It’s here at last, the online platform we’ve all been waiting for: a ‘TripAdvisor’ for rating strata managers.

If you’ve ever wished you could check out a strata management company before signing up or recommend the one that’s doing the business for your block – or warn others about the disappointments you’re stuck with – your moment has arrived.

The team at Strata Answers has been plugging away on behalf of owners and committee members, and they’ve now launched a review site for strata management companies. It’s live, it’s real, and it needs your input.

Here’s how it works: anyone can write a review of their strata management experience. there are five categories All reviews are checked and verified before they go live, so this isn’t a free-for-all where disgruntled owners (or rival managers) can just lob grenades. There are currently around 55 reviews on the platform and growing.

The reviews page itself is kept private – once your review has been verified, you’ll receive a timed access code to view what others have written. The code is generated by the site and comes from so*******@***************om.au, so check your spam folder if it doesn’t show up.

Think of it as earning your seat at the table by contributing to it. Fair enough, really.

Once you have logged in, and before you can read the other reviews, you will have to submit one of your own,

You will be asked for the number of lots in your scheme, the building’s age, whaich Australian sate you’re in, the name of your current or most recent strata management firm and the lengthe of time you’ve been with them.

Ten you rate the company from excellent to unacceptable on six criteria: Financial management, meetings, handling complaints and disputes, guidance and support, records management, and maintenance and contractor management.

Then you have a series of eight “issues” presented as boxes you can tick, from slow response times the AGM problems.

And finally there’s a feedback panel where you can sing praises or vent frustrations, whichever comes more easily.

As an author who is reviewed, sometimes brutally, by my readers on websites like Goodreads, I should warn strata managers that they will occasionally find this experience painful.  But if they use it as a launch pad for improvement, then it’s worth it.

For reviewers, don’t worry about defamation. Your identity is kept private, the platform almost certainly won’t let you name individuals, and here’s the thing, you can’t defame a company unless it’s clearly an attempt to damage their business.

So feel free to say what you think and when reading reviews, apply your own filter. If a strata manager has nothing but glowing five-star reviews across the board, you might want to take that with a massive grain of salt. Nobody is that perfect in every aspect of their job. A few four-stars mixed in with the fives is probably a more honest picture than wall-to-wall perfection.

The more reviews they get, the more useful the platform becomes for everyone, so if you’ve got an opinion on your strata manager – good, bad, or somewhere in between – head over to strataanswers.com.au/stratamanagementreviews and have your say.

Oh, and if you are one of those CEOs who can’t abide the idea of being objectively reviewed, use this as an opportunity for a little self-evaluation.

When you are telling your minions to start posting positive reviews tell them to knock off a few stars here and there in areas where you KNOW you are not up to scratch. Otherwise, readers will know not only that your review is fake, but that you arre a big fat fibber too.

While I’m on the topic, maybe the people at Strata Answers could adopt a policy of rejacting any five-star assessments. Make the blighters go and address the fact that they are not perfect before they post self-serving fake reviews.