Before you judge a company by their Yelp rating, it is important to understand who is writing the reviews and who the company serves. The complainers may not be the actual clients of the company.

Take property management – in this industry, our fiduciary responsibility lies with property owners and not with the tenants of the rental homes we manage.

Crosstown Properties has many 1-star reviews on Yelp – ALL of which were written by disgruntled tenants. We take pride in these “bad” Yelp reviews because they actually show that we are protecting our owners’ interests.

Bad reviews almost always come from tenants who are upset about deductions from their security deposit. If a tenant leaves something broken, dirty, etc. and they’re not charged for it, then the owner pays for the repair. A manager truly acting in their owners’ best interests will shield the owner from dealing with these issues. For example, we are very thorough in our documentation of move-in and move-out conditions so that we can appropriately charge the tenants and avoid passing those costs to our owners. It is part of the job that is usually invisible to the owner, as it should be, that is one of the many reasons you hire us.

Crosstown Properties

We are diligent about protecting our owners’ interests at all times. Even if it risks a bad review on Yelp. In fact, we had a tenant leave a 2-star review complaining about security deposit deductions and concluding that if he ever owned rental property in Austin he would hire us because we are “property managers for the owner.”

Some managers are so afraid of bad Yelp reviews that they pass along expenses to the owner that should be charged to the tenant, just so the manager can avoid bad reviews.

While online reviews may offer good social proof that a company is worth your time and money in some cases, in other cases the “Not currently recommended” reviews may be a more accurate representation of real clients’ experiences.

At the time of this writing, Crosstown Properties has 25 five-star reviews from long-time clients that aren’t counted in our star rating. How is that possible? I’ve spent over four hours on the phone with Yelp representatives trying to answer just that question and I’d like to share what I’ve learned.

Yelp is essentially a self-serving advertising agency. That’s the bottom line. Do you want to show up on the first page? You have to pay for it. You want to remove advertisements for your competitors from your business page? You have to pay for it. Furthermore, the more someone uses Yelp, the more value Yelp assigns to their reviews. If a very happy and very real client makes a Yelp page strictly to leave a 5-star review for Crosstown Properties (and as I mentioned, there are A LOT) but that person never uses their Yelp account again… that very real review will be “Not currently recommended.”

Take Yelp star ratings with a grain or two or ten-thousand of salt. They are not necessarily reflective of a company’s value and their actual clients’ experiences.