Apartment review

October 24, 2007 12:54 PM

Is there such a thing as a review site for apartment buildings? I'm thinking something like Tripadvisor or Expedia for apartment rentals.
posted by catburger to Home & Garden (9 answers total)

yes. Here and here. Probably plenty others, too. I remember using one back in 2004 or thereabouts. Could have been one of these, but I can't remember the name.
posted by birdlady at 12:57 PM on October 24, 2007

In Toronto we have this and this.
posted by SassHat at 1:01 PM on October 24, 2007

Yelp lists apartment buildings too.
posted by mrunderhill at 1:43 PM on October 24, 2007

See the above links; the only problem is that as far as I can tell, the only people who actually use ApartmentRatings.com etc. are A) really pissed-off tenants who hate the world and everything in it, and B) apartment owners/employees. The reviews are more useless than the ones at RateMyProfessor.com ...
posted by wintersweet at 2:09 PM on October 24, 2007

i've skimmed a few apartment rating sites and i've seen the same thing that wintersweet mentions. you only rate apartments you've had a shitty experience in, people don't tend to go leave a raving review. so you get a pretty skewed view of apartments/managers. at least i hope so. otherwise there are a shitton of horrible apartments buildings.
posted by misanthropicsarah at 3:42 PM on October 24, 2007

ApartmentRatings.com is the one I always use. As wintersweet notes, you can mostly discount positive reviews as shills (although if one seems unusually detailed and mentions negatives as well as positives, it might be real -- I have written a few like that myself). What you are really looking for on these sites is a complex that doesn't have too many recent negative reviews. Both "too many" and "recent" are important -- everywhere has a few malcontents, so you want to see how many units there are and figure out what proportion of residents are unhappy enough to complain. Also, management does change, so a place that was great can go downhill quickly, and vice versa, so stick to the most recent year or so. Warning signs include a lot of complaints about the same thing (e.g. mold) and management changes in the last few months -- it's hard to tell what they'll be like.
posted by kindall at 4:00 PM on October 24, 2007

I wouldn't trust websites like ApartmentRatings.com. When I moved into my apartment a year ago, I looked on those websites, and read a lot of very negative reviews about the building. I then realized that a friend lived in the same building, and showed him these reviews-- he told me that they were fairly inaccurate, so trusting him I moved in.

A year later, I am very happy with the building. Most of the negative reviews were completely factually inaccurate (there were statements about cars getting stolen from the parking garage, parties in the courtyard until 5am, etc), and I'm glad I didn't trust the site. The housing market in Seattle is very competitive, and I'm guessing the reviews were just planted by rival apartment owners.

If the buildings you're looking at are on yelp, that would be more trustworthy, just because you can see the face associated with the profile (if one person has written two dozen apartment reviews, you'll know there's something up).

Best of luck!
posted by stilly at 5:01 PM on October 24, 2007

Try entering the name of the apartment complex and/or the management company in quotes, example :"Ironside Apartments". You will find anything that has been in the news recently and Yahoo Local might come up if anyone entered comments about the place or gave it a star rating.
posted by 45moore45 at 7:42 PM on October 24, 2007

Oh, sure, going by the complaints on a site like ApartmentRatings may rule out some perfectly good places. But the goal isn't to find every possible place you could enjoy living. Collateral damage isn't important.
posted by kindall at 9:15 AM on October 26, 2007