How We Verify Landlord Ratings on Judge My Landlord

A landlord review platform is only useful if the reviews are real. Anyone can write "my landlord stole my deposit" — but the platforms that future renters trust are the ones that put real work into separating honest tenants from fake ones.

Here's exactly how that works on Judge My Landlord — the verification you go through to leave a review, how disputes get resolved, and what we do when something looks off.

Step 1: Account verification

Before you can leave a review, you have to verify your identity. That doesn't mean we publish your name — by default we do, but you can toggle to anonymous. It means we know there's a real person behind the review, not a competitor or a bot.

• Email verification on a real address (no disposable mail services)
• Phone verification for accounts that want to leave multiple reviews
• Optional .edu verification for students reviewing off-campus housing (badges your review as student-verified)

Step 2: Property and landlord verification

When you submit a review, you tell us the property address and the landlord's name. We verify both:

• Address goes through address normalization so the property is canonical — same building can't have a dozen different review pages
• Landlord name gets matched against existing landlord profiles; new landlords get a new profile that other tenants can also review
• If the landlord has claimed their profile, they get notified of new reviews and can respond

Step 3: Content moderation

Every review hits our moderation queue before going public. Reviewers don't see this delay — most reviews publish within minutes — but flagged ones get human review. What we look for:

• Specific factual claims without supporting context (we may ask for documentation)
• Unsupported accusations of crimes (we either ask you to rephrase or remove the specific claim)
• Names of other tenants, contractors, or family members of the landlord (we redact)
• Personal home addresses of the landlord beyond the rental property (we remove)
• Anything that reads as written by the landlord themselves bad-mouthing a tenant (we investigate)

Step 4: Landlord dispute flow

If a landlord thinks a review is fake, defamatory, or factually wrong, they can dispute it through their claimed profile. The dispute opens a formal process, not a delete button:

1. Landlord files dispute with their specific objection and any evidence
2. Reviewer gets notified and asked to provide their evidence
3. Our team reviews both sides
4. Possible outcomes: review stays (most common), review is edited for factual accuracy, or in rare cases (proven false), review is removed

Throughout the dispute, the original review stays live — landlords can't pause reviews by filing a dispute. They have to actually prove their case.

What we DON'T do

• We don't remove reviews just because a landlord asks
• We don't accept payment to hide or boost reviews
• We don't identify anonymous reviewers without a valid court order
• We don't let landlords pre-screen reviews before they publish

Why this matters for you as a renter

Reading reviews on a platform without verification is like reading reviews on a random Reddit thread. You don't know who wrote them, you don't know if the situation was real, and you can't tell whether the negative reviews are competitors or the positive ones are paid.

On a verified platform, every review you read came from a person whose identity we know, about a property we've canonicalized, with the landlord notified and given a chance to respond. That's what makes the rating system worth trusting.

If you've left a review and have a question about how it was handled — or you're a landlord disputing one — head to the contact page. We respond to every legitimate query within 48 hours.