Renterly Review Policy

Renterly does not review or approve reviews before they appear. That means the words are yours, and so is the legal responsibility for them.

Canadian defamation law works differently from what many people expect, and two features matter here:

Falsity is presumed. If a landlord sues over a review, they do not have to prove the statement was false. You have to prove it was true. That burden sits on you, possibly years later, when you may no longer have the emails, photos or receipts.

There is no minimum audience. A statement doesn't need to reach thousands of people to be actionable. One reader is enough.

None of this means you should stay quiet. It means you should write carefully — and a carefully written review is also a more useful one.

An opinion — how you felt, whether you'd recommend the place, your judgment about value — is generally protected, provided it's clearly opinion and rests on facts you actually state.

A statement of fact — something that is either true or false — has to be true, and you have to be able to show it.

The trap is that adding "in my opinion" or "I feel like" doesn't convert a factual claim into an opinion. "In my opinion, the landlord stole my deposit" is still an accusation of theft. The law looks at the substance, not the framing.

A useful test: could someone check whether this is true? If yes, it's a fact, and you need to be able to back it up.

Do this

Be specific and dated. "I requested a repair to the bathroom ceiling leak on 3 March 2025 and it was fixed on 12 June" tells the reader something real.

Describe your own experience only. What you saw, what you were told, what you paid, what happened to you.

Separate what happened from how you felt about it. State the facts, then give your view of them. That's the structure that keeps opinion protected.

Keep your records. Emails, texts, photos, receipts, notices, LTB or RTB documents. You don't have to submit these with your review, but if your review is ever challenged, they're what protects you.

You can upload a lease if you want to. It helps us record who the landlord was at that address. We read the landlord name and dates off it, then delete the document once the landlord change is processed — we don't keep leases, and we never show them to landlords. It's optional and free.

Use the structured fields. The rating scales and yes/no questions carry most of the useful information and carry almost none of the risk. The free text box is for context, not for the whole story.

Examples

Notice what the right-hand column does: it's more specific, more useful to a reader, and far easier to defend.

Never include

Anyone's name except the landlord or property manager, in that role. No other tenants, no neighbours, no building staff, no family members, no children. If a person isn't the party responsible for the tenancy, they don't belong in a review.

Personal information about anyone — addresses beyond the property itself, phone numbers, email addresses, workplaces, immigration status, health information, family circumstances, financial details.

Allegations of criminal conduct. Theft, fraud, assault, harassment as a criminal matter. These are among the most serious things you can say about someone and among the hardest to prove. If a crime occurred, report it to police. Don't adjudicate it in a review.

Claims about protected characteristics — race, religion, ethnic origin, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, family status, age, source of income. This applies both to accusations of discrimination and to any description of the landlord on these grounds. If you believe you experienced discrimination, a human rights tribunal is the venue; a review is not.

Anything you heard second-hand. "The previous tenant told me…" and "I heard that…" carry the same legal weight as saying it yourself, with none of the evidence.

Speculation about motive or character. Why you think they did something, what you think they're really up to, what kind of person you think they are.

Anything about a dispute that is currently before a tribunal or court. Wait for the outcome, then describe the outcome.

Also not allowed

• Reviews of a property you never rented or lived in
• More than one review per tenancy (you can update your existing review)
• Reviews written by landlords, competitors, or anyone with an undisclosed interest
• Content offered or written in exchange for payment or benefit
• Threats, harassment, slurs, or abuse
• Attempts to identify or contact other reviewers

Every review has a Report this review link beneath it. Anyone can use it — no account needed — including the landlord it concerns. You can also email [email protected].

We aim to triage reports within 48 hours. Where a report identifies a specific factual claim as inaccurate, our default is to hide the review while we look at it — hiding is not a finding that you did anything wrong.

We may contact you and ask what your review was based on. You are not required to send us documents, but a review we cannot get any substantiation for is more likely to be removed.

Outcomes: the review stays, the review is edited or partly redacted, or the review is removed. We will tell you which and why.

Repeat issues may result in suspension. Reviews that appear coordinated, retaliatory, or written by someone with no tenancy at the property will be removed.

Any landlord can reply publicly to a review of their property, with their response shown next to the review at equal prominence. We think that's fairer than a one-sided record, and it usually resolves disagreements better than a takedown.

Replying requires a verified claim on the property, so that a reply genuinely comes from the landlord it appears to come from — an impersonated reply would be worse for everyone than no reply. Establishing that someone legally owns a building means registry searches and identity checks, so there's a one-time fee covering that work.

That fee buys identity checking and nothing else. Landlords cannot pay to remove, hide, reorder or demote a review. There is no price for this and there never will be. Reporting a review is free for everyone, verified or not.

Your review is published with no name on it. We never ask for your name, so there is no name for us to publish, leak or hand over.

What we do hold is your email address, and a record of how you submitted. The email confirms you're a real person and stops someone submitting repeatedly about one property. The record — the IP address and network you sent it from, plus behavioural and technical information about the submission — helps us spot coordinated or automated ones. We don't fingerprint your device and we don't track you across other websites.

We never show any of it to landlords — paid subscription or not — and we don't give it out on request from anyone.

But we can't promise absolute anonymity, and we'd rather say so now. That information could, combined with records held by others, be used to identify you. A court can order us to hand over what we hold, and if that happens we have to comply. We will tell you before we disclose anything, unless the law prevents us from doing so.

Write your review as though your name might one day be attached to it. That's also, in practice, the discipline that keeps a review accurate.

You can edit or delete your review at any time from your account.

If circumstances change — a dispute is resolved, a repair is finally made, an order is overturned — updating your review is the right thing to do, and it makes the record more useful for everyone.

[email protected]