Picking a property manager usually comes down to a guessing game. Everyone claims to be the best. A five-star average built on a handful of reviews and an "award-winning" badge tell an owner almost nothing about whether this manager will actually lease their unit quickly and account honestly for every dollar.
The TrueMatch™ Score answers that with evidence instead of adjectives. It is a 0–100 verified performance score for property management companies, built on what a manager's own owners say about them (verified), plus the operational results we measure straight from their software. We rebuilt it in June 2026 to put verified owner surveys at the center, where they belong. Here is the transparent breakdown, factor by factor: the math behind the match.
1. The Core: Verified Owner Surveys
The base of the score is the people who actually pay a manager to do the job. We send the surveys ourselves, pulled straight from the owner roster in the manager's connected software, and we verify every response against that roster. A manager never hands us a list of their five happiest clients.
Owners grade the things that decide whether they stay or leave:
- Net Promoter Score: would they recommend their manager, the strongest signal of loyalty.
- Overall Satisfaction: the broad read on whether the relationship is working.
- Maintenance Cost & Value: whether repair costs feel fair for what they got. This is the single biggest driver of owner loyalty.
- Maintenance Communication: whether owners hear about issues clearly and quickly.
- Leasing Performance: how well the manager fills units with good residents.
- Accounting & Financial Reporting: whether the money is clear, accurate, and on time.
- Vacancy Time: how long units sit empty.
Here is how that becomes a number. Every answer maps onto a 0-to-100 scale from best to worst, so a 9 or 10 recommendation scores 100 while "in line with market" maintenance cost lands mid-scale. Each dimension is averaged across a manager's responses, with recent feedback weighted more heavily, and the dimensions then combine into the single survey composite that the next section's smoothing anchors.
The dimensions do not count equally. Weighting follows what the data shows predicts whether an owner stays: recommendation and whether maintenance costs feel fair carry the most weight, while leasing and accounting sit in the middle and vacancy time counts least, since it moves loyalty less than most people assume. One older question, about awareness of a remote team, was dropped because too many owners answered "not sure" for it to mean anything. We re-check the exact weights against the data before every scoring update, so they follow reality and not habit.
2. Everyone Starts at the Same Line: 77.7
Before a manager has a single verified response, their score sits at 77.7. That is not a number we picked because it sounds good. It is the median across every verified owner survey in our dataset, which makes it the honest starting assumption: until we have real evidence on a company, the fair call is "about average."
From there, the math is built to resist swinging on a handful of responses. The score is confidence-adjusted (statisticians call it Bayesian smoothing). Your first few responses barely move you off 77.7. Around ten, your own owners start to outweigh the starting point. After that, the score converges on what your owners actually report. A brand-new company cannot be sunk by one bad day, and an established one cannot be defined by a single loud outlier.
3. No Cherry-Picking: We Survey Your Whole Book
Because surveys go to a manager's full owner base, we can compare who got surveyed against the number of owners their software says they have. Hand-pick five glowing responses out of five hundred owners and the math sees the thin slice and keeps the score near the starting line. Survey deeply and real results carry full weight. The score reflects all of a manager's owners, not their favorites.
4. Fresh Data Counts More
Owner feedback ages. A rave from three years ago says less about a manager today than an honest review from last month. Every response loses weight as it gets older. Keep surveying and the score reflects who a company is now. Go quiet and it drifts back toward the median, because there is no longer current evidence to stand on.
5. Certified Performance Metrics: Graded, Not Pass/Fail
Surveys capture what owners feel. Certified Performance Metrics capture what a manager's system of record proves. When a company syncs its software, we measure operational performance directly and grade each metric on a sliding scale, then add it on top of the survey base. The top tier earns +1.0, the next +0.6, the third +0.4. Any synced number below the bottom tier still earns +0.25, because connecting verified data is worth something on its own, and a metric earns zero only when it is not synced at all. Six metrics are graded today, with more on the way:
- Speedy Leasing: median days to lease a vacant unit. +1.0 at ≤ 17 days, +0.6 at ≤ 30, +0.4 at ≤ 45.
- Speedy Repair: median days to complete a work order. +1.0 at ≤ 3 days, +0.6 at ≤ 5, +0.4 at ≤ 7.
- Rent Collection: percent of rent collected on time. +1.0 at ≥ 99%, +0.6 at ≥ 97%, +0.4 at ≥ 95%.
- Occupancy: percent of managed units occupied. +1.0 at ≥ 97%, +0.6 at ≥ 94%, +0.4 at ≥ 92%.
- Rental Price Accuracy: how close the listing price is to market rent. +1.0 within 1%, +0.6 within 3%, +0.4 within 5%.
- Lease Renewal: percent of leases renewed or converted. +1.0 at ≥ 75%, +0.6 at ≥ 65%, +0.4 at ≥ 55%.
The points scale with the verified number, so a three-day median repair time earns more than a two-week one, and a manager who syncs but lands mid-pack still earns credit for the real data. These benchmarks are calibrated against verified industry distributions and reviewed before each scoring update.
Four verified credentials add on top: Financial Trust and Tech Enabled at +1.0 each, NARPM Membership and Asset Manager at +0.5 each. Certifications are capped so they add at most 10 points, and nothing scores past 100.
6. What Deliberately Doesn't Count
What we left out matters as much as what we kept. A few things you might expect to move the score, we threw out on purpose:
- Prices. We do not dock a manager for charging a premium. Whether a fee is worth it is for owners to judge through the survey, not for us to penalize. (We do credit managers who publish their fees openly.)
- Money. Paid plans and advertising have zero influence on the score or the match. That is the whole game.
- Google stars. Anonymous, unverifiable, and buyable for a few hundred dollars. They do not feed the score.
- Size and age. The score is a rate, not a count. A 60-door shop with great owner feedback outscores a 5,000-door operator with mediocre feedback. Being big and established does not buy a top score.
7. Where the Score Lives: In the Match, Not on a Billboard
One design choice surprises people: we do not publish a ranked list of every company in a city with someone's name at the bottom. A public number turns a measurement tool into a billboard. It invites gaming and it embarrasses the operators doing the work to improve, and neither one helps an owner choose.
So the score does its real work inside the matching engine, in two forms:
- A manager's Base Score is their standing 0–100 verified number, visible in their dashboard and the same no matter who is looking.
- The TrueMatch™ Score is calculated fresh for one owner at search time. When an owner searches their rental address and says what matters most to them, whether that is fast maintenance or airtight accounting, we re-weight the manager's verified strengths against those priorities, their market, and their property type.
To get matched at all, a manager clears two gates: active surveys with at least three recent verified responses, and coverage of the owner's market and property type. Clear them and the ranking is on merit. Every match comes with the reason why, in plain language, pulled from real data.
And the part worth repeating: nothing in the rank is for sale. No placement fees, no sponsored slots. A manager earns the match with verified performance and pays only when a matched owner becomes a managed door. Payment sits downstream of the match. It never buys one.
The Goal: No Black Boxes
A property owner deserves to know the manager at the top of their match earned it on evidence their own clients verified. A property manager deserves a score they can move by doing great work, not by gaming a leaderboard. That is the whole design: no pay-to-play, no black boxes, only math.
If you manage rentals, getting on it is free: claim your profile, connect your software, and turn on owner surveys across your full book. Your metrics grade themselves from your data. If you own rental property, search your address, tell us what matters, and we will show you the managers who earned the match.