Consumer Review Guidelines

The reviews on HomeStars are individual opinions and are, by their nature, highly subjective and should be treated as such. HomeStars neither endorses the reviews posted by homeowners nor companies’ corresponding responses. HomeStars reserves the right to delete a review or company response for any reason.

What information does HomeStars require?

Before HomeStars will post a review you must provide us with:

• a valid email address
• zip or postal code
• online name and neighbourhood

What are HomeStars' posting guidelines?

HomeStars has sole discretion on what to post and in what form, but the following are useful guidelines for what we look at:

1. Reviews must be at least 30 words in length.

   We will not post reviews that are with no substance, such as "They are great".

2. Reviews must be based on a financial transaction between a homeowner and company.

   Reviews must relate to a household repair, improvement, purchase or construction undertaking completed by a written or verbal contract.

3. The content of a review must be family-friendly.

   If your mother would blush at what you have written, so will our readers! HomeStars will not post or once posted will remove any defamatory, or insulting language, profanity, threats, prejudiced comments, hate speech, or other objectionable content.

4. Reviews must be submitted from a valid email address.

   Our policy is to post your online name and neighborhood of residence in association with a review.

   Although we may use your email address to contact you if there is a problem with your review, we will not post your email address to the Site.

   We value your privacy; for more information, please see HomeStars' Privacy Policy.

5. Ensure your review is unique, independent & accurate.

   You may submit one review in respect of any given event. It must be about a specific company you have worked with, not hearsay.

   You may not refer to other reviews in your review, or ask questions or make comments about other reviews.

   The review itself should focus solely on your experience with that company, product or service.  You may not refer to a company’s competitors by name if you are giving a comparison of your experience with two separate companies.

   As others may rely on your reviews, we urge you to make helpful, reasonable and above all, truthful comments.

6. Ensure your review is legal and non-infringing.

   We will not post, and will remove from the Site any review that is or becomes illegal or infringing.

   Reviews may be removed and a marker showing the user name and date will be shown in any of the following cases:

   • Homeowner has requested their review be removed.
   • Review is currently being investigated. It will either go back up or rejected if it is not validated by the user.
   • Review is removed as not from a validated client.

   A suspicious review marker may also be shown on a company listing for a period of time if there is more than one instance of reviews being written by users other than clients of the company.

   Please see our Terms of Use for further details.

7. We will not post a review of minors under 18.

8. Company owners, management, past or current employees may not pose as consumers and post reviews about their own company.

9. Non-commercial.

   HomeStars will not post any web addresses, e-mail addresses, HTML or promotional materials of any kind.

10. Written in English.

11. Responses To Reviews.

    We allow representatives of parties or entities that were reviewed to respond to posted reviews by way of Respond to this Review.  HomeStars will apply the same posting guidelines set out above to such responses.  Please note that the identity of a representative that files a response to a review will be made known on the Site.