How we researched this.
ClearLogic’s research on professional-services firms draws on publicly posted customer reviews on Google, the reviews attached to a firm’s Google Maps and Google Business Profile listing. This page states exactly how we collected, scored and filtered them. Our trades, property maintenance and construction research each have their own methodology page, and our accounting research uses the same source as this one.
Public Google reviews, read as any member of the public could.
We read only what anyone can see on a firm’s Google listing. We did not log in, contact any firm, or access anything that wasn’t already published.
We started from a list of 1,044 New Zealand professional-services firms compiled from public business listings (not from reviews, and not from any client or enquiry data), in two groups:
- —Property, finance and legal: real estate agencies, property managers, mortgage brokers, law and conveyancing firms.
- —Architecture and design: architects, architectural designers, interior designers and drafting services.
Each firm’s Google listing was collected on 10 October 2026 through a commercial data-collection service that reads public listings. For each firm we collected its 40 most recent reviews, or all of them if it had fewer. Collection stopped at 1,007 firms when the budget set for this study was reached, so the last 37 on the list were not collected. Three of the 1,007 were removed: two were permanently closed, and one was matched by Google to a different listing from the one we asked for.
| Property, finance & legal | Architecture & design | |
|---|---|---|
| Firms analysed | 594 | 410 |
| Firms with at least one review collected | 577 | 361 |
| Firms with no public review | 16 (2.7%) | 49 (12.0%) |
| Reviews analysed | 16,520 | 3,444 |
One further property, finance and legal firm shows a rating on its listing, but none of its individual reviews could be collected.
Scope is New Zealand only. A firm is placed in a region by the town on its listing. Forty-nine firms with no published address are placed by the city they were found under, and 78 that serve an area without publishing an address are counted in national figures only.
This is a snapshot taken on 10 October 2026. It does not update automatically. If we republish an updated version later, we’ll date it separately from this one.
One star rating, not four sub-scores.
Our trades, property maintenance and construction research used a review platform where each review carries four named sub-scores on a 0 to 100 scale. Google reviews carry one rating, 1 to 5 stars, plus free text. So the findings here are built from the star-rating distribution and from what reviewers praise or complain about in the text. The method matches our accounting research, with two differences: the categories were written for these two sectors, and only each firm’s 40 most recent reviews were used.
How reviews are scored, and how we coded them.
The rating
Each review’s 1 to 5 star rating as published. We didn’t adjust it. A negative review is 2 stars or fewer; a positive review is 4 or 5 stars. 16,394 reviews were positive by that definition and 734 were negative.
Firm size
Google doesn’t publish staff counts, so “size” is the firm’s public review count split into three equal groups (small, mid, large). It’s a proxy for public footprint, not headcount.
Complaint coding (6 categories)
Negative reviews were coded against a fixed list: overcharging, unresponsive, errors or mistakes, delays, unclear advice or poor updates, and rude or unprofessional conduct. Coding was by keyword and phrase matching, fixed before the data was read.
Praise coding (11 categories)
Positive reviews were coded against a fixed list of eleven traits: responsiveness, clear explanation, proactive advice, accuracy, value for fees, accessibility (easy to get hold of), delivering on time, politeness, problem solving, referral language (“would recommend”) and repeat-use language. Coding was by an LLM classifier (Claude Haiku 4.5). The list was fixed before coding. A review can carry more than one trait, so percentages don’t sum to 100.
A statistic only gets published if it clears two thresholds.
- 01At least 30 reviews behind any single figure, so it isn’t resting on a handful of opinions.
- 02At least 5 different firms contributing to that figure, our own addition, because a figure built from one to four firms’ reviews can be traced back to roughly which firms it describes even with no name attached.
Every regional and size group we report clears both; the smallest is architecture and design in Northland, at 8 firms. We also applied the 5-firm rule to each individual praise or complaint figure, not just the group it sits in. 60 praise and complaint figures failed that test, mostly regional complaint figures where a handful of firms supplied every matching review. They are not published anywhere.
No trends over time. Because we collected each firm’s most recent 40 reviews, busier firms contribute only their latest reviews. Year-by-year review counts and rating changes would reflect that cut-off, not real change, so we don’t report them.
No names, ever.
No firm name, owner name, staff name or individual review appears in anything we publish. Every figure is an aggregate across many reviews and many firms. Reviews in these sectors very often name the individual agent, broker, lawyer or designer, so the review excerpts we used to check our coding went through two anonymisation passes: an automated pass that removed firm names, then an AI pass that removed personal names (485 of 806 excerpts had a name removed). None of the excerpts are published.
Read the numbers with these in mind.
- —Public reviews lean toward strong opinions and skew positive: over 92% are five-star in both sectors. The negative samples are 659 reviews (property, finance and legal) and 75 (architecture and design). The second is too small to rank complaints with confidence.
- —Only the most recent 40 reviews per firm, so this describes recent experience at busy firms.
- —Real estate makes up the largest share of property, finance and legal reviews. Sub-sectors are not reported separately.
- —“Size” is review count, not headcount or revenue.
- —Regional and size differences describe this data, not proven causes.
All figures were reviewed and approved for publication on 10 October 2026. This page will be updated if the underlying data is refreshed. Last updated: 10 October 2026.
