Renterly Terms of Service

Renterly is an information service organised around rental addresses. It brings together tenant-submitted reviews and rent reports, published tribunal decisions, municipal housing records, rent-control rules and other public information.

Renterly is not:

• A consumer reporting agency. We are not registered as one, we do not furnish data to credit bureaus, and we do not provide consumer reports.
• A tenant screening service. We hold no information about any tenant and cannot be used to evaluate one.
• A source of legal advice. Nothing on the Service is legal advice. Rent-control information, tribunal summaries and tenancy rules are starting points for your own research. Confirm anything you intend to rely on with your provincial tenancy authority or a qualified adviser.
• A verifier of tenant submissions. Reviews and rent figures are what individual contributors say happened. We do not independently verify them.

You must be at least 18 years old, or the age of majority where you live, to create an account.

You are responsible for your account credentials and for activity under your account. Tell us promptly at [email protected] if you believe your account has been compromised.

You may not create an account using another person's identity, or operate multiple accounts to submit repeated content about the same property.

3.1 What you may contribute

Reviews, rent figures, and structured factual reports about a property you have personally rented or lived in.

Contributions are published without any name attached. We confirm each contribution by email before publication. See the Data Use Policy, section 1.4, for exactly what we store.

You may optionally upload a document, such as a lease, to support a contribution. We confirm the landlord name matches the property reviewed and delete the document once the confirmation is complete. Uploaded documents are never shown to landlords or made public. There is no charge for this.

3.2 Your warranties

By submitting any content, you represent and warrant that:

• You rented or lived at the property you are writing about
• Every statement of fact in your contribution is true and accurate to the best of your knowledge, and you have a reasonable basis for it
• Your contribution describes your own first-hand experience, not something you were told
• Your contribution names no person other than a landlord or property manager acting in that role
• Your contribution contains no personal information about any other individual
• You have not been paid, incentivised or induced by anyone to submit it
• You have no undisclosed interest in the property, its owner, or any competitor
• Your contribution does not infringe anyone's rights and complies with the Review Policy

3.3 Indemnity

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless Renterly, its officers, directors and employees against any claim, demand, loss, damage, cost or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising from content you submit, or from your breach of these Terms.

This applies in particular to claims in defamation. You are the author of your contribution. Renterly does not review or approve contributions before publication.

3.4 Licence you grant us

You grant Renterly a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual and irrevocable licence to host, store, reproduce, adapt, publish, translate and distribute your contribution in connection with the Service, including in aggregated or statistical form.

This licence survives deletion of your contribution only to the extent your contribution has already been incorporated into aggregate statistics from which it cannot be individually extracted. We do not retain or republish deleted individual contributions.

You retain ownership of your contribution.

3.5 We may remove content

We may remove, hide, edit or refuse any contribution at our discretion, including where it breaches the Review Policy, where we receive a credible complaint, or where we cannot obtain any substantiation for a challenged factual claim.

Hiding a contribution pending review is not a finding that you did anything wrong.

No payment ever affects this. We do not accept, and will not accept, payment to remove, hide, alter, suppress or demote any contribution or record. This applies to landlord subscribers, non-subscribers, and anyone else.

You must not:

• Use the Service, or any information from it, to make or inform a screening, tenancy, credit, employment or insurance decision about any individual
• Scrape, crawl, harvest, or bulk-extract content from the Service by automated means
• Republish, resell, or redistribute Renterly content, including any individual landlord name accessed through a signed-in account
• Attempt to identify, unmask, or contact any contributor
• Submit content on behalf of a landlord, competitor, or any undisclosed interested party
• Circumvent authentication, rate limits, or access controls
• Use the Service to harass, threaten or intimidate any person
• Impersonate any person or organisation
• Interfere with the operation or security of the Service

4.1 Access to individual landlord names

Names of individual (non-incorporated) landlords are available only to signed-in users.

Why we record them. Records name the landlord identified on them — the landlord party on a tribunal order as at the date of that order, or the landlord a tenant identifies for the period of their tenancy. Recording that name is what makes it possible to correct a record when a property changes hands. Renterly does not hold ownership registry data and makes no representation as to who owns any property at the present time. See section 6.

By accessing individual landlord names you agree that you will not republish them, index them, redistribute them, or use them for any screening or evaluative decision about any person.

Breach of this clause terminates your access immediately.

5.1 Right of reply

Any landlord may reply publicly to any review of their property. Replies appear adjacent to the review with equal prominence.

Replying requires a verified claim (section 5.2), so that a reply genuinely comes from the landlord it purports to come from.

Replies are subject to the same rules as reviews: no naming of tenants or other individuals, no personal information, no threats or harassment.

5.2 Claiming a property

Creating an account is free. Adding a property not already listed on Renterly is free.

Claiming a property already listed on Renterly requires identity verification. Verification involves manual review of documentation, and we charge a one-time fee to cover that work. It is the same fee for every property, because it is the same work. Current pricing is at renterly.ai/landlords.

The fee is charged when you submit a claim, not when it is approved. If we reject a claim, the fee is returned to your account as a credit you may spend on another property. It is not refunded to your card, because the review work has been done either way.

GST/HST is added to the fee at the rate for the province the property is in, and the total is shown before you pay. A tax invoice is issued for every purchase.

A verified claim gives you the ability to reply to reviews on that property and to be notified of new ones. It gives you no control over what reviews or records appear, their content, or their ranking, and no advantage in how reports or corrections are handled.

The verification fee is not a fee for removal, suppression, ranking, or any other treatment of content. We do not offer those things at any price.

5.3 Enhanced listings

An Enhanced listing is an annual subscription attached to one property, not to your account. It includes that property’s verification, so the fee in section 5.2 is not charged separately for it.

Its price depends on the property it applies to — a single home, a small building and a block are priced differently. The price for a given property is shown before payment. An Enhanced listing covers the property you bought it for and no other; holding one on one property gives you nothing on any other.

An Enhanced listing includes listing management, aggregate market analytics, and notification tools. It does not include, and cannot be made to include: any tenant-identifying information; any influence over content or ranking; any screening or background information about any individual; or priority in moderation, correction or takedown handling.

Accounts with and without an Enhanced listing receive identical treatment in moderation and corrections. Reporting a review and correcting a public record are free for everyone, verified or not.

Enhanced listings renew annually until cancelled. You may cancel at any time, effective at the end of the current billing period. [REFUND TERMS].

5.4 Reporting content and correcting records

To report a review, use the Report this review link beneath it, or contact [email protected]. To correct a public-record entry, including a landlord attributed to the wrong property or period, contact [email protected]. Both are free and available regardless of whether any property is verified or holds an Enhanced listing.

Where the Service presents information from a tribunal or government record, we aim to provide a fair and accurate report, and we link to the source document.

Important limitations:

• Automated and machine-learning tools are used to extract and summarise information from published tribunal and municipal records. These tools can be wrong. Always read the linked source document before relying on any summary.
• Most tribunal applications in Ontario are brought by landlords. The presence of a tribunal record does not indicate wrongdoing by anyone. An application is not a finding, and a finding is not necessarily adverse to the landlord.
• Records may be amended, reviewed, set aside or overturned on appeal. We update our records on a monthly cycle, but there may be a lag.
• We do not hold ownership registry data. Landlord names are shown with the source they were taken from, such as a tribunal order. A name on a property means that person was identified as the landlord on that record. It is not a representation that they own or manage the property today. Ownership may have changed without any record reaching us.

6.1 Correcting a landlord attribution

If a property has changed hands, or a landlord has been attached to the wrong property, contact [email protected] with documentation sufficient to establish the change — for example a transfer or deed, a land registry search, an agreement of purchase and sale, a property tax bill, or a signed statement from the current owner.

On a confirmed change we will update the property so the superseded landlord is no longer presented as the landlord for it. Records dated before the change remain on the page, attributed to the landlord named on them, with their source shown.

This process is free and available to anyone, subscriber or not.

If you believe a record is inaccurate, out of date or superseded — including where a record has been attached to the wrong landlord or the wrong ownership period — contact [email protected]. We aim to respond within 5 business days. Corrections are free and unconditional.

The Service, its design, software, compilation and branding are owned by Renterly and protected by Canadian and international law.

Government and tribunal records reproduced on the Service remain subject to their originating licences, including the Open Government Licence – Ontario where applicable.

You may link to Renterly pages and quote briefly with attribution. You may not reproduce substantial portions of the Service or create a derivative database.

Our handling of personal information is described in the Data Use Policy, which forms part of these Terms.

We do not capture, store, index or disclose tenant names. Reviews carry no contributor name. We store a contributor's email address and a record of how each contribution was submitted, as described in the Data Use Policy.

We cannot guarantee absolute anonymity. A court may order disclosure of information we hold. Where that happens we will notify the affected person first unless legally prohibited from doing so.

The Service is provided "as is" and "as available". To the maximum extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy and non-infringement.

Reviews and rent figures are the statements of individual contributors, not Renterly. We do not adopt, endorse or verify them.

We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that any information on it is complete, current or accurate.

To the maximum extent permitted by law:

• Renterly is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, or loss of goodwill.
• Renterly's total aggregate liability arising from these Terms or your use of the Service is limited to the greater of (a) amounts you paid us in the twelve months preceding the claim, or (b) CAD $100.

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited, including under applicable consumer protection legislation. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain exclusions, and in those jurisdictions our liability is limited to the least amount permitted by law.

You may close your account at any time.

We may suspend or terminate your access, with or without notice, for breach of these Terms, for repeated or coordinated submission of content that breaches the Review Policy, or where required by law.

Sections 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 7, 9, 10, 12 and 13 survive termination.

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Province of Ontario and the laws of Canada applicable in it.

You agree to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Ontario, except that if you are a consumer resident in another Canadian province, nothing in this clause deprives you of the protection of the mandatory consumer law of your province of residence or of the right to bring proceedings there.

Before commencing proceedings, contact us at [email protected]. Most disputes — particularly about the content of a review or a record — are resolved faster through our reporting and correction processes than through litigation, and those processes are free.

Entire agreement. These Terms, the Data Use Policy and the Review Policy are the entire agreement between you and Renterly regarding the Service.

Severability. If any provision is unenforceable, the rest remains in effect.

No waiver. Failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it.

Assignment. You may not assign your rights under these Terms. We may assign ours in connection with a merger, acquisition or sale of assets, on notice to you.

Changes. We may amend these Terms. Material changes take effect 30 days after we post notice. Continued use after the effective date constitutes acceptance.

[email protected]