Validate this: landlord reviews 👍 👎
I need some validation for an idea:
A platform where you review the place you rent and the landlord.
Useful for renters, since you see the landlord's public review history (kind of like a reference check).
What do you think? Sounds like something useful?
Has something like this already been done?
You have this in New York city: openigloo.com
I think they're pretty successful because the subway is full of their ads.
I'd loooove to have a resource like this as a tenant. You would need some way to build trust to make the resource useful however - otherwise it would just become a platform for people to air grievances, and/or for bad actors to try and sabotage their competition. Something like asking reviewers to submit contracts might help, but that sounds like a lot of work (and maybe legally fraught?)
An obvious analogue is GlassDoor, and personally I've found employee reviews there to be less than useful. You can't distinguish, for example, someone who was mistreated through no fault of their own, from someone who was a terrible team player and wants to burn the place down on their way out.
Good feedback, thanks a lot!
Verifying reviews is actually what makes or breaks this. I'm trying to see if there's a simple of way of doing that.
Nextdoor does that by sending you a code via post. But maybe there's a way to do that digitally. The good thing here is that you can't have 100 negative reviews, because only one tenant lives in a location for a long period of time, so it's easier to manage.
I might involve small payments as well, so that it adds an extra layer of verification and also motivates me to deliver this ($5 to respond to a review or something similar).
Depending on the location it could be great. It's always tough trying to figure out whether a place is good or not based solely on barely any reviews in places or mostly biased reviews. As they say, people only shout when they're angry, and that can really detract from great places and people.
Nice, thanks for the reply!
Yeah, I was thinking part of it would be landlords asking for reviews from tenants so that you'd get the good reviews as well.
I plan to make it for London initially, as renting is a often a big issue here.
Nope!. Landlords are in charge. They don't care about bad press.