Choosing a house when there are no stars
Stars rate hotels. A holiday house has none, and that is just as well: they would have measured the wrong thing.
A hotel star means a lift, a night desk, a bathrobe. These are verifiable things, which is why they are counted. Not one of them answers the question you are actually asking in front of a house: will we be happy there?
There is no scale for that. There are signs, and they are almost always in the same three places.
Photographs of what is not beautiful. A listing that shows the bathroom, the corridor and the laundry corner was made by someone with nothing to hide. Seven photographs of the pool at sunset and none of a bedroom is an answer in itself.
The way it is written. "Charming villa, ideally located" was written by nobody: it is a template sentence. "The walls are eighty centimetres thick; you sleep cool in August without ever touching the air conditioning" was written by someone who has slept there. The second teaches you something; the first flatters you.
What you are told that is unwelcome. An owner who warns you that the road narrows for the last two kilometres, that the mobile signal is temperamental, or that the farm starts work early is giving you a gift. They would rather lose a booking than spoil a stay. That is exactly the person you want to write to.
The rest — the number of beds, the distance to the beach, the price — is on a listing page. Those three things are found nowhere but in the care taken to write them.