I live in Arizona. Long story short. I signed a lease on good faith that it would meet minimum standards for health & safety. It did not. Landlord did minimum repairs. I continued to complain and the landlord had other tenants harass me. The property is run by a big management company and I did not have the financial resources or lawyers to fight for my rights. I paid a huge early termination fee to break my lease and ended up losing around $5000.
Suing them would be a waste of time & money because they would file appeals and bury me in court costs too until I give up. (That's what I have been told they do).
I want to post a negative review online about them but I am afraid they will sue me for causing them to lose business. Can they sue me for this?
Yes, the property management company and/or the landlord can sue you over what you write in a negative review. Whether the company/landlord could be
successful with any lawsuit depends on what you have written.
Negative reviews about goods or services or companies are fine to write. For one example of reviews written correctly, you can look at
Consumer Reports. This publication rates and ranks goods and services after testing the products/services, and they do this without defaming the company that offers the goods/services. They state only facts. Consumer reviews of this sort can be valuable to consumers trying to make a smart purchasing decision.
It is not easy to write a negative review. To be legally safe, you must stick to only provable facts and pure opinions (those opinions that cannot be proven true or false). You must stick to an honest expression of your own personal experience. Those reviews that do not stick to provable facts and pure opinions and an accurate accounting of their own personal experience can be legally problematic.
Most people when writing a review tend to generalize their personal experience to comment on the business as a whole. This is a mistake. Reviews of this sort often will use terms like "never" and "always." Reviewers might expand on provable personal experiences to make the review more interesting to readers. Reviews of this sort often will use adjectives that may be too strong to reflect a situation accurately. Words might be tossed off like "slum lord" and "fraud" and "crook." What the review-writer rarely realizes is that any time a review strays from the truth and uses derogatory words to describe identifiable people or entities, the review can potentially support a defamation lawsuit.
Even if your negative review only comments honestly on your own personal experience with the company (or its goods/services) and only states provable facts and your pure opinions, nothing prevents the company from suing you anyway. Negative reviews, whether true or false, attract attention. Negative reviews can work to harm the reputation of a company. When a company's reputation is harmed, the company loses money. When a company loses money over a negative review, the company can take what has been said in the review and work to improve consumer relations - or they can consider a lawsuit against the consumer who reviewed them negatively.
One point to consider when negatively reviewing a big management company: If you intend to rent in the area again, a landlord/owner might be reluctant to rent to you. You could potentially find it difficult to find a new place to live.