“Words are chameleons, which reflect the colour of their environment.”

—Billings Learned Hand

How do the experiences of PBSA customers vary across cities?

What are the main concerns of each city customer group?

Are their experiences positive or negative?

By analysing keywords in PBSA reviews across the UK we can paint a picture of how customer concerns vary by region. We also discover if the group of customers report a positive or negative experience. 

Within our database of PBSA customer reviews we select a city of interest and find out what percentage of them contain certain keywords. For this analysis we are using the keywords: Management, Price, Location and Security – these denote important issues to the PBSA customer. These keywords indicate the content of the review and the amount of reviews in which they occur indicates the prominence of the issue in any one city. 

An extra dimension is created by taking the reviews where the keyword appears and tallying the amount of positive and negative reviews. This second dimension will indicate, within the limits of a binary result, what the collective experience has been of the customer groups concerned with each of the four prominent issues within each city.

Take aways: 

• Across all cities, Location is the most prominent issue and where it’s mentioned it is mostly in a positive light. It seems that for those concerned with location it is because it has been part of a positive experience.

• Price, appears in 10-15% of reviews, it is the issue most commonly reviewed negatively across all cities except Nottingham, where it is 82.5% positively mentioned.

• In Nottingham 88% of reviews mentioning Location are in a positive light. This could be due to the well targeted construction of PBSAs in the city center near Nottingham Trent University

• Across all properties Management is the second most prominent concern. The positive to negative reviews are fairly even split in all cities except Liverpool, which has predominantly positive experience of management.

• Birmingham reviews report the worst experience of Security, with 50% of all reviews mentioning security being negative.