Bronte Media

One of the most frequent questions I got when we launched Homethinking this week was “What will you do if someone writes something bad about a realtor and the realtor doesn’t like it?”

As consumer’s publish more information online, the issue will become ever more important.

Ernest Hemmingway once said that “all you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.”

One site that does a great job of enforcing credibility of the reviews is Citimove.com, a removalist bidding and review site. They seem to check all sorts of things like email address and IP address. Design wise the site looks like it is trapped in 1996 but still it is an incredibly useful resource. One fascinating thing they have done is to put the bidding proposal online. So after the job is finished the quote/project spec gets put online. It’s great context for when you are reading “this guy is great” type comments. Incredibly, Service magic haven’t done this too.

As for Homethinking, we ask for the address of the house the reviewer sold with the realtor and the approximate price range. We don’t disclose that anywhere on the site but we use that to run an audit against the county records to see if that house was indeed sold for that approximate price range. That adds another step of authentication, but it still is an issue that we’ll continue to grapple with. That said, the reviews from the beginning will be a whole lot more credible than the category reviews of say Insiderpages and Judy’s Book in their real estate category.

If you are hoping to establish credibility about others through reviews, sites will have to take many steps themselves to become credible in the minds of users.