Reviews
Your happy buyers meant to leave a review. Nobody asked at the right moment.
Review count is the last thing a buyer checks before calling. It is also the easiest thing to fix, and the easiest to get wrong.
· 3 min read
Handing over a flat is one of the few moments in this business where a customer is unambiguously happy with you. It is also, almost always, the moment nobody asks them for anything. Six weeks later they have moved in, the goodwill has cooled into normality, and the review that would have taken them ninety seconds never gets written.
This is not a motivation problem. Nearly everyone intends to leave the review. The failure is mechanical: the link is hard to find, the moment passes, and no one follows up while they still feel like it.
What a collection system actually is
- A direct link and a QR code, so it is one tap rather than a search
- A printed card at the possession desk and the site office — where the happy customer is physically standing
- A short, polite script, because most staff never ask simply because they do not know how to say it
- Follow-up at the right interval, done by us, so nobody on your team has to chase
None of that is clever. It is just the difference between an intention and a review, done consistently for months instead of in one burst after a bad rating appears.
Why the rating matters more than the words
A buyer comparing three developers is not reading forty reviews. They are glancing at two numbers — the star rating and the count — and using them as a shortcut. Four reviews from 2021 reads worse than none at all, because it says the business either stopped or stopped caring. A steady count that keeps growing says the opposite without making any claim at all.
The line we do not cross
We do not write reviews on customers' behalf, and we will not. Beyond it being dishonest, it is the single fastest way to get a listing penalised — and the listing is the asset. Anyone offering to write reviews for you is offering to put the thing you are paying to build at risk.
The customer writes the review. Our job is to make it easy enough that they actually do.
Then put them where a buyer will see them
The Google rating does the work in search. On your own site the same reviews do a different job — a face, a name, a company and the specific thing that went right, which is what turns a number into a reason. That is a separate piece of work, and worth doing once the reviews exist to display.
The service behind this
Google review collection