Inside Reviews and Badges: a rating that needs a booking behind it

Most review systems defend themselves with a lock on the door: a sign-in step, a receipt upload, a moderator reading the queue. Reviews and Badges on Home defends itself by not having a door. A surveying firm's rating is assembled only from feedback left by homemovers who booked that firm through the moving platform, and there is no public review form anywhere on the firm's profile. Nobody can leave a review without a booking behind it, because there is no route in that does not start with a booking. This post explains how that works, what it shows where, exactly where the rating changes a firm's position and where it does not, and the things the system will not do.

A review exists because a job existed

The record that becomes a rating is a piece of homemover feedback held on the moving platform, and Atlas, the platform behind the directory, reads it without ever writing to it. The customer is asked after the job, as part of the booking workflow: a notification goes out with a link, and the homemover scores the firm from 1 to 5 and can add words in their own language. That is the only origin. There is no public endpoint anywhere on home.co.uk that accepts a rating for a surveying firm, so a rival, a stranger or a script has nothing to post to.

That makes the verification architectural rather than procedural. The question is not whether we checked that a reviewer was a customer. It is that a non-customer was never given a way to become a reviewer in the first place.

The trade for that strength is bluntness at the other end. A rating goes live the moment the homemover leaves it. There is no moderation queue, no cooling-off period and no editorial pass. This is a deliberate difference from the agent side of the marketplace, described in buyers can now review estate agents on Home, where a review passes a moderation step before it is published. For surveying firms, a one-star scored on a Tuesday afternoon is on the profile that same afternoon.

Where the number shows up

The same underlying aggregate is rendered in three places, so a firm never has to reconcile two different averages.

On the directory card in search results, a firm carries its star average, its review count and a tally of completed jobs. On the public profile there is a dedicated Reviews tab holding the reviews themselves. Inside the firm's own portal, under Marketing, there is a Reviews screen listing them ten to a page, which is where a principal reads them and replies.

Two caching details are worth knowing because they explain a lag a firm will otherwise find puzzling. Profile reviews are served from a cache with a six-hour life, and that cache holds up to 100 reviews for a firm. A review left this morning may therefore not appear on the public page for a few hours, even though it already exists. The number on the card comes from a signals cache on the same six-hour cycle. Nothing is missing; the page is just holding a recent copy.

One reply, and nothing else

The firm gets exactly one public reply per review. That is not a policy that a support agent enforces, it is a uniqueness rule in the database keyed to the review, so a second reply on the same review cannot be created. The reply body runs from 2 characters to a maximum of 2,000, and the firm can edit it later or delete it entirely.

That reply is the firm's only lever on a published review, and the honest framing is that it is the whole toolkit. There is no flag, no dispute route, no hide, no takedown request and no way for the firm to remove a rating it disagrees with. The score belongs to the homemover who paid for the work. A record a firm could edit would be a testimonials page, and it would be worth nothing to the next buyer reading it.

Where the rating moves you, and where it does not

This is the part most often assumed rather than checked, so here it is plainly, in both directions.

The public surveyor directory's default ordering does not use the rating at all. It sorts on whether the listing is claimed, then whether a logo is present, then the firm's RICS tier, then whether a description has been written, then the name. A separate "most booked" sort exists, and it orders on completed jobs rather than on stars. A firm with a superb average does not out-rank an unrated firm in that default list.

Compare Surveyors, the marketplace where a homemover picks a firm to book, is where the rating pays. Its ranking runs in this order:

Unrated firms fall to the bottom of the rating step, which means a firm with no reviews sits below every rated firm that shares its position on the three steps above. The rating used there is the same homemover-feedback aggregate that feeds the profile and the card, not a separate score.

The blunt reading for a firm deciding where to spend effort: reviews buy position on the page where a homemover is choosing who to book, and buy nothing on the page where they are browsing.

The badge family

A badge is a small embed served live from home.co.uk that a firm pastes into its own website, and each one links back to the profile that holds the reviews. There are five to choose from.

Founder 250 allocation runs on slots. A firm gets 5 outcode slots by default, and can extend beyond that with credits. Every badge renders in a dark or a light theme, and in one of two voices, a founder voice or a local-expert voice, so it sits on a site without looking borrowed.

Each embed also reports back. A one-pixel beacon logs an impression each time the badge renders on the firm's site, and the outbound link is a tracked redirect that logs a click before sending the visitor to the profile. Both are recorded per badge, so a firm can tell the difference between a badge nobody sees and a badge nobody follows, rather than assuming either.

What Reviews and Badges will not do

Four limits, stated because a surveyor comparing tools deserves the shape of the gap rather than a discovery six weeks in.

Reviews a firm holds elsewhere are not carried in. Feefo, Trustpilot and Google profiles are not folded into the rating shown on a Home card today, and no external profile is validated for that purpose. The rating is homemover feedback and nothing else. A firm arriving with a strong record on another platform starts its Home rating from zero, which is uncomfortable and honest.

There is no moderation and no removal. Covered above, and repeated here because it is the limit firms feel most: the reply is the only response available.

The profile does not publish a star rating in its structured data. The public profile emits a professional-service record for search engines and AI answer engines to read, and that record carries no aggregate rating inside it. Stars are visible to a person reading the page, not to a machine parsing the markup. That is a gap we intend to close, and until it is closed it should not be assumed.

The Trusted Surveyor pill marks presence, not vetting. It renders for a firm that is on Home. It is not the output of a check on the firm's regulation, insurance or record, and it should not be read, or sold, as one.

Why the booking rule carries the weight

The Competition and Markets Authority publishes guidance for businesses on fake reviews, setting out the practices the law now bites on, including reviews written by people who never used the service and reviews a trader has suppressed because they were unflattering. Any system with an open submission box inherits that problem as an enforcement job, to be handled after the fact by moderators and appeals processes, all of which the trader is on the hook for.

A system where a rating cannot exist without a booking has a smaller problem to police, because the two hardest cases are structurally absent: there is no way for a non-customer to write one, and no way for the firm to make one disappear. We make no claim beyond that. It is a description of how the thing is built, not a statement about anyone's standing under the rules.

That design principle is the same one behind everything we build for surveying firms, whether it is why we built survey tools inside a property portal or the deterministic controls in Otto, our report pipeline. The parts a professional cannot afford to have wrong are handled by structure rather than by promises. For reviews, the structure is the absence of a door. If your firm is on the directory and you want to see the reviews screen and the badge snippets, they sit on the Reviews and Badges page.