Real Estate Agents and Statistics
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:
- Consumers could cut through the hype and compare real estate agents on paper similar to the P/E Ratio for stocks
- 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.
Tags: performance, real estate, realtor, realtors
March 17th, 2008 at 10:46 am
The concept is a novel one. It would provide the information that everyone is looking for.
However, I think that there would be no way to create a “one stat” show. For example, if you just look at batting average, you are missing a lot of the game. What happened in those at bats?
At the very least you’d have an AVG-SLG-OBS situation, where there are three pieces of the puzzle coming into play and trying to give a broader picture of the real estate puzzle.
March 17th, 2009 at 10:05 am
Since Texas is a Non-Disclose state, as Realtors working in Texas we can not distribute or post the actual sold prices of homes. Therefore I cannot legally list my recent sales on the site. Unfortunately the site will not allow us to enter the basic data without listing the sold price. I would suggest the site be updated to allow sales to be posted without the sold price so as not to conflict with the state laws regarding sales. Thank you for your time.
March 17th, 2009 at 10:14 am
@Betina
Yes, you can legally list your sales even though you’re a Realtor working in Texas. For more information on this, check out http://texasrealestate.blogs.com/weblog/2008/03/gotcha-guide-th.html
Specifically, this section: