In today’s modern world, it’s hard to exist without a digital presence in some form…whether you like it or not.

With Social Media and rating websites increasing in popularity every day, it is important to be vigilant in knowing what’s being written about you online.

There’s an old saying that goes something like this…”If you have a happy customer, most will tell 1-2 people, but if you have an unhappy customer, most will tell at least 10 people”.

I can tell you that these days, an unhappy customer will often vent on Social Media or a rating website…with some of the reviews reflecting a true account of the customer’s experience whilst other reviews are vastly unfair and some being a complete fabrication of the truth…more about this soon!

On New Year’s Day this year, I was looking to find the opening hours of a public water park (something new for ‘Daddy/ Daughter time’) and I was surprised to find quite a number of scathing reviews about the staff, quality of food, opening hours and other complaints about this particular water park.

Knowing that some complaints may have been an unfortunate series of events for the operators of the water park (for various reasons) and knowing that some people are just very hard to please, Lilliana and I went to the park and had a great day.

In saying this, we experienced every one of the top five complaints people made about this particular water park and given many of the bad reviews were at least 6 months old, it is clear that the operators were either oblivious to the online dissatisfaction building (which is a worry for them since it is all over their Facebook page) or perhaps they were in denial about it, I must admit to being surprised how accurate the complaints were from the people that took the time to write.

In real estate sales, we have a very delicate job – we are trying to obtain the highest possible price and best result for our sellers (which means trying to negotiate every dollar we can out of the buyers) but we always strive to make the buying experience as pleasurable as we possibly can for them.

When you have two parties with different agendas (one party trying to sell for the highest possible price and the other party trying to purchase for the lowest possible price), it is inevitable that in some transactions, one party may not be completely happy with the outcome.

Also, we can (at times) be engaged to sell a tenanted property for an owner whereby the tenant may not be particularly impressed about the fact that their temporary home is being sold and they have to go through the pain of having their lives interrupted whilst we do our best to sell the property for our owners but also ensure that the these tenants’ lives remain as unaffected as can possibly be…again, these two factors can work against each other at times.

In addition to this, we (at times) can be at the mercy of Solicitors’ errors on settlement day (we’ve already have one of these this year), bank errors in drawing cheques (we’ve already had two of these this year) and when you (as an agent) are standing outside a home waiting for written confirmation that a home has settled before you can legally hand over the keys to the purchasers (with the new owners becoming furious that things are taking too long whilst they are standing there with trucks loaded waiting to move in), we can (at times) bear the brunt of a new home owners’ frustrations.

We do have checks and systems in place to avoid these sort of situations but at times, things (beyond our control) can occur.

There’s also the question of cleanliness – one person’s idea of leaving a “clean house” may not be someone else’s idea of a “clean house” and again, if a new home owner takes possession of a home where the property has not been left to expectation or something is not working as it should be, it does come back on a reflection of us.

I’m not trying to absolve an agent from mediocre reviews (as some of them probably deserve the bad raps they receive) but I can tell you that it’s very frustrating when you (as an agent) receive a bad review that was virtually beyond your control.

Over the past twelve months, we’ve received around 150 online or written reviews in different ways with 147 of them being wonderfully positive…and that leaves three of them being not so wonderful!

I never used to worry about the online review space but once we received one bad review on Google (which I’ll chat more about next week) and one bad review on Facebook from a tenant that was vacating a home that we were selling (and to be truthful, this tenant wasn’t happy about anybody visiting for an inspection at any time whatsoever), I thought it was time to promote our fabulous reviews so that people realized that we do leave the vast majority of people very happy.

So (as a business owner) how do you handle a bad online review?

And what happens when your direct competition (another real estate agency) starts placing bogus online reviews just to try to sabotage your growth? (Yes…there’s a story to be told here).

More about this next week.

Until then…Happy Listing & Happy Selling!

 

Uncategorized
Related Posts
In today’s modern world, it’s hard to exist without a digital presence in some form…whether you like it or not.