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In their final year, most students get their heads down and focus on exams. But Natasha Hopewell combined the third year of her law degree at the University of Lincoln with building a website so students could find good digs, share their renting horror stories and avoid being ripped off by rogue landlords.
Working with two friends, she created CribAdvisor which, like the travel and restaurant review site TripAdvisor, allows students to anonymously rate and review accommodation provided by landlords, letting agents or universities. The site also provides guidance on tenant rights and how to enforce them.
Launched in July for students in Lincoln, CribAdvisor has already received more than 450 reviews and will soon open to students at universities throughout the UK. The idea was born out of Hopewell’s own bad experiences renting. In their final year, she and co-founder Lawrence Thorpe had such a poor experience with their letting agent that the dispute was only resolved after they agreed to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Hopewell says that during her second year she was forced to live without hot water for weeks, and maintenance staff from the letting agent would let themselves in without notice.
“We didn’t have privacy and it didn’t feel like our house,” she says. “In one incident that has haunted me, I was lying in bed at 9am on a weekday and someone let themselves into my bedroom. If we were renting privately and we were not students, would that have happened? I don’t think so.”
The project was launched amid a growing trend of student activism to fight abuse by landlords. Hopewell says she wants to “improve the standards of tenancies by giving students the tools to take control of their tenancies and demand more from their providers”.
She hopes the platform will allow tenants to make informed decisions and hold providers to account. “Students renters are first-time renters. We are naive and inexperienced, with no idea of what to expect, our rights or what to do when things go wrong. Providers take advantage of students because they think they can get away it,” says Hopewell. “We want to mark a turning point in the student accommodation problem and we want to put it in the students’ hands to fix it.”
The site is already seeing positive results. “One provider told us they have changed the way they check maintenance fixes because of a review posted on our site. And we have been able to provide a space for smaller providers – with less of an advertising budget but better tenant satisfaction – to be seen by prospective tenants.”
The way the site works is simple. The team creates profiles for different providers, and student users sign up free of charge to leave feedback. They can also add providers not already listed on the site.
“Posts are anonymous, but students need to have a valid student email address,” says Hopewell. “We want to encourage participation from both sides and create a dialogue between tenants and providers.”
Accommodation providers can reply to posts, as well as posting about themselves and the service they offer. The site operators can see all reviews; they do not seek to monitor posts, but operate a flagging system by which users can identify potentially inappropriate comments.
CribAdvisor has been set up as a company, but its three founders have so far worked for no financial reward – students users and providers both register free of charge. While they hope to attract advertising in the future, Hopewell says that will not come from accommodation providers or others involved in the letting business. “Working for the past year alongside studying in my final year was stressful, but I knew it needed to be done and the sooner we got it out, the sooner we could help people,” she says.
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