We just pulled a rating off our real estate agent rating site

One bad review in 100, isolated and removed

We’ve officially pulled down our first “illegitimate” review. It was actually the lowest review on the site… but that’s not why we pulled it down. (Hopefully that’s obvious, given that we’re all about the customer voice.) Here’s why we pulled it down.

The reviewer rated an agent that s/he had not actually closed a deal with… and that’s still not possible on our site without fudging the dates of purchase or sale (and by “fudging”, I mean “making them up”). So, you basically have to fake the date to leave a review if you didn’t actually close… which means that it’s an illegitimate review and has to come on down.

We went through quite a bit of deliberation and discussions prior to actually pulling the review down. Given that that was our first experience with a “true” flagged review thus far — with nearly 100 reviews on the site — we’re anticipating a LOT of hands-on work in the future as more reviews get posted and flagged. But that’s what we’re willing to do. We’ll have the discussions we need to have with the people we need to have them with, and we’ll run flagged reviews through the filters we’ve created (and recreated!). We’ll take as much time as we need to and do as much work as we need to for this reason:

To ensure that we’re sharing the honest voice of the real customer.

Plain and simple. If it’s an honest review by a real customer (who completed the transaction), then it stays up. If not, then it comes down.

(And, I mean, if we only have to deal with this small bit of drama for one in every 100 reviews, then that’s cool with me.)

~jw

Tags: fake reviews, real estate agent rating site, real estate agent reviews