About Slumlords

Why this exists

Background checks. Credit reports. Eviction records. Income verification. The rental market gives landlords every tool they need to evaluate a tenant — and almost nothing flowing the other way. If your last landlord was a slumlord, the next prospective tenant has no easy way to find that out before signing.

We built Slumlords to fix the asymmetry. Tenants rate properties by address, the ratings aggregate up to neighborhoods and cities, and the next renter walking through that door can read what the last one had to say.

How tenant reviews work here

Reviews are tied to addresses, not to landlords by name. Properties are deduplicated using Google’s place ID so the same building doesn’t fragment into a dozen near-duplicate listings. Anyone with a verified-email account can leave one rating per property — across six categories: maintenance, noise, safety, pest control, landlord communication, and value — plus an unlimited thread of comments where tenants can compare notes.

Anonymous by default. You can attach your real name to a review if you want it on the record, or keep it off. Either way, your email never appears publicly. Sign-up takes one tap with Google, or an email + password if you’d rather not link an SSO account; bot-driven account creation is gated by Cloudflare Turnstile, and you confirm your email by clicking a link before posting your first review.

How we keep reviews honest

We do the minimum content moderation needed to keep the platform usable: spam, threats of violence, and explicit content come down. We don’t police strong opinions about your landlord. If your slumlord deserves a one-star review with profanity in it, that’s your call to make.

Landlords can file copyright takedowns through our DMCA process — a federal safe-harbor procedure that lets us mechanically process valid claims without weighing in on the underlying dispute. Tenants can counter-notice through the same channel. Both sides get a paper trail, and we never delete legitimate reviews because someone with deep pockets sent us a strongly worded letter.

Identical content can’t be filed against twice — once a counter-notice has restored a review, the same content can’t be taken down again on the same grounds. Three valid strikes against an account ends posting access. The system is built for the long-term, not for whichever landlord sends the most takedown requests this week.

Who it’s for

Renters who got a raw deal and want the next one not to. Renters doing their homework before signing a lease. Tenants comparing notes about a building-wide issue. Anyone who has ever wished there was a Yelp for landlords — and then realized why a tenant-first one didn’t already exist.

It’s not for landlords running reputation management. It’s not for property managers buying placement. It’s not a lead-gen funnel. We work for the people writing reviews, not the ones being reviewed.