Reviews are the most useful thing on this site, but only if they are honest. These guidelines explain who can review, what a review may and may not contain, how companies respond and why we sometimes remove one. By posting a review you agree to follow them.
Who can write a review
You need a free account, and you may review only a company you hired or dealt with directly as a customer: a finished roof, a repair, an estimate visit that went well or badly, a supply purchase. One review per company per person. If you have had two jobs done by the same company, update your review instead of posting twice. You may not review your own company, your employer, a relative’s company or a competitor, and you may not post on behalf of someone else.
What makes a review useful
- Say what the job was: the roof style, the metal, roughly the size, and the year.
- Describe what went well and what did not, in that order if you can.
- Cover the things other homeowners worry about: communication, schedule, cleanup, surprises on the bill, how problems were handled, and whether the warranty paperwork arrived.
- Mention price only in rough terms if you want to; the exact figure is less useful than whether it matched the bid.
- Give a star rating that matches your words. A three-star review with a clear explanation helps more than a one-star review written in anger.
What we do not publish
- Second-hand stories. If it happened to your neighbor, your neighbor can write it.
- Reviews written for a reward of any kind: a discount, a gift card, a rebate, a drawing entry or a free upgrade. This includes reviews a company asked you to post in exchange for something.
- Reviews by competitors, employees, former employees, suppliers or family members of the company.
- Private information: the full names of crew members, phone numbers, addresses, license plates or photos of people who did not agree to be shown. Naming the company and its owner is fine.
- Threats, slurs, harassment, profanity aimed at a person, or accusations of crimes that you cannot back up.
- Advertising, links, promo codes or text copied from somewhere else.
- Reviews that are really about something else: a manufacturer’s product defect, a storm, an insurance adjuster, or this website.
- Multiple reviews of one company from one person, or from several accounts controlled by one person.
A note to companies about asking for reviews
You may ask every customer to leave a review, and we encourage it. You may not pay or reward anyone for a review, write a review for a customer to post, create accounts for customers, or ask only the customers you expect to be happy. Reviews that appear to have been bought, written in-house or filtered this way are removed, and repeated problems can cost a company its listing.
Owner responses
The company that owns a listing can post a public response to any review. It appears under the review, labeled as the response from the owner, so readers see both sides. Responses follow the same rules as reviews: stick to facts, stay calm, and never publish a customer’s private details, contract or payment history. A response is the right place to explain, apologize or correct a fact; it is the wrong place to argue, threaten or offer something in exchange for a change. Companies cannot edit or delete reviews.
Reporting a review
Anyone can report a review from the listing page. Tell us which rule you think it breaks and anything that helps us check, such as a job record showing the reviewer was never a customer. Reports go to a moderator, not to the reviewer, and we do not reveal who reported.
When we remove a review
We remove a review when it breaks these guidelines, when we have good reason to believe the author was not a customer, when the author asks us to, or when we are required to by law. We do not remove a review because it is negative, because the company asks, or because the company disputes the facts; in that case the review stays up with the owner’s response beside it. When a review is removed for a fixable problem, such as a phone number in the text, we tell the author and invite a corrected version.
How we moderate
A person reads every review before it appears. We check it against these guidelines and look for signs of fakes, such as identical wording across companies or bursts of reviews from new accounts. We may email you to confirm you were a customer, for example by asking for the month of the job; we never publish what you send us. We do not rewrite reviews. Moderation decisions can be appealed through the contact page, and we will explain our reasoning.
Changing or removing your own review
To update or remove a review you wrote, contact us from the email address on your account and tell us the company and the change. Updated reviews go back through moderation. If the company fixed the problem after you posted, say so in the update; that is useful to the next homeowner and fair to the company.
These guidelines are part of our terms of use. Ready to write? Find the company in the directory, log in and use the review form on its listing.