Everyone's a Critic

"This is out in the world, and we can't control it," Dickie said.

Those whose houses are being praised are happy, at least so far. One Reston house listed for $589,000, for example, received a 5-out-of-5 rating. "I'm glad it's a good one, since I own it," said Mark Shull of Crum Realty of Winchester.

The consumer-rating concept is being introduced during an explosion of new sources of real estate information on the Internet. A recent study by Pittsburgh Homes Daily, a real estate Web site, found 500 separate real estate blogs operating in the country. Most real estate brokerages, discount and full service, operate their own sites, as do companies that cater to those selling without agents.

Most listings haven't attracted comments. Still, officials at ZipRealty and Reply.com said the popularity of the consumer-review features is growing quickly. In one two-week period, 500 house reviews were posted at ZipRealty, and they received more than 30,000 page views, said Patrick Lashinsky, executive vice president of product strategy there.

"Consumer reaction has been fantastic," Lashinsky said.

Payam Zamani, chairman and chief executive officer at Reply.com, said that response has been "overwhelmingly positive," and that the Web site is catering to people who see home shopping as a form of entertainment.

"We know people like to go to open houses even when they are not buying, and they like to talk about real estate," Zamani said.

To some extent, the criticisms of the review features simply echo the concerns that have been voiced in the past about the Internet -- that allowing people to comment anonymously also encourages them to be vicious and irresponsible, just for the thrill of it.

Zamani disagrees. "It needs to be anonymous for people to be honest," he said, adding that he believes that when peoples' names are attached to information, their comments are more likely to be "all positive."

But Gwaltney said the comments posted about a townhouse she represents were wrong. In it, the reviewer complained the property was overpriced and that the sellers "could have been more polite." That baffled Gwaltney, who said the owners moved out some time ago and left the unit vacant. Gwaltney said she learned about the anonymous review, posted by a writer whose screen name is MandeepS, when someone called to say they had seen the comment online.

She and her colleagues at the Oakton real estate office called it up, and read what it said with some shock. They had never had an ad contradicted in that way, and Gwaltney said she couldn't figure out how to go about fixing information on the Internet.

"It seems very unethical to me, and to our colleagues," she said. "We are all appalled."