Rating
Students are asked to rate their own housing experience on 8 indicators. In each case the student are presented with a 1 to 5 scale. The 8 ratings are:
- The signing and letting process
- The landlord provided good customer service
- The landlord dealt with repairs effectively
- The property is safe and secure
- My House feels like home
- The property is good value for money
- The moving out process was good
- The landlord handled my deposit fairly
There is an opportunity for additional comments to be made subject to a 140 character limit.
Submitting, moderating and replying to reviews
As you will see this is an attempt to encourage students to share positive and negative views they have. All reviews will have a right of response once the review has been moderated by our expert team. Furthermore students will be restricted to submitting only one review and will have to make a declaration that it is honest and truthful and that they have lived in the property.
Rate Your Landlord is committed to giving landlords a right of response. Comments and general impressions can be answered to and landlords can make any general comments they wish under their right of reply. As students are limited to 140 characters, so are landlords. There will be moderation of comments, and any longer than 140 characters will simply be cut off at the character limit.
Once a review is submitted landlords will be automatically notified via email or SMS (if requested), with a link to reply to the review within a given timescale.
We want to be open and transparent about the moderation and right of reply systems. To that end, the moderation procedures by which we judge reviews and replies are available to view below.
Good landlords
We firmly believe that Unipol Code landlords have nothing to fear from this scheme and in fact will provide many of you with good testimonials and marketing material that will help students to make more informed choices and positively choose to rent from an accredited provider. This process will see the reviewing of all landlords of which some will not be using any of Unipol’s services.
Encouraging your tenants to take part
You should encourage your current tenants to take part before they leave their current contract with you. This can be done by visiting and sharing the following link:
www.rateyourlandlord.co.uk
Moderation Procedure
Rate Your Landlord is a joint venture between Unipol Student Homes and Leeds University Union.
In submitting a review to the site:
- reviews must come from students and no one else
- if there is reason to believe that the review has been provided by an owner/agents the review will not be published
- review comments and any right of reply are restricted to 140 characters.
Student reviewers:
- can only review the person or company they pay rent to, and no-one else
- can only supply one review per landlord per academic year (with the year running from September 1st to August 31st)
- can only reflect their own opinions and not the opinions of others
- cannot include house numbers or personal data
- cannot use any profanities (swear words or vulgar language).
Students are urged to make reviews as specific as possible to be of most use to other students.
All messages can be traced and in the event of the facility being abused action will be taken.
Rate Your Landlord operates an active policy against discrimination and takes action against anyone who attempts to discriminate on the basis of disability, gender, sexuality, race, age, religion or belief or sexual orientation. Reviews or replies that are in contradiction to this policy will not be approved and action may be taken.
Moderation of Content
All reviews submitted by students to Rate Your Landlord are moderated by a small team of trained staff and reviews will either be amended to comply with the moderation protocol, approved or rejected.
a) Discussion of any illegal activities will be removed and may be passed to the relevant authorities.
b) Allegations of criminality or illegality may be passed to a regulator or authority.
c) If the review is rejected the student will be emailed to say that the review did not meet the moderation protocol and the review will not be forwarded to the landlord.
d) Landlords have a right of reply to an accepted review (the term landlords also refers to the landlord’s representative if a managing or letting agent). The student will be told once the review has been received that it will be sent to the landlord and the landlord will be sent the moderated review for any reply.
e) After five working days whether or not the landlord has exercised their right of reply, the review will go live. Landlords can still post a right of reply after the five days.
f) All reviews and replies are confidential to the parties until they go live. Once live they will remain on the website for 3 years when they will be removed.
g) If the review and response are contradictory both parties will be asked if they stand by their comments and if so the review and reply will go live as they stand. Either the reviewer or the landlord can request that their review or comments should not go live or that, once live, they should be removed and this will be undertaken.
h) If there are a large number of amendments that need to be made to a review or right of reply to make it suitable for publishing, it will be rejected.