Rent, the residential rental marketplace owned by Redfin, has tied up with Reputation to give its landlord clients tools to manage how they’re viewed by potential tenants.
Reputation offers tools to monitor and respond to online product and service reviews on Yelp, TripAdvisor or any number of social media sites. Reputation’s technology scours the internet for customer feedback and displays it to property managers on a bespoke sentiment dashboard called RentRep.
Automated prompts encourage users to respond to feedback and invite customers to leave positive reviews. The service includes tools that redistribute positive reviews across social media.
“A property’s online reputation is a key factor in the renter’s decision-making process,” Rent CEO Jon Ziglar wrote in the announcement. “It can improve SEO and increase qualified lead traffic. Having good reviews is critical, as properties with ten or more recent positive reviews average more than 4.5x as many leads as those without.”
The tie-in with Reputation follows other strategic media alliances that Rent has made in the last year. These include a tie-in to help landlords market on TikTok and integrations of Places Nearby and Google Business Profile management.
Rent (formerly RentPath) was acquired out of bankruptcy by Redfin in February 2021. The company says its network of sites—which include Redfin, Rent.com, Rentals.com and ApartmentGuide.com—receive 47 million visits per month. In terms of traffic, that would put it close to CoStar’s Apartments.com, the dominant U.S. rental site in terms of revenue.