A new review-based website has garnered some real attention. Rate The Landlord (RTL) is described by them as:
“… a tool for tenants to stay informed about housing the same way we stay informed about every other business, through crowd-sourced reviews.”
The idea is that tenants from the growing list of locations (including SOLO’s core jurisdiction, Ontario) can take to the site and provide reviews that comprise 5 stars for a variety of categories such as “Respect” and then add a text-based message. It does not appear that the reviews are human-moderated. RTL does not indicate the number of reviews are on the site.
A SOLO housing provider listed on the site felt the specific review was a personal attack and inappropriate, they took action to report it to the site administrators. The reply to this report seemed telling:
“Hi [landlord], we take the quality of our reviews very seriously, so we can investigate this review when our website is back online and will certainly remove any personal attacks or inflammatory language. Since the identity of the tenant is presumably unknown, we cannot remove a review simply by assuming it is the tenant you are referring to.
Rest assured we will be looking into this matter when the site is back online and amend the review if it is uncivil or violates our moderation policy. Thanks for reaching out, RTL Team”
The line “Since the identity of the tenant is presumably unknown, we cannot remove a review simply by assuming it is the tenant you are referring to” is key. The developers, former tenants with a clear prejudice towards landlords, have made the system so deeply anonymized that data ingested about the tenant-reporter appears useless from the source. It’s an attempt at building in deniability before it’s even required. It’s a troubling approach and a clear signal about what they’re trying to do.
When posting a review, the RTL site also says “I understand that once I post this review I cannot have it taken down unless it violates the Rate The Landlord policy” – this policy is a clear attempt to embolden attacks against landlords and make sure there is no recourse once an attack is identified, not even from the unknown tenant themselves.
And, looking at the site’s code on GitHub, there is a basic process for filtering out coarse language, but no indications that the developers have included more powerful filters for what they deem “inflammatory.” More than that, all indications in our observations show that the site has little or no human-level moderation, and just about anything posted (so long at it avoids a basic language filter), will go live. There is no indication on the site or in the process that RateTheLandlord makes any effort to verify claims of tenants.
Perhaps more troubling, the lack of identification for the accusers. When a landlord faces the potential loss of income and the person making the accusation is shielded by anonymity, that opens the door to all sorts of harmful and baseless lies. Contrast this with the approach taken by OpenRoom, where entries there are backed up by public, legally available tribunal orders. OpenRoom does rigorous moderation and only offers information in the form of publicly known information.
RTL describes their process this way:
“At Rate The Landlord, privacy is important. A landlord’s name is used in reviews because they operate a business under that name. However, we do not permit the posting of addresses, phone numbers, or any personal information related to the landlord or other parties involved.”
There is no indication that RTL verifies if a landlord indeed run “under that name” or a corporation. While it may be fair to strictly treat a housing provider as a business under their name, the reality for small landlords, in particular, is they might be renting one apartment and in specific danger from a tenant (see the Ombudsman’s Report). It seems particularly callous to facilitate attacks on these sorts of landlords. We have already seen postings about our members that describe almost nothing about the service offered while expounding their personal evils. The irony here is that one of the landlord’s star ratings is for “Tenant Privacy.”
A reasonable compromise might be offering landlords the chance to reply to reviews posted in a way just about every other business review site allows. This, at the very least, gives the housing provider the chance to speak to the claims, show proof if needed and respond. This what is typical on “other business review websites,” as RTL likes to mention.
The site is still having some growing pains. Due to either high traffic or a configuration error, the website was unreachable and showing a standard Cloudflare gateway error:
The use of a Cloudflare tunnel is also an indication that the site’s developers expect attacks. From where, that’s not clear. A recent Vice article described on of the Ontario men who created the site as wanting anonymity “due to angry criticism of the website.” Again, ironic given what they’ve created. Where is this angry criticism, we wonder?
But, with this lax approach, anyone can post reviews with almost anything about anyone. The site’s owners will soon see now that requiring identification and doing no verification will lead to all kinds of unintended consequences. At SOLO, we want to promote good housing providers and good tenants. If there is a place for RateTheLandloard in this landscape, they’ll have to make a great deal of changes to gain some legitimacy.
We’ve seen these types of tools come and go. SOLO Ontario reached out the website creators for comment but received no response.
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