The Search for Perfect Agent

25 Comment(s)

1. Agent Scoreboard | Jun 6, 2007 | Reply

   Wow… that’s a interesting post, especially since thats mostly what I’ve been thinking about for 2-3 years now. Ever since I got bounced from bidding on a motorcycle on ebay for not having enough positive feedback. I was saying to myself, here is a market that is self-policing. Ebayers, back in the day took the feedback seriously, some still do and some know how to game the system, but mostly they took that feedback rating as a way to measure something in a market with no persistent relationships.

   I’ve heard that referral are everything in the real estate business, but how come no one has tried to aggregate their own referrals and then use them as a marketing tool for new business, oh, I forgot about the testimonial… well I believe the public largely believes their fake or have been manipulated in some fashion.

   So then there has to be some trusted 3rd party, who has a process for collecting and disseminating the feedback that the consumer can trust, and is at the same time fair to the service provider (allows some sort of dispute process).

   I’ve been in the lab late at night cooking such a brew… Its challenging to build something that both consumers and real estate professionals will trust…

   What we have come up with is the term “credibility marketingâ€? it’s the process of marketing your reputation to the masses. It must be packaged for the service provider, and then spoon feed to the consumer, as I believe transaction count and frequency for both realtor and consumer are very low, compared to say a restaurant.

   I agree with you that the search criteria and rating schemas are a bit limited at this time, but cutting thru the fear from the realtor side is the first hurdle, if realtors don’t participate or find the feedback useful in generating new business they may ignore it all together… which would make the database even more useless.

   I think many years will pass before there is a truly useful (from a consumer’s perspective) agent rating product. We must have time to amass the feedback. Once such a tool does exist I predict it will be more important than a NAR membership.

2. Daniel Bates | Jun 6, 2007 | Reply

   The biggest problems with with the sites already out there are that agents have to pay to be listed (bad agents with money can pay for a spot) and there’s no way to validate who is commenting on their performance. A ruthless agent could go to the site claiming to be a past client and say all the other agents are bad. Conversely the agent could have all his friends bid him up. Records would have to be kept in house, permission given by the agent to contact his clients, and it would have to be free – sounds more like a good service that NAR should provide, but then again if you’re a bad Realtor and fork over all that money to them and then they tell everyone you’re not good at what you do, you might not pay them anymore membership dues.

3. Steven Groves | Jun 6, 2007 | Reply

   Great comment Joel – I visited the HomeThinking site and yes, I found 11,000 realtors listed from Phoenix Arizona, but NONE were rated – nice presentation, content was lacking.

   In Arizona, the state has decided to open up the public databases to Google searches – this might include the Department of Real Estate and their complaint database – hmm, might make an interesting ‘Web2.0′ mashup site…

   Regarding the response to an online critic – we have to just be ready for them. A good response is to be open to their comment and other than the flaming greifer, recognize that the commentator may have a valid concern – the Agent2.0 Real Estate Professional (the real estate agent of the future) needs transparency, warts and all.

4. John Schroeder | Jun 6, 2007 | Reply

   I guess that it comes down to the same thing that all RE 2.0 companies face. Where does the revenue come from. Having agents pay to belong seems to me to not be the right way to go. Maybe advertising would work.

   How does the company who create this online database verify the online critiques? Your site is only as good as the integrity of data which would seem to be very hard/expense to keep accurate and complete.

   Maybe something more like Facebook as you have mentioned in your previous post would be a better source for this. Knowing the person (1st degree, 2nd degree, 3rd degree) who is giving the critique on the agent seems to hold a lot more water than a mysterious first name last initial from Anytown USA.

5. Yvonne Lederer | Jun 6, 2007 | Reply

   Well, funny you should ask…Expert Realty, my company, takes the guesswork out of finding a “competent” agent by providing all our agents with high level agent training – no matter what their experience is. Then we train them to corporate specs. Then we brainwash them, clone them and throw them in real estate bootcamp to reinforce the training seminars and AFTER AND ONLY AFTER they have proven themselves worthy, do we send them out on calls fielded by realtors’ assistants. Our agents NEVER pick up a call. They are the in-field expert ready to greet you and dazzle you with knowledge on-site. Once you get assigend to one, you’ll never go back to “looking for an agent” again. WE MATCH YOU.

6. Daniel Bates | Jun 6, 2007 | Reply

   You may still have a bias issue there Yvonne. I’m not discrediting your training, but if you are the one to gain in the situation why should the consumer trust you? Just playing devil’s advocate for a moment. If I were to sell my home (and I wasn’t a RE agent) I would want a local agent who knows the area and it sounds like you may or may not get that with your system despite that fact that you match the consumer.
   In the end if you’re looking for an agent online you probably know the area you want to move. Find an agent in that area and interview them. Follow up with one of their testimonials and get an honest assessment. It’s a little more work to do it yourself, but it is the investment of a lifetime, did you think that there would be an “easy” button? This takes the bias out of the equation and ensures that you are finding someone that you get along with and can see eye to eye with.

7. Agent Scoreboard | Jun 6, 2007 | Reply

   Yea… I don’t think agents should have to pay for a profile… it kinda defeats the purpose… there are other ways to make money on a site like that. (6 million possible transactions = 12 million participants)

   I also like incorporating the DRE data… so much so, that I put that in agent scoreboard… check out my profile here

   http://www.agentscoreboard.com/agent/635220_Michael_Agee

   If you click on my license # it will pop up with the CA information about my license. Scary… Not all states make it that easy to put the data out there but we’re trying…

   and yea… no anonymous ratings either… that’s a cop out and invites corruption… I can see the Redfin’s and Help-U-Sells of America getting daily attacks from anonymous reviewers telling tales of disappointment and woe. There needs to be a dispute process. Its tricky. Unverified reviews are posted as “Comments” that don’t affect your ranking or score, and a simple click of a mouse can initiate a dispute process that can have it removed if the commentator can’t be verified.

   In fact we also built in a “peer review” process which allows other agents to comment on an agents ability to do their job, from the perspective of another professional, again separate from their consumer score…

   I hate people who use comments on blogs as commercials… so I’m sorry if this sounds like one… we’ve just been working on this for about 2 years now, and have built it from actually talking to agents like you guys. So we’ve received the same comments before, and tried to incorporate solutions for them into our product…

8. Incredible Agent | Jun 6, 2007 | Reply

   Joel, lots of good stuff. Thanks for throwing down the gauntlet. At Incredible Agent we talk about these same topics everyday. Many of these improvements are things we are already developing for the site, the others we will definitely take a look at. Credibility & Clean/Accurate Data on our site are very important to us. We’ve learned that playing the middle man between agents and consumers is not an easy task and are always looking for better ways to improve our data & tools for both sides of the fence.

   Of course our site has to make money, just like every other business. If you don’t, you won’t be able to build the tools needed to lend credibility and drive traffic. Advertising is only part of the equation. There are many other ways to monetize the traffic and help agents reach more consumers.

   In regards to AVVO… 1 negative review on AVVO won’t crush your practice because there aren’t enough visitors to the site to make a difference. If AVVO were the definitive place for lawyer selection, that may be true. They certainly aren’t there yet.

   BTW: A little tie into to our Real Estate world for AVVO…http://www.benchmark.com/sv/venture_partners/barton.shtml Obviously, Rich is thinking about the review world as well.

9. Josh | Jun 6, 2007 | Reply

   Great idea… It would also help to get rid of the “friend of the family” approach, when you could objectively point out to the family member you’d prefer a 10yr, 100 closing veteran, with a specialty in coops, for example.

10. Agent Scoreboard | Jun 6, 2007 | Reply

    Referral are the number one source of clients for the industry, what if you could collect them and distribute them outside your sphere of influence or the sphere of influence of your past clients… what if people looking for an agent that speaks spanish and provides excellent customer service in Corona, California would have a place to find one…

11. Tony Arko | Jun 6, 2007 | Reply

    Searching for the perfect agent should be very easy thanks to the internet search engines. Here is how you do it:

    1. Ask 5-7 people you trust for the name of an agent they would recommend and/or use to buy a house.
    2. Google the agents name.
    3. Read what they have to say and where they have exposure.
    4. Pick the agent that you feel will best represent you based on what they write and what they have to say about real estate in your area.

12. Agent Scoreboard | Jun 6, 2007 | Reply

    yea.. tony… it makes in simple… however…

    The likely scenario is that those 5 people give you 5 names… Only 2 have blogs, and they are mostly nonsense or some feed from inman…

    Your approach still doesn’t give the reader an idea of that agents track record with his clients. I good referral isn’t necessarily an indictor that this agent knows how to sell “YOUR” house.

13. Niki Scevak | Jun 6, 2007 | Reply

    @[4]Steven: Just to clarify, the crux of Homethinking is that we can try to measure the performance of an agent based upon what they have sold and what they are selling. The consumer reviews are part of that but the backbone is the sales data.

    @Joel: All good thoughts and feedback here. You are right no one has yet nailed it. Avvo is kind of step in the right direction but I don’t know if you were deep in the legal industry you’d consider it an endpoint; they have a long way to go. Although it’s great to see another piece of the Yellow Pages directories being turned consumer friendly and data-driven.

    Niki Scevak – Founder, Homethinking.com

14. Tony Arko | Jun 6, 2007 | Reply

    Agent, the precise reason for the search is to reduce the agents down to 1 or 2 who have a knowledge and are utilizing the internet as a marketing tool. If someone is using the internet to research an agent, they should choose an agent who understands the internet and is writing a blog.

    Also, the difference between finding someone a house to buy versus selling someone’s home are monumental. And these differences should be discussed in the agents blog.

    The main point is if you are using the internet to research an agents abilities and they don’t utilize the internet to market themselves they should be eliminated from the “Perfect Agent” search.

15. Robert Melton | Jun 6, 2007 | Reply

    Great post, Joel!

    I do have to agree with Niki – Avvo has a long way to go. They have relatively inexperienced trademark attorneys ranked above the experienced partners here in Pittsburgh and they have a trusts & estates taxation expert ranked at the top of the real estate section.

    Not saying they won’t get much better (let’s just say that I recognized two names in the team bio and I wouldn’t want to bet against them). And I applaud the effort (the directory of lawyers – Martindale – is awful).

16. Agent Scoreboard | Jun 7, 2007 | Reply

    You know AVVO is neat… but I don’t know how you can use the same yardstick to measure all lawyers. I’m sure their “formula” compensates for anomalies in the lawyers past, what if a lawyer interned with a firm working in a very specific set of cases, that your interested in? does the model pick that up? How can it? Additionally, years in the business doesn’t = successful lawyer. So while I think objective data has its place there has to be some context put to that data from their clients…

    I don’t know I’ve met really good real estate agent w/ less than 2 years of experience who’ve immersed themselves in the business, learned the latest tools and are on the cutting edge of real estate sales… they may have slightly more transactions than the guy with 20 years of experience by are light years better. How do adjust for that? It has to be with customer feedback…

    I agree with whoever said “it’s a new twist on yellow pages dataâ€?
    my.02

17. Robert Melton | Jun 7, 2007 | Reply

    Based on the data that they are displaying, it is pretty easy to take a stab at the AVVO formula (though I’m sure it is more complex than this and I’m doing it from memory of the site which I looked at last night):

    +- law school + Clerkship + Years of Experience + Awards + Journal Articles + Community Involvement + or – customer ratings + – Firm Caliber + Percentage of cases handled on subject area – disciplinary actions = Attorney Rating on a 1 – 10 scale.

    I think there is probably a major bump for a couple things: AV rating in Martindale – Chambers & Partners mention, 100 Top Lawyers mention (or whatever it is called – Rising Stars, 40 under 40, etc.) Martindale is peer reviewed (I think) and Chambers is based on customer reviews.

    And I think that is probably a rough estimation of the caliber of the attorney. Certainly better than just picking up the yellow pages. If they want to really distinguish specialties, they’ll pay a couple well connected lawyers in each city to run through the list of attorneys and hand alter them every couple years – Just like I imagine Google does.

    What it does not do is give you a value estimation – weighing rate and caliber. And that’s a big problem – since anyone that is going to want the attorneys at the top of the list probably has a slew of attorneys already. The people that are most likely to need to use it to pick an attorney at the moment (small businesses and individuals), probably aren’t really helped by it.

18. Tom Johnson | Jun 7, 2007 | Reply

    ERA is the only real estate company to win 3 consecutive JD Powers awards. International company, Fortune 500 parent, every client is surveyed. In addition, we have a satisfaction guarantee, and a Guaranteed Buyout Program: I will sell your house or ERA will buy it. What more does a consumer need?

19. Robert Melton | Jun 8, 2007 | Reply

    How about an agent that doesn’t post a sales associate instruction page on their website with “Get that listing!” right on top?

20. Agent Scoreboard | Jun 8, 2007 | Reply

    Tom… saying that ERA won this and is a Fortune 500 company really says nothing about that individual agent. ERA is still a copo operation and agent are independant contractors, running their own small business. Brand Association is not a guarantee that the customer will get have a great experience.

    But that said… ERA at least, is on the right track. ERA should publish every customer survey… I bet there would be tons of traffic just to read the juicy details…

21. Davd Bethoney | Jun 11, 2007 | Reply

    Here s an update on Avvo – over at John Cook’s Venture blog. Apparently, they are taking some pretty heavy fire.

    http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/venture/archives/116417.asp

22. Charles Turner | Jun 14, 2007 | Reply

    [Aside: I am working with Charles Turner of the Portland Real Estate Blog, with whom I am very happy - this post is more a general musing.]

    That’s a relief.

    Judysbook.com attempts to offer user ratings of Realtors but their navigation is so messed up the system is almost inoperable. Search Portland, OR and it asks you to narrow down you search by selecting which Portland you mean- did you know there are 11 states with a city named Portland (the one in Oregon isn’t an option!)? Biggest problem is that you have to register as a Realtor and then drive your past clients to the site to rate you. I’m not overly motivated to send an unhappy client (it has happened once) to rate me.

    Our company sends out surveys via a third party (Quality Service Certification). Return rate is about 30%. We rate in the high fours out of five.

    The danger I see of rating Realtors is the comparatively low volume. In most markets, a Realtor is probably making a living closing six transactions a year (we aim for that in a month). Outliers in the survey skew the results drastically (as Joel points out). You could argue that Ebay’s system works at all level of volume or at least throws a red flag for low volume sellers if there is a negative.

    References are great but I’m not likely to post about the client who thought I was the devil incarnate on my website.

    At the end of the day, real estate is personal. If it wasn’t there would be no need for Realtors. You may not want to work with me and I may not want to work with you (ask an agent that has been in the industry less than two years and ask them if they have ever turned away a potential client). I can tell more on the phone with a potential client (or a potential tenant) than I can over weeks of email. Eventually, as a buyer, you are going to get in my car and we are going to have to talk. But at the end my day, I’d probably rather shoot you an email than pick up the phone!

23. Ken Horst | Jun 20, 2007 | Reply

    I don’t think anyone will ever build the perfect ranking/rating system for real estate agents, by perfect I mean a system that is all I need to be SURE I chose the best agent. Choosing a good agent will always involve feedback and information from different sources and related to different critieria. Geographic location is important, whether I’m buying or selling a home, I want a local expert. Testimonials are a form of user feedback but as many of you pointed out, it is not hard to “game” the system on most agent referral sites. That said, I think a simple measure such as “number of recommendations” is slightly more useful than a system that uses only a 5 star rating. Anyone can give themselves a 5 star rating and using a system that uses an email address for verification, if this same agent has 3 or 4 different email addresses, can give themselves 3-4 five star ratings. Even asking your friends to cheat the system for you is going to run dry after a few of your lying cheating best friends anti up their fraudulent reviews. When you see an agent with somewhere between 10 and 40 testimonials, you have to wonder if at least a few of them aren’t real. Also, the longer you have been in the business and exceeding client expectations, the easy it will be for you to get to a higher number of clients willing to take the time to visit a site and give you a testimonial. As I said above, I don’t think agent ratings will ever be enough to insure a perfect choice but they will always be a part of the process to help you choose.

24. Mike Davin- CataList Homes | Aug 3, 2007 | Reply

    There is a new site launching next week called agentmatch.com which I think will be the type of site you are looking for. Total clarity on the talent and cost of the agent is disclosed to the consumer upfront. Nobody wants to be introduced to three total unknown agents….they want to see the agents. Imagine match.com where a woman posts her profile and the internet sets her up with three blind dates? I think that woman would rather do the searching for herself.

    AgentMatch has very few agents as it just got turned on live yesterday, but there are some for zip code 90277 if you want to look at the technology.

25. Perrfect Agent Match | Nov 15, 2007 | Reply

    I’ve read through this article and most of the responses and I think my company (Perfect Agent Match) seems to do what everyone asks except for one thing, we don’t list the agents on our site. We agree that the real estate agent landscape is ever changing and no one agent will fit the needs of every client. This is why we have taken a very hands on approach to helping real estate buyers and seller find the perfect real estate agent for their needs. We profile the buyer or seller over the phone or through our online questionnaire. Once we know the buyers or sellers needs, we actively go out into the market and look at sales data, marketing, past client testimonials, license status, if they have ever had any disciplinary action and finally finish off with a personal interview with the top agents we find. The result is a truly awesome agent that is custom fit to this specific buyers or sellers needs. The best part is that this service is free for the buyer and seller and we don’t rely on memberships or up front fees from agents. In fact, we get paid through the existing informal referral system that virtually all agents are part of. I invite you to visit our website to learn more about our service and see customer testimonials, or feel free to call toll free at 877-906-2824.

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