Vigilantism FTW

[needthatscrilla]

so, here's the run down. i'm living in a student housing apartment complex that has ties with my university. rent it cheaper than the other options, however they have a terrible reputation. the management is incompetent and the maintenance staff is lazy.

so, i decided i'd work on a lil' something something to hopefully incite the staff to stop being fucking stupid and start listening to their lessees when they go to them with problems with their apartments.

what i will be doing is buying the domain dontleaseat[apartment].com or [apartment]horrorstories.com and the content will be testimonials people send in about management being terrible or maintenance staff being terrible. i will work on getting it seo optimized for terms such as the name of the apartment, "apartments near [my university]" etc, etc.

the goal is to get it to rank higher than the actual apartment's website, which shall be easy. it has like... less than 10 backlinks, it is not optimized for its name or any of the applicable search terms that they would want to rank for to draw traffic and then leads for apartments.

secondary goal is to rank for those other terms, but if i can't do that, i'll just run a ppc campaign for them (which should be relatively cheap) and drive more traffic to my site.

the whole point is to have leverage so that the management starts giving a fuck. they were all over my roommate for a facebook comment because they said people were revoking their leases because of what he said. so, i can only imagine what they'll do seeing the site above theirs and having people call in with questions concerning what's on the site.

questions i have are: will i run into any legal trouble? could i monetize the site later on selling ad space to my apartment complex's competitors, etc?

 

[Bombastic]

questions i have are: will i run into any legal trouble?

They could sue you, but they would have to prove that you lied or were malicious.

could i monetize the site later on selling ad space to my apartment complex's competitors, etc?

This sounds like trouble. If you want to sell leads to a competitor, do it by promoting them, not by trashing this student complex. I think they would have a good case against you in court if they could show that you were making money from their competitor.

Note that my only legal qualifications are having watched a lot of Judge Judy on Youtube.

 

[needthatscrilla]

alright, i figured the monetizing would be out of the question. but, i have no malicious intent. i'm simply making people aware of the lack of competency the entire staff at the apartment complex have.

because they will be testimonials submitted to the website, it would be pretty difficult for them to say that i'm lying.

ideally, i will turn it into a place for people to submit maintenance requests or other general requests that have yet to be resolved by management/maintenance. once it starts drawing the attention of the staff, the goal is to have it incite them to work to resolve the problems.

it'll be something like a counter. for example, "there have been 124 maintenance requests submitted to the northpointe front office. 4 have been resolved."

 

[bauss]

legal trouble no...

But this whole idea seems kind of like an endless chase.... were talking about university housing not trump towers. I think just save yourself the time and accept the norm for university houising

You won't be pissing off the mgmt/maintenance assuming their just paid by the university anyways... They will just laugh someone went through the trouble to do this. Your best off contacting whoever they answer to and complaining that way so they lose their jobs

 

[needthatscrilla]

legal trouble no...

But this whole idea seems kind of like an endless chase.... were talking about university housing not trump towers. I think just save yourself the time and accept the norm for university houising

You won't be pissing off the mgmt/maintenance assuming their just paid by the university anyways... They will just laugh someone went through the trouble to do this. Your best off contacting whoever they answer to and complaining that way so they lose their jobs

i know it seems trivial, but they aren't technically paid by my university. they're owned by a different company altogether. i think they might pay the university in order to say they're affiliated.

and, i don't think they'll just laugh it off. especially considering the fact that a simple facebook comment on their facebook page about a burglary that the management took a blind eye to evoked the staff to contact my roommate and request that he take it off due to people calling in to revoke leases.

although, i like your idea about contacting whoever they answer to. that could be step 2. once i get the website up & running & ranked 1st on google for their name + other relevant search terms, i can type up an email from a "concerned parent" and send it to the company that owns the place.

 

[Bombastic]

If it's a big enough deal to you it to bother, it does sound like an effective way to bring some heat on them. If the attention embarrasses the university, they could put pressure on the company, and the threat of losing affiliation with the uni is probably enough to scare the crap out of the management.

We had this issue at the company I used to work for in Japan. The company is a chain of English schools that bring Westerners over here to teach, and they sent teachers to live in housing provided by an "affiliated" housing company. It was a constant gravy train for the affiliated company, because if a teacher moved out, another would soon be moved in to replace him. They got their money even if they did zero maintenance on the apartments and gave shit service. That was until the teachers started directing the heat at their employer at big staff meetings, etc. Our company was embarrassed enough by the teachers' angry complaints that they started riding the housing company's ass to get it to start doing some work. There was no website but some of us did a lot of forum posting that drew attention to it.

 

[needthatscrilla]

well, i forgot to mention it will also help me with my internet marketing skillz. but, yeah. i'm definitely gonna work on making this happen.

your story just gives me the motivation to do so. it's just funny to me. i almost sold my soul over the summer to this apartment complex for a chance at "free rent." i could've been an RA for a building, but they forgot to mention the part where i'd do 12 hours of manual labor every day for no pay whatsoever. this manual labor they were supposed to have done over the summer is pathetic.

the grounds look no better than the did pre-labor and most of the apartments themselves obviously aren't fixed.

sometimes you gotta do shit yourself. this is me doing shit myself.