison to 2024 and were featured within 33.76% of 1- and 2-star reviews.
J Turner Research predicted this in last year’s article, specifying that the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC’s) ruling on “junk fees” for the multifamily industry did not absolve properties from needing to be transparent. Failing in communication of these fees, regardless of the letter of the law, deters too many prospective renters, especially when residents are so willing to discuss it online.
The trend within financial clarity is largely a consequence of increased sensitivity to service and communication. Since the height of the pandemic, complaints in communication, customer service, and financial clarity have gone up, especially skyrocketing among student renters. Gen Z seems to be a big driver of this sentiment given their previously noted skepticism and inherent distrust of the new businesses they interact with.
Last year, we broke down the “Amazon Effect,” which theorizes that people’s regular use of services specializing in immediacy translates to increased service and communication standards for other businesses. This unequivocally has resulted in increased renter demands to understand all charges within multifamily even if the FTC is not mandating fees be rolled into rent.
This is still an area that multifamily needs to work to address.
Other Trends of Note
- Despite the increases in complaint rates for 2 of the 3 Apex Threats, sentiment improved for the second year in a row, reaching its highest level since 2021. Outside of the successes noted with security and care of the property, the biggest reductions in complaints were in regard to noise, parking, and amenities;
- The amenities improvement is less about quality of service and more about resident perception. The data suggests that amenities are continuing to become less of a driver of satisfaction. In fact, compliments about amenities reached its lowest mark since 2009, only being featured in 10.95% of reviews. Moreover, amenities were featured in only 15.25% of reviews overall, well down from its 21.8% lifetime rate and pre-COVID rate of 23.79%. This drop-off is even more noticeable in students, suggesting that amenities are more of an expectation and less of a satisfaction needle mover than before; and
- In contrast, the importance of service continues to be alarmingly clear. An incredible 77.3% of all reviews in 2025 discussed customer service in some way. In fact, 62% of all reviews featured a compliment about the staff, which is basically double 2011’s mark of 33%. While a large portion of that could be a result of review gamification and the increase in fake reviews, the fact that 66.2% of 1- and 2-star reviews feature a complaint about customer service suggests that the resident relationship with the staff continues to be the ultimate determinant of how satisfied a resident is overall. It should also be noted that compliment rates within communication and maintenance service hit their all-time highs going back to 2003. Likewise, complaints within these categories increased within 1- and 2-star reviews, again proving that quality of service is the correct measuring stick for multifamily.
Conclusion
This new era in online reputation, focused on the content over the stars, is a big story for multifamily in 2026. J Turner Research is hopeful that trends within key areas like financial clarity and pest management may show improvement as a result of the increased focused prospects are placing on them and the negative impact companies are seeing as a result of their shortcomings.
Source: Multifamily Executive
Accessibility