Local Visibility Index 2024

Wondering How Your Company Measures Up?

The Biggest SOCi Local Visibility Index Ever

This year marks the sixth anniversary of the SOCi Local Visibility Index (LVI). We established the report to benchmark the performance of multi-location brands across the most important and influential digital channels for driving foot traffic and sales at the local level:

In order to obtain top visibility and performance locally, multifamily marketers must understand the interconnectedness of the three pillars of localized marketing — search, reputation, and social. If any of these three pillars is lacking, a property brand’s overall marketing success can be impacted. For instance, reputation can be diminished by a low volume of positive reviews, which also tends to drive down local search rankings, in turn reducing local conversions.

This year’s report demonstrates that property management companies are continuing to neglect many of the key priorities in localized marketing. Too many ignore their local reviews, fail to claim and consistently update their local community profiles, and neglect the priority of building local audiences on social platforms.

Property brands must also pay close attention to emerging trends in search and social, such as those outlined below.

Wondering where your brand ranks against other property management companies?

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Top 50 Property Management Companies

Local Visibility Index 2024
How Property Managers Can Maximize Revenue & Resident Retention

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Top Takeaways

What We Measure

The SOCi LVI does not assess a property’s visibility at the national or regional level; its focus is exclusively on local channels and markets, where over 84% of commerce happens. We apply over 100 measurements to every location we analyze, looking at the most important factors that drive discoverability and overall online visibility, such as local ranking, star ratings, review response, onsite and offsite SEO, local followers, and local engagement.

All of these factors are weighted and scored in order to produce two results for every business:

1. An Optimization Score that measures to what extent a property has put into practice all of the tactical optimizations that experts agree should drive better local visibility and performance

2. A Performance Score that judges how highly ranked and rated a property actually is and how successfully they’re engaging with local audiences

Key Trends in the Most Influential Digital Channels

Search Tightens Its Focus

In the last year or more, Google has deliberately decreased the volume of search results that include a Local Pack (also known as a 3-Pack), in an effort to dial back cases where local results did not match user intent. Correspondingly, the local packs that still appear are likely more relevant to the searcher’s needs; but competition is fiercer for fewer opportunities.

Thus, it becomes more important to provide both base-level accuracy of information and depth of optimization to ensure that online profiles address all resident needs.

SOCi’s sixth annual Local Visibility Index, our biggest report ever, examines the digital performance of multi-location brands, including property management companies.

Property management companies that fail to engage with residents digitally and build audiences in local markets are leaving millions of dollars on the table. In total, property management companies lose out on $8.6B in revenue every year by not fully leveraging their localized marketing opportunities.

The key to achieving optimal results is strong local search optimization, effective reputation management, and a localized social media strategy.

Property management companies can use our industry-specific benchmark metrics to focus their strategies and set goals to outperform the competition.

Social Expands Its Reach

A recent Forbes study revealed that one in four of all consumers only or primarily use social for search. Consumers, especially in younger age groups, are increasingly turning to social platforms over search engines, for local as well as many other search needs. SOCi’s Consumer Behavior Index (CBI), released in February 2024, found that consumers aged 18-24 were more likely to use Instagram (67%) and TikTok (62%) than Google Search (61%) when looking up a local business.

Even Facebook, which tends to attract more older consumers, was third overall in the rankings of local platforms for all age groups behind only Google Search and Google Maps. Businesses looking to market themselves locally must have a robust social strategy.

SOCi LVI Benchmarks for 2024

Search Benchmarks

Reputation Benchmarks

Social Benchmarks

The Role of AI in Local

AI is changing the game in local marketing for property brands. The impact of this still-emerging technology is already significant in three areas related to the LVI: data analysis, search interfaces, and marketing automation.

AI Transforms the Search Interface

As we know, Google and Bing have both been hard at work incorporating AI into their search interfaces. Most significantly, Google launched AI Overviews (AIOs) in May 2024, after a year of experimentation with Search Generative Experience (SGE). Microsoft, early in 2023, had already rolled out an integration of Bing search with ChatGPT.

Google, Bing, and similar AI platforms like Perplexity and Meta.AI, all handle local queries at a deeper level of granularity than we’ve been used to in the past, requiring local marketers to up the level of specificity and the richness of information they provide to residents.

We’ve recently launched Genius Search - our AI-powered platform tailored for property management. Adapting to over 130 unique keywords and Google’s updates, it acts as your personal data scientist and SEO expert. Get real-time local insights and optimization recommendations with just one click, helping you boost visibility and attract more tenants effortlessly.

The High Cost of Invisibility

We’ve developed a model that quantifies the opportunity cost of inadequate performance in search, reputation, and social, broken out by industry. We attribute the cost of poor search performance to the loss in conversions when local properties fail to appear prominently in search results. For reputation, opportunity cost is attributed to lost conversions when property brands ignore their reviews, especially negative reviews. In social, when property companies fail to build audiences at the local level, they lose value in both current and potential residents.

It’s clear from our analysis that companies are leaving millions of dollars on the table by failing to engage with local audiences and provide them with the information and feedback they need to sign local leases. Missed opportunities in localized marketing are costing property management companies a combined total of $8.6B every year. (See more about our calculations in the Methodology section below.)

Annual Opportunity Cost of Localized Marketing

Methodology

The 2024 SOCi LVI includes 2,791 multi-location companies divided into five industry groups: Retail, Food & Beverage, Financial Services, Local Services, and Property. To produce the rankings and scores in the SOCi LVI, we analyzed a statistically valid sample set of approximately 350,000 store and office locations, applying more than 100 metrics to each location in the categories of search, reputation, and social. Data for the report was gathered by our analytics partner Places Scout.

We assessed the online profiles of each store or office location on Google, Yelp, and Facebook, measuring factors in these categories:

In total, the number of store and office locations represented by the companies included in the SOCi LVI is approximately 2.8M, representing the majority of companies in the U.S. with 50 or more locations for all other industries and 10 or more locations for Property Management.

To calculate the opportunity cost of localized marketing, we relied on SOCi research including Top Ranking and Conversion Factors for Local Search and The State of Google Reviews; a commissioned study from Localogy on typical transaction values by industry; earned media values from the Ayzenberg Social Index; and internal SOCi data.

The SOCi LVI and Your Business

How Property Managers Can Maximize Revenue & Resident Retention

The most visible property management companies know how to appeal to local residents' needs and turn every community into a local favorite.

Our chart defines four quadrants for measuring performance:

Low Visibility: Properties are working to improve their local visibility, but more work remains to be done.

Limited Visibility: Properties are doing a lot of the optimization work required to compete, but haven’t yet achieved top performance on all platforms.

Moderate Visibility: Properties are performing well on some platforms, but haven’t yet done all the work required to optimize their online presence everywhere.

High Visibility: Properties are effectively combining strong optimization with high performance.

What Defines a High Visibility Brand?

Here are some of the notable stats that differentiate property management companies in the High Visibility quadrant from the competition.

High Local Visibility = High Local Traffic and Revenue

Strong visibility in local platforms equates to local dollars. SOCi research has shown that property management companies in the top LVI rankings grow year-over-year revenue at 2-3X the rate of the average property. This makes sense: residents base their decisions on communities who treat digital channels as a local community, offering helpful information, useful content, and meaningful engagement.

At the heart of the LVI report are the benchmark metrics that identify the minimum level required to outperform the average competitor. We benchmark a broad range of performance metrics for property management in search, local reviews, and social, with only a selection of top metrics featured here.

As you’ll see, we’ve segmented the data into four different types of property management companies: multifamily, senior living, student housing, and affordable housing.

According to our search benchmarks, property management companies are doing a reasonably good job of claiming and optimizing their profiles on Google, with some room for improvement on Yelp and Facebook. Competition is stiff to achieve high rankings in the Google 3-Pack, on page 1 of Yelp, and especially on page 1 in Google organic results.

2024 SOCi LVI Search Benchmarks

On Google, only 55.9% of reviews get a response from the property, and response rates on Yelp and especially Facebook are significantly lower (here we are looking at all reviews published in the last 12 months). Response times need improvement as well, with the average response time on Google coming in at a rather slow 6.8 days.

2024 SOCi LVI Reputation Benchmarks

Property management companies are struggling to build audiences on Facebook, with the average company only posting an average of 2.7 times per month. We see a strong amount of posts with photos, but there is an opportunity for PMCs to share more video content. Facebook does limit the reach of business content with the average engagement rate at 0.46%, but properties can still do a better job of sharing content that is useful, informative, or entertaining, rather than merely promotional.

2024 SOCi LVI Social Benchmarks

The Struggles of Low Visibility Brands

In contrast with High Visibility brands, many property management companies in the Low Visibility quadrant have yet to master the priorities of localized marketing. Here are some of the features that define lower-performing companies.

The SOCi LVI has proven to be an authoritative source of the metrics that matter for local visibility. Our methodology has evolved over the years, keeping pace with changes in local algorithms and resident trends. This year’s report marks one of the most significant steps in the SOCi LVI’s evolution, as we expand the report's scope to include the majority of multi-location businesses in the United States.

This year, with the help of AI, we examined businesses, including property management companies, across North America for approximately 468 companies, 4X the number of companies we’ve ever included in the LVI. These companies represent approximately 2.8 million locations.

Search: Visibility on the platforms potential and current residents use to seek out information about local businesses.

Social: Presence in local markets on social platforms and ability to build and engage with local audiences.

Reputation: Resident ratings and reviews and the responses attentive communities provide to local resident feedback.

Local search result for "apartments near me" on Google

Our scoring system allows us to uncover specific factors that may be diminishing or boosting visibility for certain industries, offering multi-family marketers a concrete set of opportunities for improving digital presence and, ultimately, revenue.

Google displays a Local Pack or 3-Pack (here shown at the top of the search result) when it determines the user is searching for local apartments