I Read 2,244 Google Reviews of 122 Property Management Companies. More Than Four in Ten Had Someone Who Couldn't Reach Them.

Published September 17, 2026 · by David Kohlani, founder of ApexSmartAI

I sell a 24/7 answering service for property management companies. That gives me an obvious interest in missed calls being a real problem.

Which is exactly why I measured it instead of asserting it — and why the method is published here along with the result, including the parts that weaken it.

What 2,244 reviews actually said

Of the 2,244 reviews, 2,064 had written text. Of those, 1,241 were one, two or three stars.

One hundred and eleven of those reviews said plainly that the person called and nobody answered, or called and nobody called back.

That review is sitting on their Google Business Profile right now, where the next prospective resident — and the next owner shopping for a management company — reads it before deciding who to call.

This is not a story about bad companies

Before anyone dismisses this as a sample of cowboys: the 122 companies in it hold 32,226 public Google reviews between them, and their average rating is 4.27 stars.

These are, by the only public measure available, normal businesses that are mostly doing a decent job.

That is the part I did not expect. I assumed the missed-call complaint would cluster in the low-rated companies. It does not. It sits alongside the good reviews.

Nearly double what we found in the trades

We ran the same test in September on 59 home-service companies — plumbing, HVAC and related trades — in one U.S. city. There, 14 of 59 had such a review. About one in four. The full write-up is here.

I want to be careful about how far that comparison is pushed. The two samples are not matched: the home-service study covered one city and this one covers six, and property management companies carry far more reviews each, which changes what twenty reviews reaches. It is a strong signal. It is not a controlled experiment.

City by city

The rate was not uniform. It ranged from about a quarter of the companies to about two thirds.

With fewer than twenty companies in most cities, I would not build a strategy on any single row. The spread is worth showing because it is real, not because it is conclusive.

What the reviews sound like

Four examples, all written in the last twelve months, all from one, two or three-star reviews. I have not named the companies — the point is the pattern, not a pile-on.

Read that last one again. That is not an unhappy resident. That is a person who wanted to rent a unit, tried more than once, and gave up — and the vacancy that followed showed up in the owner's monthly statement with no explanation attached to it.

Why a missed call costs a property manager twice

In the trades, a missed call is a missed job. In property management, the same unanswered phone produces two different losses, and they land on two different people.

The leasing call is revenue. Someone saw the listing and called. If nobody answers, they call the next listing — and the unit sits empty longer. The owner sees days-on-market, not a missed call.

The resident call is cost and liability. Water coming through a ceiling at eleven at night does not pause until the office opens. Every hour it sits in a voicemail box, the repair bill and the exposure grow.

And then there is the third cost, which is the one this study actually measured:

A management company's reputation is written by the people who live in the buildings and read by the people who own them. That is an unusual arrangement, and it makes an "I could never get anyone on the phone" review expensive in a way it simply is not for a plumber.

What this study cannot tell you

The limits matter more than the headline, so here they are plainly.

I counted reviews. I did not count missed calls. No tool can tell you from the outside how many calls a business misses — that number lives in their phone system, not on the internet. Anyone who quotes you a dollar figure for a missed call invented it.

Four in ten is a floor, not a ceiling. Each company's twenty lowest-rated reviews were read. For 47 of the 122, that was not deep enough to reach the end of their complaints — the collection hit the limit while still inside their negative reviews. Had it gone deeper, some of those 47 would likely have joined the 54. None would have left it.

Six cities is not the country. The method was chosen to match an earlier study; the cities were not chosen to represent the United States.

The quiet ones are invisible. The number of people who called, heard voicemail, and simply dialled the next management company is unknowable — and obviously far larger than the number who wrote a review.

Two patterns behind most of it

The clock. Leasing enquiries arrive in the evening, because that is when people look at listings. Emergencies arrive at night, because pipes do not check the time. Both fall outside the hours most management offices staff, and staffing them properly is not one receptionist — it is several.

The language. A resident who reaches an English-only voicemail usually does not leave a message. In a portfolio with Spanish-speaking residents that is not a courtesy question, it is a maintenance-reporting question: the problems you do not hear about are the ones that get expensive. We made that case separately in why English and Spanish is no longer optional.

Neither pattern is solved by working harder. Both are solved by somebody — or something — picking up.

Three things you can check this week, for free

No purchase required, and none of these involve us:

• Read your own one-star reviews and sort them by type. How many are about reaching you, versus about the work, the fees or the deposit? That ratio tells you whether you have a service problem or an access problem. They have completely different fixes.
• Call your own office line at eight in the evening, from a phone your team does not recognise, once as a prospective resident and once as a resident with an emergency. Listen to what each of them hears. Many owners have never done this.
• Find out what happens to the second caller. In most small setups, while one line is busy the next caller gets a busy signal or a voicemail box nobody checks until morning. Ask your phone provider what actually happens — it is usually worse than you assume.

Run it yourself

This is 122 companies in six cities, read once, by one method. It is not the whole industry. Everything needed to repeat it is described above, and if somebody runs the same test in another market and gets a different answer, I want to know about it.

But if you manage property and the phone is where both your leases and your emergencies arrive, it costs you nothing to read your own reviews tonight and see which kind you have.