A guide to effective real estate reputation management

Almost every business transaction starts with an online search today. It could be on a review site, search engine, social media platform, or listings website. The stronger the reputation for your real estate business online, the more likely the client will choose you over a competitor. 

Managing the reputation of your real estate business means listing on these platforms, collecting and managing reviews, and using them to grow your business. An attended negative review or an unclaimed profile can drastically impact your online reputation. 

This blog post explores the real estate reputation management world and the best practices to follow. 

What is real estate reputation management? 

Real estate reputation management is the process of monitoring how customers feel about your real estate business, taking strategic action based on the insights, and eventually influencing public perception by leveraging positive testimonials. 

This is an ongoing process that every real estate business owner must invest in to grow their business and gain a significant edge over the competition. 

Why is reputation management important in the real estate industry? 

Customer relationships in the real estate industry come from trust, customer experience, and personalized service. You can prove your trustworthiness to clients when they interact with you. Online reputation management for real estate businesses can make it possible in the research stage itself. 

Reputation management in the real estate industry can help businesses: 

• Understand how homeowners and other clients feel about their interactions with the team and act upon their suggestions for improvement. 
• Improve customer satisfaction rate by showing clients that they are listening. 
• Leverage positive feedback and reviews by including them in marketing campaigns.
• Improve local SEO efforts and rank higher in local Google search results. The algorithm values reviews and overall star ratings while displaying the top businesses. 
• Claim and update all listings for your business. This way, potential homeowners do not receive any misinformation or show up at the wrong address. 
• Identify unhappy clients and resolve queries to improve customer retention rate. 
• Reward employees who go above and beyond for the business and grow a cohesive team. 

5 effective strategies for real estate reputation management 

There are so many moving parts when you’re managing reputation for a real estate business. Having the right processes in place will help you prevent things from falling through the cracks. Here is a list of a few strategies that will help you make the most of your real estate reputation management efforts: 

Automated review generation 

Collecting as many reviews as possible must be a top priority for your business. Choosing a real estate agent, a property manager, or a rental property is a big decision — one that consumers don’t take lightly. The more positive reviews your business receives on niche-specific review sites like Zillow, the more a potential homeowner will trust you. 

Unfortunately, if you leave it to the homeowner or renter to remember and write reviews, you may not capture all positive experiences. People are busy — even if they had a fantastic experience working with you, they might forget to leave a review. For best results, real estate businesses must: 

• Send an automated review request to all clients via text, email, or other messaging services to share their experiences. 
• Run drip campaigns encouraging customers to write reviews with gift cards and coupons. While you can’t pay for positive reviews, you can still run contests to help a random customer claim the reward. 
• Make it easy for clients to write a review by sending a short link directly to the review site. This way, they can write the review easily instead of them having to spend time looking up the business. 
• Encourage survey respondents and clients who message on various platforms to write a review. 

Birdeye helps you with business listing management and collecting reviews on 100+ sites with just a few clicks.

Review response management 

Collecting reviews is a good start, but your job doesn’t end there. All customer communications become fruitful when you engage with them, which is valid for reviews too. Just as it is in every industry, real estate business owners must make sure that they respond to all reviews they receive — positive and negative. 

When you respond to customer reviews: 

• You keep your business listings active. This shows potential homeowners and the listing websites that you are a legitimate business that cares about feedback.
• Clients know that when they choose this forum to share their opinions, the business will notice them. This encourages them to write reviews, helping your online reputation. 
• Businesses can even persuade clients to remove negative reviews by responding with a resolution. This improves your overall star rating and builds a positive reputation. 

Multi-location real estate businesses might find tracking and responding to every review challenging without a tool or a process. Using the industry’s highly-rated #1 review management software like Birdeye can help you:

• Monitor reviews as they come in from various sources in a single dashboard 
• Respond to them with pre-written templates to save time and effort
• Automate review responses to make sure that every review receives a response promptly, improving customer experience. 

Want to get in on the action? Learn more about Birdeye Reviews here! 

Review management 

You can find a lot of gems buried in the sea of reviews, and you can use those reviews as powerful social proof and marketing material. But it is a challenge to find those gems of good feedback if you don’t have a process in place. Proactively manage your reviews so you never miss an important review, and turn the feedback you receive into actionable insights. 

By prioritizing review management, you’ll understand: 

• Which locations are performing well and which are not. You can do this by comparing the ratings and review volume across locations and review websites. 
• The most underperforming locations or team members to dedicate your resources to. 
• How to improve customer experience
• How they fare against their competitors
• Which clients are ideal for requesting video testimonials, participating in referral requests, or pitching another property. 

Review marketing 

If you want to succeed with reputation management, you must leverage your online reviews. Reputation management for real estate can’t be just firefighting by acting on negative reviews alone. Leveraging your positive feedback to influence public opinion and grow a more positive outlook for your business is vital. 

Your real estate business can leverage review marketing by:

• Sharing positive reviews on social media 
• Posting customer success stories in marketing materials such as emails, billboards, and more. 
• Adding a review widget on your website to encourage more reviews.

Social listening and monitoring 

Customer reviews and feedback are not just on the designated review sites anymore; they are everywhere — especially on social media platforms. Homeowners like to talk about their experiences with real estate business on popular social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter (now X), and Facebook. 

Your real estate business reputation can benefit greatly from you monitoring social media platforms to understand overall customer sentiment. To do this, leverage social listening and social monitoring by tracking a few essential keywords and engaging with clients when they post about your business. 

Birdeye allows you to track brand mentions and specific keywords, and engage with your audience from a single dashboard so that you never miss a single conversation. 

How to choose the right reputation management tools for real estate businesses

While real estate companies must prioritize reputation management, they also have a business to run. It is not cost-effective for business owners, agents, or managers to chase reviews or respond to them without the assistance of a tool. The right reputation management tool can help you scale your business while building a positive reputation at a competitive price. 

Here are a few things that you must look out for when you choose the reputation management tool: 

Automation capabilities 

Reputation management has a lot of elements, and you must take control of all the processes and variables involved. Using an AI-driven solution that allows for automation but with human supervision can significantly help scale reputation management with lean resources. 

Birdeye helps real estate businesses: 

• Automate review requests to all clients by integrating with their homeowner/renter database 
• Automate review responses with AI-driven templates and rephrasing abilities. You can send professional responses to all reviews within seconds of them coming in. 
• Leverage all positive reviews by automated posting to social media platforms with pre-designed templates and captions. 
• Automate reporting (weekly, monthly, and annually) to understand how to improve online reputation. 

Integration with systems

Your business likely already has a customer data management system, agent data management, payroll management, etc. Your reputation management tool must integrate with these so you can: 

• Send review requests to new and existing clients
• Assign tickets to employees 
• Enable employees to send review requests for walk-ins
• Send periodic surveys to all homeowners to gauge satisfaction.

Birdeye integrates with 3000+ apps, including software that major real estate companies use such as Homegauge, Horizon, Sitelink, and Hospitable. You can integrate your customer management system with Birdeye to send out review requests online reviews automatically after a transaction and boost your online reputation. 

Compliance 

Every real estate business has regulations to comply with based on their specific domain and location. It is essential that the tool you use to boost your online reputation also allows you to stay compliant.

For example, in the United States, businesses must comply with the 10DLC regulation to send text messages to customers. So, a reputation management tool can only work if it complies with 10DLC for sending customer reviews or survey requests via text messaging. 

Similarly, reputation management tools must help real estate agents make sure all their listings are accurate and do not misrepresent properties in any way. 

FAQs on real estate reputation management 

Conclusion 

Reputation management is of paramount importance in the real estate industry. Your brand is only as good as how the digital world projects it to be. Actively working on reputation management and ensuring an exemplary customer experience can significantly boost your competitive edge in the industry. 

Managing multiple locations and catering to thousands of potential homeowners, renters, and other clients while building a solid online reputation is only possible when you have a comprehensive tool like Birdeye. 
With a simple, easy-to-use dashboard, Birdeye helps real estate businesses manage listings, reviews, appointments, and social media channels. It is also an award-winning AI-driven solution that leverages technology to simplify data management and accelerate growth for your business.