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A pair of tenants who met on Reddit launched a website last week that lets tenants rate their landlords. Both of the volunteers running Rate The Landlord are based in Ontario, Canada and the site has quickly garnered about 400 landlord reviews.

Tenants applying for apartments often have to divulge personal financial information, submit themselves to credit checks and in some cases have to provide reference letters from previous landlords. Yet tenants often know very little about the person they’re renting from.

Rate The Landlord began with 50 reviews pooled in a spreadsheet and received about 150 more reviews the first day after it went live, one of the site’s founders told Motherboard. It is the most recent attempt by renters to insert more transparency in a rental process that has a huge power imbalance in favor of landlords.

The site comes as a housing crisis roils the US and Canada. As prices have risen and  landlords have leveraged a lack of affordable units, tenant unions and eviction defense have seen renewed resurgence. Tenant-centered websites like JustFix have emerged that allow users to trace their buildings’ owner and request repairs. Rate The Landlord is focused on giving renters more information before they sign a lease. 

The site is anonymous; users just need to submit the name of their landlord or property management company and the city where they’re based. They’re prompted to leave a rating between 1 and 5 for Repair, Health and Safety, Rental Stability, Tenant Privacy and Respect, and a written review.

One of the site’s creators, R.—they requested anonymity due to angry criticism of the website—said the idea emerged from bad rental experiences. For example, a broken heater was starting to smoke and left burn marks on their wall. When they and their roommates facetimed their Toronto landlord to show him the issue, he chided them for the burn marks and didn’t believe the radiator was broken. They went without heat for two weeks during that winter, R. said. 

When R. told friends about the problem, they responded with horror stories that were worse. “That got me started kind of wondering why we tolerate this dynamic where landlords have all the power and tenants have little power,” R. told Motherboard.

About a year ago, R. began posting the idea for a landlord rating website onto various subreddits. There were rating websites for doctors, restaurants, and retail stores, and so a site for rating landlords was only apt.

“You can almost look up anything, but for some reason landlords have been exempt from this process,” they told Motherboard.

A lot of Reddit users expressed initial interest and R. started a Discord server dedicated to the project, which began with about 50 reviews collected on a spreadsheet. The project was dormant for a while. When it started up again, creating the website came down to R.—a PhD student without a coding background—and one developer who now helps run the site who now helps run the site. 

When Rate The Landlord launched last week, R.’s inbox immediately started filling up. They said that most of the feedback has been positive, but they’ve also heard from landlords and their supporters who are angry that they could be rated like any other small business.

“There's people who have this perception that we're starting a blacklist and we want to go after landlords,” R. said. “Personally, I haven't seen any arguments as to how it's different” than rating other businesses, they added.

Rate The Landlord was also criticized by Reddit users worried that it put tenants in the crosshairs of retaliatory landlords. “Why would someone risk outing themselves on your site versus just joining the local tenants council?” one user asked.

R. said they’ve had conversations with their collaborator about how to limit potential blowback for tenants. To that end, before posting a review, users must check a box that reads “while the review is anonymous, it may still be linked back to me. Finally, I understand that Rate The Landlord recommends leaving a review after my tenancy is over and that doing otherwise is my decision.”

R. said Rate the Landlord received a message from one tenant who changed their mind about publicly criticizing their landlord. The review was removed.

There are plenty of consumer websites to rate professors, restaurants and private companies, but landlord rating websites have been rare, limited in scope, or temporary. Openigloo allows prospective tenants to look up a buildings’ history of maintenance violations, check ownership and post and read reviews of landlords, but this feature is tied to reviews of individual buildings that could change hands between landlords over time. The site was initially NYC-focused but has expanded to the rest of the US.

A website called WYL allows tenants to rate landlords (or “housing providers” as the site calls them) but does not appear to be in heavy use. An older—and similarly named—website called Rate My Landlord facilitates reviews, but it’s not clear that the site, which began in 2005, is still being updated. (R. said she’s reached out to Rate My Landlord about collaborating or combining their websites but hasn’t heard back.)

Another landlord rating website, Good Neighbour, ran for 7 years and is now no longer accepting new reviews. In a blog post, the site’s operator said it was a cost issue and a result of the projects’ inherent unprofitability.  “While we empathize with rental issues, there is no immediate benefit to creating accountability,” the site’s owner, Drew Minns, wrote.

Allia Mohamed, co-founder and CEO of Openigloo told Motherboard that renters have long been asking for a database on landlords but have had few options. Openigloo was similarly founded out of a desire to provide transparency for tenants who often have to disclose lots of private information to secure a place to live. 

“Landlords ask renters for bank statements, credit checks, pay stubs…renters don't get much information in return,” she said.

Mohamed said that one of the concerns about the site early on is that reviews tend to skew negative: people are less likely to leave a review after a good experience than a bad one. But she said Openigloo splits about even: around 50 percent of tenants recommend their buildings to others, she said.

Mohamed said Openigloo gets positive responses from landlords who want to know what tenants are experiencing. “Most landlords want to tap in to tenant feedback,” she said.

 “I'm super excited that this space is starting to get attention and I think it's something that tenants have talked about for decades,” Mohamed said.

Both Openigloo and Rate The Landlord require that the reviews stay pertinent to the landlords’ operation of the property and shouldn’t be personal. R. says they check reviews to make sure they meet the site’s standards.

R. said that due to requests, Rate The Landlord may soon allow users from the UK to leave reviews. They also want to partner with tenant unions and use the site as a resource guiding people to join tenant unions. 

They say they are open to receiving donations, but the site is volunteer-run for now. “We are very kind of against the idea of benefiting financially in any way from this site at this point,” R. said.

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