Yelp is making it harder to find reviews for home-flipping companies like Opendoor and Offerpad.
Business pages for the two iBuyers cannot be found through Yelp or Google searches, Inman reported. The reviews can only be accessed through this link.
Industry experts and reviewers argue removing pages makes it harder for consumers to compare iBuying programs with traditional brokerages, which are more visible on Yelp.
Opendoor’s Yelp page comes with nearly 500 reviews and a three-star rating, while Offerpad’s less active page has a single one-star review, the report said.
“Any agent or broker with less than four stars on Yelp would give their left pinky to have those reviews disappear,” Brian Boero, a real estate consultant, told Inman. “If I were Opendoor and had a three-star rating, I would be relieved to have that suddenly vanish from Yelp.”
An Opendoor spokesperson said Yelp removed the company’s listing following an internal discussion that found it “was not a fit for their platform based on the overwhelmingly virtual nature of our business.”
Yelp pages for Zillow Offers and Knock also could not be located. Virtual brokerage Redfin is eligible because it employs “on-the-ground agents,” whereas Opendoor does not conduct “face-to-face interactions.”
A Yelp spokesperson said that as Opendoor “began expanding and publishing non-physical listings in new markets, we felt that the operation no longer fell within the local nature of Yelp.”
Research shows that a subpar Yelp rating can negatively businesses. A recent survey found that 57 percent of consumers will not even consider a business with less than four stars. [Inman] — Meenal Vamburkar