High Rankings

Website traffic was up 4,996.43% yesterday after the Associated Press included AgentRank.com in a round-up of real estate agent review web sites:

AgentRank, for example, launched in March and remains in its beta stage of development. The company brews agent rankings through a complex recipe. Put simply, it bakes all kinds of variables into an agent’s profile — recent sales history, client reviews, experience, average days homes stay on market, among others — and assigns them secret values that are then pumped through an algorithm that distills everything down to a rank between one and 10, with 10 being the best.  Visitors can search for agents by ZIP code or city and state, and they receive a list of agents ranked in descending order.  A key component of AgentRank and similar sites is the gathering of testimonials from agents’ clients.  What better way of ranking agents than by the number of positive reviews from past clients?  The site tells agents they can improve their ranking if they “close deals and make your clients happy.”  Currently, agents solicit testimonials from their clients to place on the site. But that will change by next spring, when the site begins accepting unsolicited reviews, says AgentRank.com chief executive Marc Dugger.  A search of agents in Los Angeles on AgentRank turned up only 15, which is a precious few.  Dugger acknowledges the site is a work in progress. It has profiles for up to 5,000 agents spread out nationwide, which can lead to some regions having more than others, he notes.  Ultimately, relying on referrals from friends or relatives doesn’t always work out, Dugger insists.  ”People are very quick to hire an agent based on a single referral, but the power of these reviews are the fact that you get to see a pattern of success for an agent,” Dugger says. “There are some agents that have upward of 15 to 20 reviews on the site, and that, in my opinion, would instill great confidence in that agent.” 

Overall, a solid review.

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?

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.