this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
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Bro, we need Glassdoor for renting...
I'll build it, just as soon as you figure out how it gets paid for.
Get paid by landlords to remove negative reviews, like yelp. Offer to show all reviews, even removed ones, to renters that pay for the premium service.
Ew, I feel gross after coming up with that idea.
It's a lovely pattern to look out for, your efforts to show just how ugly it is, are welcome.
For anyone considering implementing this: No.
shake down bad landlords to delete bad reviews.
charge landlords for priority in search results.
sell searcher info as marketing data.
sell search trends as financial early indicators to hedge funds.
expand to HOA reviews for neighborhoods.
Real estate advertising, surely?
Yeah. No.
"Advertise your rental property on the page where your tenants review you."
"I mean... If you really value your brand, you'll stand behind it? I can put you on the opt-out list though, so future tenants know you don't stand behind it. I'm offering value at a fraction of the cost of advertisement and you're paying for peace of mind."
Most retailer websites have customer reviews on them?
They could also promote houses for sale (not rent).
I think it works.
Nonprofit ... crowd funded... build it and all you need afterward are paying for servers. Then you're just doing donations like Wikipedia. How much would would it cost to maintain such servers? Seems fundable by a wealthy liberal.
And then a wealthy slumlord does the math and finds out it's cheaper to pay people to sabotage the website than to lose tenants due to reviews.
You know somehow wikipedia maintains it's integrity pretty well.
Wikipedia has two significant advantages:
The former makes for a clear and low-effort bar for determining if a contribution is bad. If it's not cited, or it's biased, revert and move on. Figuring out if a user-written review is paid for, factually false, or exaggerated is a lot harder.
As for the latter... aside from doing it out of spite or as a favor to landlord friends, I have a hard time imagining that many people would volunteer their time moderating the review page about the apartment they rented 14 years ago.
Just an FYI. Wikipedia is actually privately funded. They don't need donations anymore. From what I have seen of their financial statements, the donations are essentially building a slush fund for them, at this point, and have been for the last few years.
Yeah that's kinda what I meant by the wealthy liberal thing. Make something good enough and you only need a couple good donors.
For apartment complexes there's yelp/Google maps reviews.
I just left a building with 4.5 stars on Google that was an absolute horrific nightmare. Somehow they had gamed the system so that all the recent very negative reviews got mostly taken down or hidden. Do NOT trust Google reviews if you have any inkling the place is sketchy. (I did but the reviews and price were good)
Indeed, while this idea should work in principle, I've found it mostly useless in practice.
I don't know if all large apartment complexes are notoriously bad, but a few years ago, you'd mainly find horrifically negative reviews on those sites (likely because only people who have had issues with them actually bothered to write a review in order to get their petty revenge on them).
Nowadays, all the management companies are aware of these sites, and they likely either pay Yelp to "manage" their reviews for them and/or incentivize their tenants to leave positive reviews (even though that's technically against the rules). Meanwhile, small buildings generally aren't even listed on these sites or don't have nearly enough reviews to get an objective picture.
Yeah, I'm fairly sure this building was paying for good reviews and paying tenants to take down bad reviews. In fact they did waive a hefty fee in exchange for me removing mine. I wish I had enough money to tell them to fuck themselves on that one, but I don't.
Most of the reviews at this place were either glowingly positive or very negative, citing the same kinds of severe maintenance issues that we'd had there. But the catch was that you'd almost never see the negative reviews unless you sorted by most recent. A fact I learned after it was too late and we were already moved in and having terrible experiences there. Basically Google was helping them bury the reviews that made them look bad.
Also originally Google had silently hidden my very negative review. I tried removing a phrase about how I was sure the apartment complex was breaking the law and it magically showed back up... The whole damn thing is suspect. I no longer put any stock in reviews.
Edit: I just went looking back at the reviews for this building and I found out that Google removed the only small power the public has against fake reviews. The "not helpful" button was replaced with reaction emojis, all of which convey positive emotions. Fuck Google. They know they are helping shield bad businesses, they just want to keep clicks (ad dollars) flowing.
Yup, I'm pretty sure I've also seen some leasing offices offer gift cards or one time rent reduction in exchange for a positive review. Like I said, I'm pretty sure that's against the sites' rules but not technically illegal. I suppose you could file a complaint but good look having them take your side over that of a paying customer's.
Reporting is still an option, and it works. Literally just 3 days ago reported some inaccurate reviews at a place near where I work and I got the email last night they'd taken action, they're gone now
What was the inaccuracy?
Multiple 1 star reviews for a nearby business that complain it doesn't do something that it doesn't claim to do (bulk fuel delivery place people are complaining it's not a gas station even though it doesn't come up as one) was the most recent one I did.
I also got one removed last year because someone gave a 1-star review whining about a fee that you weren't warned about if you were late, I sent in a picture of the big ass sign about it that's been there for years
Yeah it makes sense that those would get removed. They're somewhat cut and dried.
The kinds of reviews I was concerned about in this case are dozens of "omg the staff is amazing!"
I can't prove that they are fake, but I can tell you my experience at this building was abysmal and a LOT of other reviewers agreed. However unless you change the sort order to show newest first you'd completely miss that probably half of the recent reviews are all basically the same valid , damning complaints over and over, while 45%+ of the reviews are glowingly positive.
I feel certain they have paid for fake reviews, but how would I prove that to Google? Before, I could mark them unhelpful. Now I just have to give up ever trusting the reviews again and accept that anyone less cynical will get burned on occasion by shit like this.
Those are shit though, on average. Only the very upset respond. You're going to have to figure out a way to make the satisfied show up.
Something like this?
https://www.ratemylandlord.com/landlords/