For landlords and managers
This page is for anyone who owns, manages, or works for a place listed on ReLease. It says what you can do here, what is not for sale, and how to dispute a review. The same rules apply to every operator, every time.
Reading and following
- Every review on ReLease is public. You do not need an account to read one.
- You can ask for an email when a review posts on any record, using the same form and getting the same email a renter gets, at the same time.
- There is no private alert channel for operators, and there will not be one. If you learn about a review before the public does, something has gone wrong.
What is not for sale
Nothing on this list has a price, and nothing on it ever will.
- Placement, ranking, or being featured
- Removing a review, or pushing one down
- Certification, badges, or an approved mark
- The identity of a reviewer
- Any say in who gets asked to write a review
Operator responses are not a feature today. If they ever ship, they will be free and available to every operator, or they will not ship.
Disputing a review
Write to disputes@joinrelease.com with the record, the review, and your evidence. There are four grounds.
- Conflict of interest. The reviewer has an undisclosed stake: the operator itself, its staff, a competitor, or anyone compensated.
- Not a real tenant. The reviewer never held the tenancy. We ask the reviewer, through the platform, for redacted evidence of it.
- Wrong target or off topic. The review is about a different building or operator, or is not about a tenancy. Shared offices and overlapping portfolios make honest mix-ups real.
- Specific factual error. A specific, checkable statement is false, and you have evidence for that statement.
We acknowledge within two business days and aim to resolve within ten, longer when we are waiting on evidence. You get the outcome and the ground it turned on. So does the reviewer. Reviewer identity is never part of either message.
What we will not do
- Remove a review for being negative.
- Remove a review because a lease contains a non-disparagement clause. California Civil Code 1670.8 and the federal Consumer Review Fairness Act of 2016 are the reason.
- Remove a review on a legal threat that names no ground above.
- Give out anything about a reviewer without valid legal process. When process arrives, we tell the reviewer first.
A review comes down for a content policy violation, for evidence the reviewer did not hold the tenancy, or for an authenticated final court order finding specific statements defamatory. Where part of a review is the problem, we redact that part and leave the rest.
What the badge means
Verified email means one thing: the reviewer controlled that mailbox when they signed up. It is not a check of enrollment, employment, or tenancy. Lease years, rent, and everything else in a review are the reviewer's own report and are labeled that way.
If our directory is wrong about you
Our addresses come from Alameda County parcel records and our operator data from Berkeley business licenses. If a building is attributed to the wrong manager, that is our error rather than a review dispute, and we fix it. Send the address to disputes@joinrelease.com.
ReLease records good tenancies and bad ones under the same rules.