Review policy

This is a draft for a person and a lawyer to review before anyone publishes it.

The Landlord Ratings lets tenants post reviews of landlords and of rental properties. A property can be a house, a townhouse, a condo, or an apartment. The first pages are for Nashville, Tennessee.

Who can post

You can post if you are a current or former tenant of that landlord, or of that property. The review has to be about a tenancy you were actually in.

You get one review for each tenancy. If you lived there again under a separate tenancy, that second stay can have its own review. (decision: a new tenancy can have its own review; the same tenancy cannot have two.)

You do not have to put your legal name on the page. You choose a display name, and that is what the public sees. (decision: public reviews use a display name, not a legal name.)

The person who posts should be 18 or older. (decision: posters are adults.)

Check before a review goes up

We check that the post is a real tenant review of that landlord or that property. If it is not, we flag it, and it does not go up.

We may ask for something that shows you lived there. We use that only for the check. We do not publish it. (decision: a lease page or a rent receipt is enough as an example; do not put a government ID in the review text.)

What we remove

We refuse a review, or we take it down, when any of these is true:

• The person was not a tenant of that landlord or that property.
• It names the wrong landlord or the wrong property.
• It threatens violence or physical harm. (decision: saying you will sue, or that you will contact a housing agency, is not this kind of threat.)
• It includes private information: phone numbers, email addresses, account numbers, government ID numbers, or another person's unit number.
• It is only an attack on a protected class. (decision: race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or familial status. A review that describes discrimination you say you faced is not "only an attack," and it can stay.)

We also strip private details even when the rest of the review stays. (decision: we do not publish unit numbers, including the reviewer's own unit number.)

If the tenancy is real but the review is on the wrong page, and we can tell the right landlord or property, we move the review instead of deleting it. If we cannot tell, we take it down. (decision: move it when the right page is clear.)

What we do not remove

We do not remove a review because it is negative, harsh, or poorly written. We do not remove it because the landlord disagrees with it.

How a landlord disputes a review

The landlord, or the person who manages that property, can dispute a review. (decision: other visitors cannot open a dispute.)

They can say one of three things: the reviewer was not a tenant, the property is wrong, or a specific factual claim is false. They should point to the review and the claim they mean.

The review stays up while we check. Any rating drawn from it stays up too. We take the review down during the check only if it clearly breaks the removal rules on this page.

The outcome is one of these:

• A correction, when a specific fact was wrong and the rest of the review can stand.
• A short context note from The Landlord Ratings, placed next to the review. (decision: this draft has no separate public reply thread for the landlord. The note is written by the site.)
• Removal, only if the review broke this policy.

A false detail does not, by itself, erase the whole review.

How long a dispute takes

We send a first response within 10 business days. (decision: 10 business days to first response.) That reply says we have the dispute and what we are checking.

We aim to finish within 30 business days of the dispute, unless we are waiting on the landlord or the tenant. (decision: 30 business days to an outcome.)

If the review clearly breaks the removal rules, we remove the offending part, or the whole review, without waiting out that period.

No pay-to-delete and no landlord veto

Nobody can pay The Landlord Ratings to delete a review, hide a review, or raise a rating. A landlord cannot veto a review. Disagreement goes through the dispute steps above, or it does not change the page.

We do not charge a fee to post a review, or to remove one under this policy. (decision: no fee for posting or for a removal this policy requires.)

Where to send a dispute

Until the site has a dispute form, write to disputes@thelandlordratings.com.

This page is meant to be read with the privacy draft and the terms draft.