Accommodation and Property Owner Rating Website

AlphaRed

In the UK after having rented in awful conditions for a year a tenant has set up a website for tenants who can use it to rate their accommodation and let other possible tenants know whether it's any good or not or just what their experience was like.

After having lived a in few dodgy accommodations myself I think this is a great idea. To have an insiders opinion before you live somewhere would be very helpful. I see a lot of posts on this site about people being unhappy with their current living conditions so I'd say a website like that has a lot of value.

I contacted them and asked would they cover Ireland as well and they said not at the moment. I think it would be great if someone set a website like this up for Ireland. http://asktenants.co.uk/

athtrasna

Sounds like a legal minefield to me. Naming and shaming would leave the host site open to legal action.

AlphaRed

athtrasna wrote: »

Sounds like a legal minefield to me. Naming and shaming would leave the host site open to legal action.

Would it not come under freedom of speech? I imagine the creators researched whether they could do it or not before they created the site.

athtrasna

UK laws are different. Naming and shaming is not permitted on boards for legal reasons. My Internet law course starts tomorrow but I'm pretty sure there's a sound legal footing for the ban

bearhugs

Would it not be similar to rate my teacher or lecturer? Not that I particularly agree with the posters being able to post anonymously, but teachers/lecturers were named.

The_Morrigan

There is no such thing as freedom of speech when it comes to defamation. If you are responsible for a website the buck stops with you with regards to any lawsuit and Internet trolls could bankrupt you in days.
How could you verify the content of the reviews? How could you stop someone giving a bad review to ruin a landlord or to use it for their own gain.

awec

The_Morrigan wrote: »

There is no such thing as freedom of speech when it comes to defamation. If you are responsible for a website the buck stops with you with regards to any lawsuit and Internet trolls could bankrupt you in days.
How could you verify the content of the reviews? How could you stop someone giving a bad review to ruin a landlord or to use it for their own gain.

How does it differ from the likes of TripAdvisor etc?

Not that I disagree with you, I'm just curious. There are plenty of review sites out there for all manner of products and services.

The_Morrigan

awec wrote: »

How does it differ from the likes of TripAdvisor etc?

Not that I disagree with you, I'm just curious. There are plenty of review sites out there for all manner of products and services.

Same as here. If they step over a line edits and deletions occur.

The_Conductor

For the record- I am personally aware of 3 such sites attempting to launch here in Ireland since Jan 2014 (and I'm sure there were attempts before that). Some of the budding entrepreneurs even had threads on this forum, seeking advice. One managed to launch- but was closed down in less than 10 days. I don't think the other 2 actually launched a public facing website- though they did have test sites up and running.

Its something which several people have explored, and dropped like a hot potato. You are opening yourself to a whole world of trouble.

A more satisfactory solution- would be better publication of PRTB tribunal reports- and a removal of tenant's and landlord's rights to have their own tribunal reports removed from public view (which quite unbelievably the PRTB appear to be happy to facilitate at the moment).

seamus

I think the PRTB should provide a reference check facility where both landlords and tenants can submit a simple check which returns the number of PRTB disputes the other party has been in, the nature of the dispute (just categorised as "Arrears", "Landlord breach", etc), the date it was raised and closed, and the outcome.

This could do away with quite a bit of messing, and in the same way that you can get BER certs, tenants or landlords could obtain public reference records for themselves, available for anyone to view with a reference number. For landlords in particular this would bring in a lot more confidence in renting, and tenants would very easily be able to weed out the iffy landlords from the decent ones.

Michael D Not Higgins

seamus wrote: »

I think the PRTB should provide a reference check facility where both landlords and tenants can submit a simple check which returns the number of PRTB disputes the other party has been in, the nature of the dispute (just categorised as "Arrears", "Landlord breach", etc), the date it was raised and closed, and the outcome.

This could do away with quite a bit of messing, and in the same way that you can get BER certs, tenants or landlords could obtain public reference records for themselves, available for anyone to view with a reference number. For landlords in particular this would bring in a lot more confidence in renting, and tenants would very easily be able to weed out the iffy landlords from the decent ones.

As The Conductor mentioned above, the PRTB are happy to remove tribunal findings from their website, so I doubt you could have a comprehensive database.

There's also the case of which Paddy Murphy or Joe Bloggs are you searching for when the system spits out 10 results. Would the PRTB have the justification under the data protection legislation to collect indentifiable information on people and release it to anyone querying their database?