How Towne Properties Eliminated Data Overload for 100 Properties with One Platform
Learn how centralizing reputation management and customer journey analysis transformed Towne Properties’ operations, marketing, and community.
The Challenge:
Drowning in Manual Data
For Towne Properties, a large-scale property management company, the process of managing its multi-site online reputation was a massive drain on resources and a source of constant error.
Before implementing Reputation’s platform, Towne’s marketing strategist’s role involved a grueling manual process:
“One of the things I was responsible for was going to every site that we had reviews on, and pulling out the information and creating this horrible document. It took me a full day to complete this document. I was manually counting reviews and scores and all the things, and sure enough, things were wrong.”
Karen Zapowski, Marketing Strategist, Towne Properties
This time-consuming, error-prone manual aggregation not only wasted days of work, but also prevented the team from quickly acting on critical feedback. Concurrently, managing social media posting for approximately 100 properties was overwhelming, requiring a solution for standardized content distribution.
The Solution:
Centralization and Efficiency
Towne Properties sought a solution that could centralize both reputation and social media management. Reputation immediately addressed their two primary pain points:
Centralized Feedback: All reviews from every platform were consolidated into a single dashboard, eliminating the need for manual data collection and ensuring instant, accurate reporting.
Streamlined Social: The platform provided a critical, simple service to distribute generic, yet essential, content (like “Here’s how you can download our app and pay your rent”) across all 100 property pages simultaneously, solving the social media overload.
This shift immediately provided relief, saving “days of work” and transforming the daunting, overwhelming multi-location structure into an efficient system.
The Game Changer:
Journey Insights
While initial implementation solved the time-saving and centralization issues, the strategic team soon discovered the profound value of Journey Insights, a feature that became a game changer for the marketing strategist.
In a world where AI searches can now summarize community sentiment, understanding the why behind a property’s performance is paramount. Journey Insights allows the team to pinpoint where the customer experience breaks down in the leasing life cycle.
Journey Insights not only uncovered, but pinpointed operational gaps…
When a property was struggling with occupancy, the initial, traditional solution was to spend more money. However, Journey Insights revealed a different story:
The Problem: The data showed a high level of frustration right at the beginning of the journey—the tour/prospect and move-in stages.
The Details: Digging into the comments, Towne Properties found residents were frustrated, because they were showing up for scheduled tours and no one was in the office, or they couldn’t get a hold of staff. The issue wasn’t a lack of traffic; the on-site manager was simply ‘slammed’.
The Action & Result: The team implemented operational fixes using technology to support the overburdened manager, including self-guided tours and a chatbot to handle scheduling and initial inquiries. This freed up the manager’s time to focus on service, leading to immediate operational improvement and a reduction in wasted marketing spend.
We were able to look at this and get this location the help that it needed, and now they’re doing much better! This really helped us save so much money on marketing once we figured out what the issues were.”
Karen Zapowski, Marketing Strategist, Towne Properties
Making ‘markzeting gold’ from resident stories using Journey Insights
Journey Insights also highlighted what Towne Properties was doing exceptionally well, providing valuable “marketing gold” for possible promotional campaigns.
Playing Cupid: Sentiment analysis picked up a heartwarming survey response from a resident who met their spouse at the on-site pub. This was not an isolated incident. Towne Properties leveraged this positive feedback to launch “Singles Nights” at the pub, a highly successful event campaign.
Building Community: At another property, reviews consistently praised the dog park as a social hub where residents and their pets formed a close-knit community. The marketing team immediately leaned into this by hosting “Yappy Hours” (often sponsored by pet companies) to reinforce that sense of belonging.
These insights proved that strong resident reviews are more than just a good score; they are a direct roadmap for successful, authentic marketing and, ultimately, resident retention.
Conclusion:
From Reactive to Strategic
The partnership with Reputation has fundamentally changed Towne Properties’ approach to reputation and customer service. They moved from a reactive, manual, and overwhelming process to a proactive, strategic, and informed one.
The platform provided the essential efficiency to save time and the deep analytical insights to improve operations, reduce wasted ad spend, and create authentic, community-driven marketing campaigns.
