I'm floored that Steve doesn't realize people love to complain, and that giving people an outlet to moan about their bad apartment is all the incentive they need.
Problem is that this skews the data, since people who post are self-selected to be people with negative experiences. There're a bunch of apartment review sites out there already; I looked at a bunch when I moved out here. The reviews are almost uniformly negative, because the only people who contribute are the ones that like to complain.
If you want to remove the information asymmetry, you need a random sample of previous tenants. This is hard to get unless you force people to write reviews or provide some incentive that is stronger than their urge to complain.
If you take some time to read a fair number of reviews of a fair number of apartments, you can get a good idea of how much people bitch about a normal apartment vs a shitty apartment.
Example: there's an apartment near where I live which looks like a great deal on paper, but on some internet review site there were lots of complaints about how there are hidden fees for things like parking, and how the apartments aren't insulated so you end up with a huge heating bill. I didn't see those complaints with other apartments, so I think they're legit.
Reviews for lots of online products have bimodal distributions: you get tons of 5-stars and tons of 1-stars.
But that's not the point with this site. As an apartment hunter (probably from another city or state), you have little information on structural problems with the apartment. How can you find out if your 1st-floor apartment floods or lacks concrete foundation? Your realtor or landlord probably won't tell you the truth.
So, instead, you can turn to former tenants. This site isn't a review data aggregator--it's a tool for reaching informational equilibrium.
This is entirely explained by game theory. If you think the final star rating for something should be something other than what the average currently is, you maximize your power over the rating by using only 1 or 5 star ratings.
That's assuming reviewers only derive utility from some product's star rating and not from voicing their opinion. If it were solely game theory, we'd see tons of 1- and 5-star reviews with only one or two lines of text (as this would maximize utility while minimizing the time cost of reviewing). For websites with more affluent user bases, (Yelp, Amazon's non-video game products), that's not the case: there are some epic screeds for and against restaurants and coffee tables.
To me, it looks like a self-selection issue: people only review a product if it either (a) changes their life positively, or (b) causes them trouble. If a product only impacts someone's life in a trivial way, well, why write a 3-star review for a trivially good product?
In all fairness, the site featured is BADnycapartments - so the sole purpose of the site is to catalog and displayed data skewed in the favor of negative experiences.
I do love how there are overwhelmingly negative reviews of apartment managers online. But then there are also equally ridiculous positive reviews of the apartment managers, obviously written by the managers themselves.
Agree with random samples. Also need larger samples. Or something like a carfax for apartments.
Agreed, and I'll go a step further: people just want to voice their opinions. Just look at Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or your local paper's "letters to the editor" section.
