High Rankings

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