How PropaPlace works

Trust isn't a claim, it's a process. This page is the process — how we verify what renters tell us, how we turn individual submissions into numbers you can rely on, how we protect the people who contribute, and how we handle reviews of named landlords and agents. If something here isn't clear, it's a bug — tell us.

1. Verification

Every rent figure and every review starts unverified and has to earn its weight:

• Email-confirmed — we confirm a real, unique contributor behind the submission.
• Tenancy-checked — where a contributor supplies evidence of the tenancy (a tenancy reference, not documents we keep), the review or rent is badged tenancy verified and weighted highest.
• Sense-checked — each rent is compared to the local distribution; figures that fall far outside are flagged as outliers and excluded from headline medians.

Unverified content is never hidden dishonestly, but it is visibly de-emphasised and never counts toward a published median.

2. Aggregation thresholds

A median built on three rents is noise dressed as fact. So we hold a hard line:

• We publish a median only at 12+ verified rents for a given slice (area × bedrooms × type).
• At 20+ we mark it high confidence; between 12 and 20, medium.
• Below 12, we show the official area baseline and say so — we never present a thin sample as authoritative.
• We never show an individual's rent, address or identity — only aggregates that can't be reversed to a person.

3. Protecting the contributor

People share honestly only when they're safe. We aggregate and anonymise: individual rents are stored server-side and never exposed; reviews are shown without identifying the renter; and the building-matching key we use to group submissions can't be reversed into a name. Privacy is what keeps the data flowing — it's a feature, not a constraint.

4. Never an empty page

When you look up an address with no first-party data yet, we widen the search in clear steps and tell you which one you're seeing:

• this exact address →
• the same building →
• the same street →
• the same postcode →
• within about a mile (clearly labelled as nearby).

And third-party area data — safety, transport, energy, broadband, council tax, flood risk — carries the page until renters' own reviews accrue. Each of those facts is attributed to its source and dated.

5. Actual, not advertised

We only ever show real paid rents and real renter experiences— never asking prices, never an agent's photos, never an estimate dressed up as a fact. We have no paid relationship with landlords or agents. That independence is the entire reason to trust us.

Reviews of named landlords and agents are governed by our moderation & right-of-reply policy.