13 May McGill Ridge Apartments Reviews
Checking McGill Ridge Apartment reviews (or any Kamloops apartment’s reviews) is a good idea if you’re considering renting, though reviews should be looked at objectively and taken with a grain of salt. Most businesses get a mix of positive and negative reviews. There are always people that are never satisfied, no matter what the business’s staff do to help resolve an issue, while others may be incentivized by the business to write a positive review to inflate their rankings. Some reviews, whether positive or negative, are warranted and others are not; however, they can provide an indicator of how the business addresses customer complaints. People are human, mistakes and miscommunication can happen. It’s how your business steps up to resolve issues that defines a well-managed business with great customer service.
McGill Ridge Apartments typically has a Google Business star rating of between 3.7 and 4 out of 5. Currently, 18/27 reviews are very positive, twice as many positive reviews as negative, but as you’ll read below, the number of reviews is a very small sampling of people who have rented an apartment in one of our buildings, and reviews are not always what they seem.
View McGill Ridge Apartment reviews.
Confirmation Bias, Social Media Amplification and Apartment Reviews
The problem with reviews is that they can give you a false sense of security or insecurity (in the case of negative reviews). A false sense of security and insecurity is frequently a psychological protection mechanism called confirmation bias – a way of resolving cognitive dissonance.
Confirmation bias
The tendency to gather evidence that confirms preexisting expectations, typically by emphasizing or pursuing supporting evidence while dismissing or failing to seek contradictory evidence – APA Dictionary of Psychology
Cognitive dissonance
Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort a person feels when their behavior does not align with their values or beliefs. Cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomenon that occurs when a person holds two contradictory beliefs at the same time. – “What is Cognitive Dissonance”, Medical News Today.
At this point, you may be wondering what all of this has to do with McGill Ridge reviews, the topic of this post. There are many things at play when it comes to reviews: biases, social media amplification, and the degree (or lack thereof) of subjectivity.
Here are a couple of examples of confirmation biases as they relate to purchases. The same biases exist whether buying a product, service, or renting an apartment.
Example 1 – a positive bias
A person wants to rent a one bedroom apartment but can only afford a studio. They love the idea of extra space for living and entertaining. They know they want it, though they also know it’s probably too much for their budget. This is cognitive dissonance – that uneasy feeling you get when your behaviour (renting a 2 bedroom) doesn’t align with values (the knowledge that it’s too costly). Your conscience says “No” but your desire is screaming “YES!”. To resolve the dissonance, the person in this example may try to find “evidence” that supports their wish to have what they want and ignore facts that suggest it’s not a responsible or wise choice. They may seek positive reinforcement from friends, ignore their bank balance, seek out positive reviews and ignore negative reviews.
Example 2 – a negative bias
Another person knows they can’t afford what they want. Maybe they want expensive noise-cancelling headphones, a new guitar, or a 1 bedroom apartment. They may feel resentment, perhaps anger that what they want is too expensive for them. They don’t want to admit to themselves that there may be good reason for the price, so they may blame the company, telling themselves that these things are “overpriced” or “not worth it”. They refuse to consider that a new, solid wood guitar by a reputable builder costs more than a mass-produced guitar because the materials and labour are more costly; noise-cancelling headphones have expensive components and are more expensive to make, so are pricier; and apartment rental pricing is based on many factors, such as the age of the building, quality of the construction, and quality of amenities. The person in this example might look to confirm their bias. They may ignore positive reviews or refuse to see that they should be comparing apples to apples. As the old adage goes “You get what you pay for”.
Apartment Reviews and Negative Social Media Amplification
The fact is, even the most well-maintained apartment building with excellent management, responsible caretakers and competitive rental prices will get negative reviews. Frequently, where apartments are concerned, the main complaint is rental pricing, then responsiveness of property management when there is an issue.
The Growing Problem with Online Reviews
Online reviews, including reviews for McGill Ridge Apartments, are often subjective or unverifiable; therefore, consumers should talk to many real people – either in person or from a variety of reliable sources when assessing a company, their services or products.
Consider these enlightening statistics about reviews.
- 13% of customers tell 15 or more people when they are unhappy with a company (“Customer Experience for Executives”, Estaban Kolsky). Negative reviews are amplified by social media.
- Few people write reviews. According to a study by Duncan Simester, professor of management science at MIT, just 1.5% of people have ever written a review (that’s 15/1000). Should we be relying on the subjective and sometimes biased opinions of such a small group of people? Online reviews don’t provide a representative sampling of opinions about a particular product, service or company.
- A study about the objectivity of online ratings found that online reviews about a company (which are deemed more subjective), frequently have little correlation with ratings of the same company by Consumer Reports, an organization widely regarded as objective. Both ratings scores can’t be accurate, right?
- The research into the validity of online reviews by Kay Dean, a former U.S. federal criminal investigator turned consumer advocate, found that a high percentage of both positive and negative reviews are fake. Have you ever seen a business with 200+ glowing Google reviews? What are the chances that the vast majority of reviews would be overwhelmingly positive? On the other side of the reviews coin, negative reviews are often fake, too. Frequently, negative reviews are written with bad English; are incoherent and over-the-top emotionally; lack any specifics and are very brief (e.g. “Terrible!”, “Don’t buy from here!”); or are posted by imposters who are not in the company’s records of customers. All of the aforementioned are signs of paid review offshoring.
We Love Complaints – Especially When They are Real
McGill Ridge Apartments takes all reviews seriously, although we can’t always prove the validity or verity of the review. We love our tenants and take all complaints seriously. We strive to make our tenants happy to rent an apartment – so much so, that we actively field maintenance requests and complaints. We want people to tell us what’s wrong so we can fix it and improve the tenant experience. When we see a problem, we address and resolve it. When we hear a complaint, we listen. That’s why people love to rent here (whether they say so online or not).