Durham Students’ Union and Unipol Student Homes are launching Rate Your Landlord; a review and ratings website that allows student tenants to leave feedback about their renting experiences.

Rate Your Landlord aims to allow students to talk about their personal renting experiences and for others to view and learn from them, becoming savvy, safe and happy renters. Many students are brand new to the world of private renting, so other people's opinions can be a useful tool. Rate Your Landlord provides an open, fair and balanced forum for tenants to have their say, for landlords to respond, and for students to learn what's what in the world of renting. We want students to share both good and bad experiences. The more reviews posted, the stronger the website becomes.

• Durham University Students’ Union signed up to this site in response to students requests.
• The aim is to improve student accommodation standards for current and future students.
• Your name, or contact details, will not be published on the site.
• You can leave a review for each year you are a student.
• If you are in shared accommodation then each household member can leave a review.

We are currently in the pre-launch phase, and so are collecting student reviews at https://preview.rateyourlandlord.org.uk/; these reviews will not be published until our full launch after landlords have had their right of response (student names, or contact details, will not be shared with landlords). At this point, the reviews and responses will be available on the main Rate Your Landlord site. We aim to launch the site after the collection of 400 reviews, which we hope to be in early 2025. Students can review the properties that they live in now and have lived in for the previous 2 academic years (so 3rd years could leave 3 reviews), scoring their experience on things like efficiency, value for money and safety and security.

How the Site Works - 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 (5 the highest). 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 written comments (max 140-character). Your comments are helpful to explain your scores and so be of most use to other students.

Submitting, moderating and replying to reviews

All reviews will have a right of response once the review has been moderated by our expert team. Students will be restricted to submitting only one review per academic year 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.

Before the site’s go-live date, landlords will be notified of any reviews with an opportunity to reply (the reviewers name/contact details are never shared). Once the site is live following a review being submitted, landlords will be automatically notified via email (where available) or SMS (if requested), with a link to reply to the review within a given timescale. If any users of the website have a concern about a live review they can use the ‘report a review’ function at the side and the moderation team will investigate.

More about Rate Your Landlord

The site has been operating successfully in Leeds since 2016, followed by rollout in York, and is soon to launch in Newcastle. It has become a popular tool in the house hunting process, allowing future tenants to consider the reviews and make savvy, informed decisions, whilst driving up standards in student accommodation as landlords respond to their consumer feedback. Each year, Rate Your Landlord holds the Rate Your Landlord Awards, recognising outstanding landlords and agents and celebrating the good work already being done.

Good landlords

Rate Your Landlord provides good landlords with good testimonials and marketing material that will help students to make more informed choices and positively choose to rent from a trustworthy provider. Rate Your Landlord is also an effective tool for recognising problems with particular landlords or agents and highlights trends of consistently good and poor landlords in the Landlord Rankings area.

Moderation Procedure

In submitting a review to the site:

• Reviews must come from Durham University 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. Students are urged to make reviews as specific as possible to be of most use to other students.

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 inappropriate language).

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.

1. Discussion of any illegal activities will be removed and may be passed to the relevant authorities.
2. Allegations of criminality or illegality may be passed to a regulator or authority.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.