Can I sue Hometrust for a negative review?

Hometrust is the platform for all stakeholders to air their views, both positive and negative ones. We do our best to foster a community of users who post helpful, relevant, and reliable content, but users are ultimately responsible for the things they post on Hometrust. Hometrust isn't responsible for the opinions of our community and the community is entitled to their own, even if the review is negative. 

What you can hold us accountable for, relates to spam, fake and content irrelevant to the renovation experience. We do not tolerate such content and it is our responsibility to weed them out. However, a negative review does not fall within this category.  

Hometrust understands the frustrations that come with a negative review. We encourage firms to reply to their reviews by sharing their side of their story. You may reply to a review once you have claimed your firm page.

We are happy to work with your team by coming up with solutions to overcome the effects of a negative review. We believe that efforts should be spent on generating more positive reviews instead of drawing more attention to negative ones. To better manage your firm’s reviews and content, you may sign up as a Hometrust Pro firm.

Do Hometrusters ever get sued for posting negative reviews?

Freedom of speech is protected both online and offline. As a result, online reviewers are well within their rights to express their opinions (both positive and negative ones) and relate their true experiences (Again, both positive and negative ones). 

There will always be businesses who will attempt to solve their problems by suing people who post negative comments about their businesses. From our experience, few of these lawsuits have ever met with any success. In fact, the lawsuits tend to bring more attention to the negative comments that the business hoped to shield from public view. In short, litigation over comments made over an internet community rarely succeed and may not be a practical means of resolution. 

I am a firm representative and I suspect that a non-customer has written a review regarding my firm. What can I do?

Hometrust is a community-driven site, and removing user content is not something we take lightly. As a general rule, Hometrust stands by our community and the content they post. We will only remove user-posted content if they are fake, spam or unrelated to the renovation experience. Please email us if you stumble upon a non customer who has written a fake review regarding your firm. You can help us spread the word that not only is it unethical to write fake reviews, it can also be illegal. If you feel that a review is  fake, please click "report" on the indicated review, or contact us here.