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FAQs for Builders and Vendors

We allow, and encourage, all builders to respond in a constructive and respectful manner to reviews left on their profile pages. As per our Guidelines, builder responses to a review must be respectful and constructive- and may not contain abusive, hateful, threatening, or harassing content. Responses that violate these Guidelines, or contain other information disallowed by our site, such as links to external sites or resources and personally identifying information about the reviewer, may be removed or have their content masked with the following text [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN].

We view the builder response option as a key aspect of our Reviews Program in that it allows the builder and reviewer to engage in a constructive and respectful dialogue intended to open up lines of communication and provide additional context and clarification. For guidance on forming well-crafted responses, builders may access their Portal to find suggestions on leaving a response via our platform.

We understand a negative review can be upsetting. As a reviews platform, we provide an opportunity for builders to address misunderstandings or issues. A builder’s response to a negative user review has the potential to result in a positive experience for both builder and reviewer, as well as demonstrate to other property buyers a great customer service experience. Please see our guide to addressing negative reviews as well as this blog post about the positive outcomes of negative reviews.

No, builders are sent a notice only after a review has been published by our team. To avoid confusion from spam or reviews that do not pass our QA process, no notifications are sent upon a review submission.

Visitors to our sites are free to submit reviews to our QA process on whichever property they choose. As an unbiased, user-driven reviews platform, we do not ask for consent from the builder before a review is published. All builders are treated equally in this respect and cannot opt out of receiving reviews. In this way, our reviewers generate valuable content that help our other community of property buyers make informed decisions.

Like all online reviews platforms, we endeavor to provide our users with project directories that are as comprehensive as possible. As such, our policy is not to remove project listings from our sites unless: (i) the project listing does not fit within one of the existing property categories (or “directories”); (ii) the vendor/builder can provide evidence that project is no longer actively being marketed and/or sold to the public; or (iii) the listing or profile fails to comply with our guidelines.

In our ongoing efforts to improve our service, we periodically audit our reviews database. And, as our ability to vet these reviews improves, we may find past reviews that still contain entirely valid content that we can now publish. These reviews will display in the order of their submission date. Because there is currently no time stamp on verified reviews, we treat these past reviews the same as all other verified reviews submissions. We publish them exactly as they were originally submitted.

If a review was not removed following your investigation request, this means that during the course of our investigation our team found the flagged review to be in compliance with our site guidelines. While we cannot provide further details about the investigatory process, we can confirm that the reviews team devotes significant time and effort to investigating every escalated review and evaluating the review against our site guidelines.

A review cannot be removed simply because it is referencing features that are no longer actively supported. If the review was valid at the time of submission, it is reflective of the user’s experience with that project at that point in time. While recent reviews are more likely to reflect a project’s most current set of facilities and most relevant experiences, it is important for our buyers to consider how reviews about a builder have progressed over time as the project as developed.

Our site does not share the personal contact information provided by the reviewer along with a submission to any builder and vendor, though certain non-private information such as name and company may be publicly displayed alongside a review to provide important context to our site users (except in cases where reviewers have opted to submit an “anonymous” review.

Yes, we consider all information when investigating a flagged review. However, we are unable to act as an intermediary between vendors and reviewers. As an unbiased reviews platform, we cannot make decisions based on interactions that took place between a builder and a reviewer outside of our site. Because we are not able to validate private communications, such as email exchanges or phone conversations that happen outside of our site, these can be unreliable. Therefore, we consider outside communications as one aspect among the many that make up our investigation.

While we understand that many builders pride themselves on knowing their customer base, there are many valid cases where a builder might not know a legitimate reviewer, based on the information provided along with a review. These cases include but are not limited to the following:

  • Property buyers who evaluate multiple tools before purchasing property. We believe these evaluative experiences (in a proof of concept) are valid experiences in their own right and thus worthy of sharing with our user community.
  • Properties that are shared by multiple users (tenants, lease holders or business units at a single company. The reviewer may not be the property owner and thus may be unknown to the builder.
  • Property purchase that are signed under a company name or a group, not by an individual.
  • Reviewers who change residence and have stayed at this property previously.
  • Users who submit under a name other than the name used on their contract with the builder. For example, “Kumar” rather than “Jayakumar”, or the use of a maiden name.
  • Users who enter an alternative name, such as initials or a shortened name, or a parent or sister company, rather than the name used on their builders base.
  • Users who opt to use an abbreviated or screen name to maintain their anonymity.
  • Reviewers who log in with Facebook or Google but choose to remain anonymous. These users have been validated by our Reviews team, but their reviews will not display any identifying information. Learn more about anonymous reviews.

As a neutral content platform, we rely on our reviewers to provide accurate and honest descriptions of their property buying experiences. In keeping with our efforts to provide the broadest possible picture of the Real Estate industry, we try not to limit the types of experiences that are shared on our site. Because any property buyer has a valid experience to share, a reviewer is not required to be the account owner or to have been in direct contact with the builder.

Builders are permitted to ask their customers for reviews and offer nominal incentives for doing so. Propryte also sends out periodic email campaigns asking for a property review in exchange for an incentive amount.

  • These incentives must be offered to all reviewers, regardless of whether they leave a positive or negative review.
  • Builders found using incentives to influence the content of a review will result in the review’s removal.
  • Builders may notify Propryte if they source reviews in exchange for an incentive.

Most of our reviews come from users/owners posting reviews directly on our site or in response to our in-house reviews campaigns (which are targeted to our own database of site members). Users are added to our database voluntarily as they leave reviews on our site, sign up for our mailing lists, or phone our in-house sales teams. While visiting our site or when responding to our reviews campaigns, users are free to review any property they wish. We may then email these users about reviews from time to time based on their past interaction with one of our sites.

We encourage interchanges between builder and reviewers via our review response mechanism. Builders should not contact a reviewer, either directly or indirectly, with the goal of getting a review removed or edited. Propryte does NOT condone, and has a zero tolerance policy for, any threats or bullying of our reviewers.

Though no fraud may have been intended, when a third party submits a review on a reviewer’s behalf, we have no way to determine whether the content was submitted with the reviewer’s consent or if the original content has been modified in any manner. When we identify a customer review submitted by a builder, we will disable the review. The original reviewer is encouraged, following such disablement, to submit a review in their own right directly to our site.

All reviews for all builders across all directories are subject to the same Quality Assurance process, regardless of whether or not they are a paying for premium listing. We make every effort to ensure that our reviews team is completely unbiased and unmotivated by revenue. This is one of the primary reasons the reviews team is separate from the sales and marketing teams.

We believe that providing a full catalog of property across a variety of categories is more important to our users than removing a listing altogether. Instead, we look to penalize builder for fraudulent activity in other ways, such as flagging their profile for fraud as a warning to property buyers. In this way, we provide valuable information to property buyers that would not be evident were we to simply remove the profile from our catalog.

We do not facilitate arbitration. We are not mediators and cannot intervene in disputes between our reviewers and builders. If you feel you are being harassed or threatened, we suggest you contact applicable law enforcement.

If a negative review does not meet our guidelines, please flag the review for investigation through the portal. Our team will investigate accordingly as per our standard investigation procedures.

Reviews are by default sorted by Most Helpful to property buyers, driven by our proprietary algorithm reflecting the depth and quality of the review, recency of experience, and other factors. As a neutral reviews platform, the star rating of the review is not considered in the “Most Helpful” ranking, and there is currently no voting mechanism that would allow site visitors to influence the ranking. This default sorting algorithm has been applied across every product profile for every vendor at the site level. Users of the site may choose to change the sort to other options, such as Most Recent or Highest Rating.

When a review is submitted, it goes through our QA process, conducted by a team dedicated to ensuring published reviews meet our guidelines. We aim to publish reviews within a few business days of being submitted, though during busy times, the delay may be longer. Builders are then notified when reviews are published.

As a neutral reviews platform, we endeavor to provide our users with reviews directories that are as comprehensive as possible. As such, our policy does not allow builder to opt out of our reviews program. Whether or not builders choose to participate in collecting reviews, we will publish reviews we receive about any project listed in our catalogs, as long as it passes our QA process and meets our guidelines.

Events and conferences are a great opportunity to generate reviews and these reviews are eligible to be published, as long as they are submitted by the reviewer and conform to our published Community Guidelines. Builders must alert our teams prior to any event where reviews will be solicited so that our teams may provide ‘best practices’ information for collection, and supply proper links for attribution and evaluation.

No, we do not send a notice to reviewers or builders when a published review is disabled. As part of our ongoing Quality Assurance process, if we learn of a previously published review that does not comply with our published Community Guidelines, the review will be disabled. We operate as a neutral platform provider, and evaluate all content against an objective set of criteria. Because of this we cannot engage in subjective debate as to how these policies are applied, and do not send notifications of disablement.

A review being too vague or generic is a subjective determination of content quality that we are not in a position to make, since we do not evaluate the content of the review itself. However, while we will not disable a review solely on the basis of its content, we will ensure that all reviews meet the criteria outlined in our Community Guidelines. Reviews that, in our discretion, do not meet these Community Guidelines, will not be eligible for publication.

We do not endorse pricing that is posted by a reviewer, and rely on reviewers to submit accurate, publicly available information. However, as per our Reviews Guidelines, reviews must not violate any legal agreements, and a review disclosing confidential pricing details should be flagged to our attention. If a review is challenged on pricing concerns, our teams will investigate to see if the pricing is from a publicly available, validated source. Pricing information not found to be public can be removed in violation of our Community guidelines as it would be considered private information. At our discretion, we may i) mask the sensitive information from public display, or ii) disable the review entirely.

No. When submitting a review, a reviewer attests that their statement is an honest reflection of their experience. If the review was based on a bad experience, a retired product feature, or even a miscommunication or misunderstanding on the reviewer’s part, it is reflective of the user’s experience with that software, even if later action may have resolved the problem. As a product evolves, it is typical to see a shift in the nature of the reviews listed. We believe the inclusion of this history serves to increase the value to software shoppers visiting our site, as they can better understand how a product has evolved over time.

Yes, a review may mention a competitor to the project being reviewed so long as the reference is intended to add value to the review and not to deliberately promote or disparage the competitor. Reviews may contain mention of alternative projects considered or seen before or after using the project being reviewed. This additional information can help put a review into the proper context, and provide valuable information to property buyers.

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