Horton and Garton call for estate agents to use Google reviews after widespread ‘gaming’ of Trustpilot
The Times investigation singled out Foxtons and Purple Bricks as manipulating reviews from consumers.
Estate agencies have been accused of gaming Britain’s biggest consumer feedback website by paying it to help gain better review scores.
An impartial analysis by The Times of almost 200,000 reviews on Trustpilot has uncovered that some estate agencies are jumping from a handful of bad responses one month to hundreds of positive reviews the next. The Times published the information in Friday’s paper stating: “The biggest (estate agencies) pay Trustpilot, which generated revenues of almost £40m in 2017, tens of thousands of pounds a year to access its marketing services. The agencies can use the company’s technology to filter the reviews they place on their own website or corporate Facebook pages, allowing customers to read only favourable posts.
“Trustpilot admits that its technology allows subscribing companies the chance to filter out bad reviews. Critics of the company say the findings show how corporate subscribers are able to use its marketing and reputation management tools to manipulate their ratings.”
Their corporate subscribers can send unlimited email invitations with Trustpilot’s logo and embedded technology to make it easy to post reviews; these can be sent before clients have had the full service experience – for example, sellers or landlords who have just listed their properties as opposed to those who have actually sold or let with the company. These invitations to review sometimes include incentives to post a review, such as the chance to win prizes.
The analysis found that in August 2016 Foxtons received just five reviews on Trustpilot, with an average score of 2.2 stars out of five, but the following month they received 467 reviews with almost 90 per cent generating five stars. The online agent Purplebricks, which cut revenue forecasts last month leading to plummeting shares, has over 60,000 Trustpilot reviews with an average score of 9.5 out of ten.
However, Countryside, one of Britain’s largest estate agent groups with brands including Hamptons and John D Wood, has only 123 reviews and a score of one out of ten. Countrywide is not a paying corporate subscriber to Trustpilot but Purplebricks is.
The article also highlights several small businesses which have been critical of Trustpilot’s seeming inability to remove malicious, fake reviews.
Paul Cooney, Horton and Garton’s Chiswick Sales Director, notes: “Unlike some of our competitors, we don’t offer incentives to our clients for positive testimonials.
“We encourage every seller, buyer, landlord and tenant to leave a Google review for us which has resulted in a combined total of just under 200 reviews across our two West London offices and an average rating of 4.9 stars out of 5. The goal is to completely change locals’ perceptions of our industry.”
While John Horton, Founder and Director of the Hammersmith and Shepherds Bush office, adds: “We’re extremely proud of our client feedback and want every person who encounters our team to have a seamless experience from the first email or phone call through to the day they hand over or receive their keys. We love what we do and our enthusiasm, professionalism and intelligent approach shines through in our client testimonials. The public, open platform that Google provides serves as the most honest portal available.”
Read our Chiswick and our Hammersmith and Shepherds Bush testimonials here. Our service will move you. Can we help? Get in touch with our W4 office or W6 and W12 office today.
