Snark attack in online real-estate reviews

NEW YORK — As unsold properties proliferate and encounters with the scalpel fail to move them, some New York City sellers are being undermined by an often nameless enemy.

Even as they rearrange the furniture and pray for a sale, their apartments are being picked apart online by anonymous strangers.

Brutally frank discussions about specific listings can draw hundreds of comments on sites such as StreetEasy, Curbed and Brownstoner, where traffic has increased as buyers and interested observers seek insight into the turbulent real-estate market.

Commenters scour these Web sites, attend open houses or study brokers' advertisements and then post their analyses. Recent postings included these:

• "The layout is downright medieval; totally irrational."

• "The bathroom looks like a Chinese bordello."

• "The brokers are doing a huge disservice to the owner of this place. It will sit, sit, sit and die a slow and painfully stale death."

Such reviews are a growing phenomenon.

"This is something we've just noticed this past quarter; our traffic has gone through the roof," said Dawn Doherty, of StreetEasy.com, a Web site that publishes detailed information on listings, sales and comparables, and plays host to an increasingly active discussion board, Talk.

The site's page views since last fall have more than doubled, to 10.5 million a month, as users display an appetite for more than just hard data.

"What's happening now is the numbers aren't enough," Doherty said, referring to the information published by StreetEasy. "People are asking questions they can't ask their broker, and they're really interested in the qualitative perspective, in getting opinions of people."

For their part, sellers and their brokers are seething over what they perceive as a lack of accountability, hidden or misanthropic motives, and that defending one's property — even correcting an error — can prolong or aggravate its turn under the collective microscope.

Said Lockhart Steele, the president of Curbed:

"We err on the side of giving readers freedom. We remove comments that cross the line into personal slander, like making fun of someone or revealing extremely personal information, like posting a phone number."

Brownstoner and StreetEasy take a similarly hands-off approach.