Looking for Opendoor reviews or Offerpad reviews on Yelp? Good luck.

On February 11, 2019 Inman News reported that Yelp made finding these reviews almost impossible, by removing them from Yelp’s online search tool and from Google search results. The review pages are still accessible with direct links so consumers can still read old reviews and post new reviews – you just can’t search for the review pages any more since Yelp has stopped them from turning up in searches. When the review pages became unsearchable, Opendoor had a 3.0 star rating from over 180 reviews, while Offerpad had a 1.0 star rating from only 1 review. Interestingly, Opendoor has received financial backing from Yelp’s CEO as well as two former Yelp board members though they state the Yelp policy change has nothing to do with this relationship.

Why are reviews so important to a business? Consider when you make a small purchase decision, such as buying a new toaster or going out to eat. How often do you read reviews before making your choice? Let’s be honest, most of us hardly doing anything today with a little research first, which includes reading customer reviews and looking up star ratings. Would you buy a toaster with a rating of 3.0 stars in their reviews? Would you eat at a restaurant that only gets 3.0 stars from hundreds of patrons? And we’re talking about spending less than $100 in each of these situations. Consider then that selling a home is one of the biggest and most important financial transactions of many people’s lives. So if you won’t eat at a Chinese buffet with a questionable 3-star rating, would you sell your home with a company that gets the same rating?

Here is a link, which is also fully searchable on Google, to my rating and reviews from Zillow: Andrew Robb reviews.