High Rankings

AgentRank™ is going communal and we want to include your data points if you operate a website where real estate agent participation is scored. Some data points I’d personally like to see include:

1. Zillow’s Home Q&A - A real estate agent’s answers are flagged as either being “helpful” or “not helpful”. Data point wanted: the ratio between an agent’s “helpful” and “not helpful” answers.
2. Trulia Voices - Similar to above, a real estate agent’s answers voted “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” by visitors. Additionally, a “best answer” is chosen among all answers to a question. Two data points wanted: 1) ratio between “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” answers and 2) the ratio between “best answer” selections and total number of answers given.
3. ActiveRain “Featured Posts” - Blog posts are nominated to be “featured” on the ActiveRain homepage. Data point wanted: the total number of “featured posts” earned by a real estate agent.

Any other data points you can suggest?

AgentRank™ profiles continue their expansion. Earlier this morning, I added a listing of weblog publications to an agent’s profile. I’ll follow up with Technorati stats for each weblog later next week.

The best part, however, is that each weblog listing has a backlink to your weblog without a “nofollow”. If you’re as SEO obsessed as most agents, you know that means these links are primed for search engine spiders and deliver link “juice” to your blogs!

Similar to Drew’s call for a Virtual Housing Stock Market game, but based on “drafting” real estate agents rather than “trading” houses. How it might work:

1. Start a new “season” on the first day of each quarter.
2. Using AgentRank API’s ‘profiles’ resource, players browse agent profiles and “draft” a sales team consisting of no more than 10 real estate agents.
3. Scoring is based on home sales and can be determined using AgentRank API’s ’sales’ resource. A player is credited points when an agent on the player’s team closes a sale during the quarter.
4. Players can “hire” and “fire” agents throughout the season.
5. Maintain leader boards in each metro area for player teams.
6. End the season on the last day of each quarter and tally the “gross” sales for player teams to determine a winner.

Maybe a good candidate for the Facebook Developer Platform? Again, if you have the programming skills and want to take a shot at it, lemme know and I’ll personally help you get it going.

I appreciate simplicity in web design. And no one does simplicity better than SimpleWeather. SimpleWeather is a single-page snapshot of today’s weather plus an extended five-day forecast. SimpleWeather is an underdog considering the incumbent, Weather.com, but both my wife and I prefer SimpleWeather because it loads fast—only a single banner ad—and it’s easy to understand.

I’d like to see the same simplicity for real estate. Just like weather, the real estate space has its incumbents, too. But if done right, a simple view of local real estate could draw a crowd. I imagine entering my ZIP code and quickly seeing a single-page “cheat sheet” containing:

• Price-per-square-foot charting
• Plotting of median sale price forecasts
• Reviews of the agents selling in my area

Our AgentRank API provides all the necessary data to make this happen—sales history, market forecasts, and agent reviews. If you have the programming skills and want to take a shot at it, lemme know and I’ll personally help you get it going.

One of the biggest components of AgentRank™ is an agent’s sales history. And one of the biggest complaints I receive from agents is how tedious reporting individual sale transactions can be. So, I’m thrilled to announce agents can now easily upload multiple sale transactions from a common-delimited file.

And remember, agents, quality sale transactions can not only boost your placement in AgentRank.com search results, but they also act as virtual ’sold’ signs on any website that uses AgentRank.com’s open API.

There’s lots of chatter about reviewing and/or scoring real estate agents lately—Joseph Ferrara, Michael Wurzer, Mike Farmer, Dustin Luther, and Dave Phillips—and it will only get hotter as spring approaches.

Two themes jump out at me:

1. No particular agent reviewing/scoring website has gained significant traction yet
2. Agent reviewing/scoring websites can be easily gamed or are unfair

Whether true or not, if the perception of #2 exists in the minds of either Realtors or consumers, #1 will never be resolved. But my gut feeling is someone will get it right in 2008.

Interestingly, just as our press release hits the wires this morning, IncredibleAgents.com is getting a face lift the very same day. They’ve added a scorecard to agent profiles and the ability to save agents in an “Interview Cart”. I especially like the Interview Cart since I pitched the same concept to Yahoo! Real Estate last year. It seems natural to shop for an agent like you would any consumer product.

. . . hit the wires this morning:

Dallas, TX (PRWEB) March 18, 2008 — RealtyBaron™ (www.realtybaron.com), a pioneer in REALTOR® selection for the consumer, launches AgentRank.com (www.agentrank.com), a consumer destination website where thousands of REALTOR® profiles in the United States are available for searching and filtering by sales activity and client reviews.

With market conditions in the United States deteriorating, it’s never been more important for consumers to hire one of the best agents in their market. AgentRank.com helps consumers anonymously and objectively evaluate agents when preparing to buy or sell a home. AgentRank.com can guarantee objective results because no advertising or preferred placement is available to participating agents.

Consumers can make contact with agent candidates free of charge. Likewise, participating agents receive notification of consumer inquiries free of charge.

Joseph at The Sellsius Real Estate Blog floats the idea of a batting average for real estate agents and, obviously, I think it’s a great idea.

Two benefits:

1. Consumers could cut through the hype and compare real estate agents on paper similar to the P/E Ratio for stocks
2. Agents would have a useful method to benchmark themselves against the competition

However, Kris Berg casted doubt in the comments on whether real estate stats can be parsed and interpreted like baseball stats:

Real estate stats are [not] quite as cut and dried as baseball stats. Market times shorter? Does the agent price the homes too low? Market times longer? Does the seller insist on too high of a price? Maybe all of your listings were short sales or had small lots while mine were traditional sales with millions of dollars worth of upgrades and free-form pools. You sold more homes? You might have a team of twenty (and once hired, your client will never talk to you again), while I might work on my own and close fewer transactions overall but more “per warm body.” Finally, numbers are funny in that I can manipulate them to make them say what I want.

Granted, that’s a lot of asterisks and her points are valid. But baseball stats could easily be littered with asterisks if allowed. For example, was the game played outside or in a dome? Was the distance between home plate and the wall above or below average? Was the game played home or away? Ultimately, a statistical data point is never perfect but, if mined from enough data over time, can be a good indicator of performance.

. . . and not just your average ‘find a REALTOR®’ website, either.

Why AgentRank.com is different:

1. Objective: agents cannot purchase advertising or preferred placement.
2. Comprehensive: agents are ranked against each other using a dozen data points from a variety of sources such as experience, sales activity, client reviews, market forecasts, and blogging.
3. Unobtrusive: consumers can make contact with candidate agents for free. Likewise, agents are notified of consumer inquiries for free.
4. Pervasive: an open API available at http://tinyurl.com/yof6ds