What letting agency reviews actually tell you
The day-to-day property managers get glowing reviews. The deposit return gets "the worst service we've ever received." Both are true, and the average hides it.
We read the last 213 Trustpilot reviews of Foxtons, the London estate and lettings agency, and grouped them by what customers actually raised. The named property managers come out genuinely well: 215 positive mentions against 7 negative. Then you reach the end of a tenancy. One reviewer summed up that side in a line: "getting our deposit back has been the worst service we've ever received from an estate agent."
Both things are true at once. That is the problem with reading a letting agent by its average score.
A star rating averages two different relationships
A tenant or landlord deals with a letting agent in two very different modes. There is the day-to-day experience driven by the property manager who answers the phone, chases the contractor, sorts the boiler. And then there is the transactional side, signing the contract, paying the fees, getting the deposit back at the end. People rate those two experiences completely differently, and a single star rating blends them into one number that describes neither.
So the useful question is not "what is the score". It is "which moment is the score hiding". For a letting agent, the answer is consistent: the relationship is judged at the exit, not in the day-to-day. You can see the whole split in the Foxtons review dashboard.
The people are genuinely the product
This is the part an agency should protect. Of 224 mentions of individual property managers, 215 were positive. Reviewers name them: Toral, Arianna, Jordanna, the Woolwich team. The praise is specific, about responsiveness, problem-solving and being kept informed, which is exactly the language you want customers using about your staff.
If you only read the five-star reviews, you would conclude the agency is in great shape. The day-to-day service really is good.
The exit is where the relationship breaks
The damage sits in a tight cluster around money and the end of a tenancy, and it is not a handful of one-offs:
- The deposit. Of 20 reviews that raised the deposit, 19 were negative and none were positive. The recurring complaint is opaque deductions, weeks of delay, and a sense that the process favours the landlord by default.
- The fees. 26 of 31 fee mentions were negative. The sharpest one from landlords: a full year's commission taken upfront, with no cash refund if the tenant leaves early, only a credit against future lettings.
- Unsolicited calls. Every one of the 7 reviews mentioning repeated sales calls was negative, often after the customer had asked them to stop.
None of this shows up if you average the score, because the volume of warm day-to-day praise outweighs it. But the deposit and the exit fee are the moments a customer tells everyone about, and they are the ones that end up in front of the Property Ombudsman.
Why the online platforms look better
For contrast, we ran the same analysis on OpenRent, the online lettings platform, across 621 reviews. It scores noticeably higher, and the reason is instructive. Landlords praise it for removing the exact thing they resent about traditional agents: the commission structure. Its own weak spots are different, mainly the lack of a phone line and slow complaint handling.
The takeaway is not that one model is better than the other. It is that two businesses on the same review platform are being judged at different moments, so their scores are not really comparable. A platform that charges a flat fee never has the upfront-commission fight. A high-street agency that manages your property for years has far more surface area to be judged on, most of it at the end.
Read reviews by the moment, not the average
If you run customer experience at any business with a public review score, the method here transfers directly. Take your last few hundred reviews, group them by the moment in the journey they describe rather than by their star rating, and sort by what is consistently negative. The average tells you how you are doing on aggregate. The grouping tells you which moment is quietly costing you the reputation, and that is the one worth fixing first.
That grouping is what Sunbeam does automatically with any public review set. It is free to try: point it at your own Trustpilot, App Store or Google reviews and it builds the themes for you, so you can see where the relationship is actually decided instead of staring at a single number.