Reviews policy

Homeowners whose property the manager looks after now (current client) or looked after before (former client). Reviews are about the owner’s experience of the manager, not guest stays. You can’t review your own business, a competitor, or a business you’re connected to.

You need a working, permanent email address. We don’t accept temporary (disposable) inboxes, or addresses on the manager’s own website domain.

• an overall rating from 1 to 5 stars;
• optional ratings for cleanliness, financial reporting and payouts, maintenance, responsiveness and guest service (skip any that don’t apply);
• a title and the review itself;
• the area the property is in (never a street address), how long the manager has looked after it, and whether you’re a current or former client.

Your name is shown as first name and last initial. Your email address is never shown or shared.

Every published review carries one label, so readers know how much was checked:

• Email confirmed: the reviewer confirmed their email address by clicking a link. It shows a real person wrote it, not that they worked with the manager.
• Invited by the manager: the reviewer came through the manager’s own invite link and confirmed their email. Managers can invite all their owners; invited reviews are checked the same way and are never filtered to show only good ones.
• Owner verified: the reviewer also uploaded private evidence of the relationship, such as an owner statement or a contract extract, and a person on our team checked it. Only our team sees the evidence. We never publish it or share it with the manager, and we delete it 30 days after checking (straight away if it isn’t enough).

• One review per email address per manager in any 12 months.
• After you confirm your review we email you a private link. You can edit your review with it for 30 days after you sent it. Edited reviews are checked again before they go live and show “Edited”.
• You can ask us to remove your own review at any time (see below).

We take these steps on every review, as UK and EU consumer law expects:

• email confirmation, a bot check, and limits on how many reviews one connection or address can send;
• temporary email addresses and addresses on the manager’s own domain are refused;
• a second review of the same manager from the same connection is flagged for a person to check;
• if a manager receives 5 or more reviews within 24 hours, every new review of them is held for a person to check;
• an automated check (using Anthropic’s Claude) looks for spam, possible defamation, personal data, links and near-duplicate reviews. Links and phone numbers are removed automatically, and anything flagged goes to a person;
• anyone can report a review with the “Report this review” link under it.

We check reviews before they’re published, usually within 2 working days. We don’t publish reviews that:

• aren’t about a homeowner’s own experience with the manager;
• contain personal data (phone numbers, addresses, guests’ or staff names), hate, threats or obscenity;
• are fake, paid for, incentivised, or written by someone connected to the business or a competitor;
• make allegations of crimes we can’t reasonably check (we may ask for evidence or remove the claim).

We don’t edit a review’s meaning. We may remove personal data, links or a line that breaks this policy, and say so.

A manager’s score is the average of their published reviews. No score is shown until a manager has 3 published reviews; before that you see the reviews without a number. A category average is shown once 3 reviews have rated that category.

Where reviews affect the order of managers, we use a Bayesian average: every manager starts from a neutral 3.4 stars counted as 3 reviews, so one 5-star review can’t jump ahead of many good ones (see how ranking works). On a profile you choose the order of reviews: newest first or highest rated first. Reviews are never filtered by rating.

Managers can’t pay to remove, hide or reorder reviews, on any plan. Ratings come only from published reviews. Paid plans don’t change ratings, scores or organic ranking.

Managers who have claimed their listing can post one public reply to each review. Replies follow the same rules as reviews: no personal data about the owner and no threats.

If you’re the manager and believe a review breaks this policy (for example, the reviewer was never your client), dispute it from your dashboard with your reasons and any evidence, or email hello@vrmatlas.com. Evidence is private and deleted 30 days after the decision.

We may hide the review while we check and may ask the reviewer for evidence. We decide within 10 working days: the review is removed if the reviewer can’t show a genuine relationship or it breaks this policy; otherwise it stays. Every step and decision is logged, and we email you the outcome with our reasons.

Either side can appeal a decision once by replying to our decision email within 14 days with any new information. A different person from our team reviews the appeal, and that decision is final on VRM Atlas. This doesn’t affect your legal rights.

Reviewers can ask us to remove or update their own review at any time by emailing hello@vrmatlas.com from the address they used. See also our privacy notice.