The 1-Star Problem: What NZ's Review Data Really Shows

The average Google star rating for a ranked NZ service business is 4.86. That number is so consistent across industries, and so close to five, that it has stopped meaning much. The more revealing number is the 1-star rate: the proportion of reviews that are outright complaints. Across 3,269 businesses and more than 376,000 reviews, that number tells a very different story.

Some industries absorb far more complaints than others

Family lawyers attract 1-star reviews at an average rate of 6.24%, nineteen times the rate of mortgage brokers (0.33%) and twelve times the rate of graphic designers (0.50%). Legal services as a whole now top the sector table at 3.84%, ahead of automotive at 3.21%. When we first ran this analysis in April, automotive led and the widest gap was sevenfold; two months of accumulated data and 16 additional categories have stretched it to nineteen.

The spread by individual category:

The reasons differ by sector. For legal services, the dynamic is adversarial outcomes: a client who lost a custody case or an employment dispute has both motive and time to leave a review, which is likely why family and employment lawyers now hold the top two complaint rates in the country. For automotive trades, the pattern reflects the nature of the work: complex diagnosis, disputed liability, customers who feel charged for a problem that wasn't resolved. Property management sits in its own category: managers are reviewed by landlords and tenants simultaneously, and that relationship is structurally contentious in ways most service categories are not.

The star rating hides all of this

Here is the problem: the headline star rating barely moves across these categories.

Family lawyers, the most complained-about category in the country, still average 4.65 stars. Mortgage brokers average 4.98. The difference between the category with the highest complaint rate and the cleanest is a third of a star, a gap most people would not notice or act on.

A business with a 5–10% 1-star rate still averages 4.62 stars in the businesses analysed. Roughly one in six ranked NZ service businesses has a complaint rate above 5%, and seven in ten of those still display a rating of 4.5 or better.

The reason is volume. A business with 300 reviews absorbs 15 unhappy customers and still shows 4.7 stars. At scale, individual complaints become statistically invisible in the average. The star rating measures sentiment share, not complaint frequency. Those are not the same thing.

The city picture is more complicated than it looks

Dunedin businesses average a 2.58% 1-star rate across all categories, the highest of the seven markets analysed. Hamilton follows at 2.30%. Christchurch (2.01%) and Wellington (2.06%) run cleanest among the main centres.

In April we attributed the small-city gap to review volume: fewer reviews per business means a single unhappy customer moves the rate further. That explanation now has a counterexample. Napier and Hastings, new to the analysis, has the fewest reviews per business of any market alongside Tauranga, yet the lowest complaint rate in the country. Volume still buffers the big-city numbers (Auckland's businesses carry nearly three times the reviews of Dunedin's), but it cannot be the whole story. Dunedin's higher complaint rate persists across most categories, not just the thin ones.

What to look at instead

The rating distribution (the breakdown of 1-star through 5-star counts) carries more information than the average for high-stakes categories. A business with 400 reviews and 30 of them at 1-star is showing something a 4.7-star average does not.

For legal, automotive, and property management, the three sectors where complaint rates are structurally higher, the distribution is worth checking before committing.