Real Estate Agents and Statistics
March 17th, 2008Joseph 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.