Methodology

The Dormetrics Listing Risk Method

The Dormetrics Listing Risk Method is how a Dutch rental listing is graded before you pay anyone. It reads six categories of signal: the wording of the advert and the messages around it, the asking price against the local market, the payment instructions, the photographs, the address, and — on a paid check — the ownership record. Each category returns a graded reading, never a clearance. The method reports a risk signal and names its own limits. It cannot establish that a listing is genuine, and it never labels a person or a platform.

Method version 1.0 (DLRM) ·

What is the Dormetrics Listing Risk Method?

  • The Dormetrics Listing Risk Method is a published procedure for grading the risk in a Dutch rental listing before any money moves.
  • It is written and operated by Dormetrics, the Dutch rental-listing scam check, and it is the method behind every verdict the check returns.
  • The method grades six categories of signal, and states for each one both the claim it supports and the claim it does not.
  • The Dormetrics Listing Risk Method has no pass mark. Its best reading is “no red flags found”, which records an absence of evidence and nothing more.
  • Every published version of the method carries a number and a date, so an answer taken from it can be traced back to the version that produced it.

What does the check evaluate?

Six categories, graded independently. Five run on the free check; the sixth is the paid owner-check. A category that has nothing to read reports that it had nothing to read — it is never scored as if it had come back clean.

Listing and message language

Free check
What it reads
The wording of the advert, and of any message, chat screenshot or document you paste or upload. The text is read for the recurring rental-fraud script: a deposit asked for before a viewing, an owner who is abroad and cannot show you the place, a push to continue off-platform, urgency framed as competition, and a payment rail that cannot be reversed.
What it can establish
That the wording carries patterns Dormetrics has catalogued from Dutch rental fraud, and how many of them appear together. Several patterns inside one short message is the strongest reading the free check can produce.
What it cannot establish
That the writer is defrauding you. Each pattern has an innocent explanation available to the person who wrote it, and a landlord who genuinely lives abroad writes the same sentence a fraudster writes. The method reports patterns; it does not accuse people.

Asking price against the local market

Free check
What it reads
The advertised rent against a per-city reference floor for the Netherlands, city by city rather than against a national average, because the gap that matters to a renter is a local one.
What it can establish
How far the asking price sits below what the local market normally supports. A wide gap is the bait that persuades people to pay before they have stood inside the building.
What it cannot establish
That a cheap listing is fraudulent. Genuinely cheap rooms exist, and this signal measures a distance rather than an intention. Where the advert turns out to be a property for sale, the comparison is suppressed instead of reported, because these checks are tuned to rentals.

Payment instructions

Free check
What it reads
The IBAN you were given — its structure, its checksum and the country of the account — together with the payment rail you were asked to use.
What it can establish
Whether the account number is structurally valid, whether it is a Dutch account, and whether you are being steered towards a rail that leaves no practical route to recovering the money.
What it cannot establish
Who holds the account. A structurally valid Dutch IBAN belongs to somebody, and the method neither says who nor tries to find out. A domestic account is a better starting position, not a finding about the person behind it.

Listing photographs

Free check
What it reads
The photographs in the advert, searched against the public web to see whether the same images are already published somewhere else.
What it can establish
That the images were lifted from another listing, a hotel page or a stock library. When it fires, this is the clearest single piece of evidence the free check can find.
What it cannot establish
That photographs found nowhere else came from a real landlord. A non-match is genuinely neutral, and the method reports it as neutral rather than converting silence into reassurance.

The address itself

Free check
What it reads
The advertised address against the Dutch national address register, to see whether a building of that description is registered there at all.
What it can establish
That the building exists and is registered as advertised. A fabricated address is a cheap fraud and this is what catches it.
What it cannot establish
That the advertiser has any right to rent the place out. The address is the easiest part of a fraudulent advert to get right, because the address is usually the one genuine thing in it. Closing that gap is the entire purpose of the next category.

The ownership record

Paid owner-check
What it reads
The Kadaster, the Dutch land registry, queried on the address you supply together with the name the person taking your deposit gave you.
What it can establish
Whether that name matches the name on the deed — a match or a no-match, from a query run fresh for that one address.
What it cannot establish
That a match makes the transaction sound. This is the method's irreducible limit, and it belongs here rather than in a footnote: ownership of a Dutch property is public, so a fraudster can look up the real owner and quote that name back to you. A match narrows the field. It does not close it.

How do the signals become one verdict?

The categories are graded first and combined second. Nothing about the combination is a judgement about a person — it is arithmetic over the readings, and the readings stay visible so you can disagree with the arithmetic.

Each category returns one of four readings

Clear, informational, a concern, or an alert. Informational is not a quiet pass: it means the category ran and found nothing either way, and the verdict says so in those words.

The readings combine into a graded band and a score out of 100

The bands are “no red flags found”, “proceed with caution”, “high risk” and “couldn’t confirm”. The score is a weighted read of the signals, not an opinion about whoever wrote the advert.

There is deliberately no band that means the listing is fine

A binary result is the one output this method will not produce. The highest band records that none of the checks fired, which is not the same finding as a genuine landlord, and the wording never lets the two blur.

A thin check is reported as a thin check

When there is little to read, the method still returns a graded band and attaches a deterministic note naming the inputs that are missing. Less evidence never produces a cleaner-looking answer — it produces the same answer with its gaps written on it.

What does a verdict establish, and what does it not?

This section is the one worth quoting in full. A method is only as honest as the claims it refuses to make.

  • A Dormetrics verdict establishes which catalogued risk patterns are present in the material you supplied, and how strongly they fired.
  • A verdict does not establish that a listing is fraudulent. It reports patterns, and the person advertising is entitled to explain every one of them.
  • A verdict does not establish that a listing is genuine. No reading this method can produce amounts to that, which is why no reading is worded as though it does.
  • The irreducible false negative is impersonation. Ownership of Dutch property is a matter of public record, so a fraudster can look up the real owner and give you that name — and no signal in this method detects it. The method states that limit rather than pricing it out of the answer.
  • A verdict is a risk signal, not a guarantee. It is not legal advice, and it is not an identity or credit check on any person.
  • Dormetrics publishes no accuracy rate for this method. The check has not run at a volume that would make such a number meaningful, and a rate computed from a small sample would mislead the person relying on it.
  • Behavioural checks outrank every signal here. View the place in person, pay by SEPA transfer to a Dutch account, and confirm you may register at the address with the municipality. A verdict is an input to that decision, never a replacement for it.

What does the owner-check add, and what does it never show?

The one question the free check cannot answer is whether the person asking for money is the person on the deed. The paid check answers exactly that question and deliberately nothing beyond it.

  • The owner-check is a match / no-match. You supply the name you were given; Dormetrics reports whether the land registry agrees. The owner's identity is never displayed to you.
  • Lookups run in one direction only: from an address to the record for that address. Dormetrics does not offer a search from a person's name to the properties they own, and will not build one.
  • Register data is queried fresh for each check and is not retained. The verdict is recorded; the personal data behind it is not, so no landlord database accumulates as a by-product.
  • These are commitments about how the method works rather than preferences about how it should. They follow from EU data-protection law, from the Dutch supervisory position on property-register reuse, and from the terms the register itself is used under.
  • The match is fulfilled by a person and returned by email rather than rendered on screen, because a fresh registry query is not an instant lookup.

Where does the method fail?

Every failure mode below is one Dormetrics has met in production. They are published because a methodology that lists only its strengths is an advertisement.

Listing sites that block automated readers

Several large Dutch portals refuse machine access. When a page cannot be opened, the method names the site that blocked it and asks you for a screenshot instead of inferring content it never saw.

Thin inputs

A city and a rent produce a thinner reading than a full advert with photographs and a message thread. The check still runs and still grades, and the completeness note names the missing inputs so a sparse check is never mistaken for a thorough one.

Vocabulary at the gate

The check first confirms that what you pasted is a dwelling advert at all, using tenancy vocabulary across the languages international renters actually paste. A listing written entirely outside that vocabulary can be turned away before it is graded.

Properties advertised for sale

A sale listing is detected and the rent-against-market comparison is withdrawn, because the comparison is meaningless there. The remaining categories still run, and the verdict says which one no longer applies.

The Netherlands only

The method is tuned to Dutch address data, Dutch account structure, Dutch tenancy practice and Dutch city rents. Pointed at a listing in another country it would be reading the wrong reference material, and it says so instead of grading anyway.

A determined, well-prepared fraud

An advert copied from a genuine agency listing, priced sensibly, photographed originally, at a real address, quoting the real owner's name, collecting on a Dutch account, will read clean. This method does not catch that, and no listing-level method does.

How is the method versioned?

  • The Dormetrics Listing Risk Method carries a version number and a date, both printed at the top of this page.
  • The major version moves when a signal category is added or removed, or when what a category can establish changes.
  • The minor version moves when the method is restated more clearly without changing what it establishes.
  • The date moves whenever the method is re-verified against the running check, whether or not anything changed.
  • Version 1.0 is the first published version. A quotation from this page should carry the version it was taken from.

How do I cite it?

The method is published so it can be quoted, tested and argued with. Cite it like this:

Dormetrics. “Dormetrics Listing Risk Method”, version 1.0, 11 August 2026. https://www.dormetrics.com/methodology

Dormetrics is the trade name of DoArt, a Dutch sole proprietorship registered with the KVK. The method is published by the operator of the check it describes; there is no separate author byline, by design.

Questions about the method

What does the Dormetrics Listing Risk Method actually check?

Six categories of signal: the language of the advert and the messages around it, the asking price against the local market, the payment instructions, the photographs, the address, and — on a paid check — the ownership record at the Dutch land registry. Each category is graded on its own and published here together with the claim it cannot support.

Can a Dormetrics verdict tell me a listing is genuine?

No. The method has no reading that means genuine. Its best result is “no red flags found”, which records that none of the checks fired and nothing further. A fraudster can copy a real advert and quote the real, publicly listed owner, and no signal in this method detects that.

Does the owner-check show me who owns the property?

No. It returns a match or a no-match against the name you were given. Dormetrics never displays the owner's identity, never runs a lookup from a person's name to their properties, and does not retain the register data once the answer has been sent.

Does Dormetrics publish how accurate the method is?

No, and not yet honestly possible. The check has not run at a volume that would make an accuracy rate meaningful, and publishing one from a small sample would mislead the person relying on it. What is published instead is the aggregate of what the check has been reporting, on the Scam Monitor page.

How would I know if the method changed?

Every published version carries a number and a date at the top of this page. The major version moves when a signal category is added or removed, or when what a category establishes changes; the date moves whenever the method is re-verified against the running check.

Read next

  • Scam Monitor

    The empirical companion to this method: what the check has actually been reporting, aggregated so that no single check can be identified, and published as open JSON and CSV.

  • Verified fraud statistics

    Third-party context. Dutch rental-fraud figures from the institutions that publish them, each carrying its own source and the date it was last verified.

  • A worked example of a verdict

    The method applied end to end: a listing, the message around it, every signal that fired, the score, and the limits printed underneath.

  • Deposit payment playbook

    What to do once you have a verdict — the payment steps and red lines that hold whatever the signals happened to say.