Homethinking.com: Ranking Real Estate Agents

Imagine if you could find reviews of your real estate agent online? That’s the idea behind Homethinking.com, a website aimed at helping home buyers and sellers find top agents. It’s a great idea but since its launch in late 2005, Homethinking.com has yet to reach its potential as a useful resource for consumers.

The website uses a computer model to rank real estate agents based on the number of properties they have sold, are selling and reviews from clients. The sales information is collected by “intelligently crawling the masses of data on the web” but it’s not clear if the sources are industry based or other commercial sites.

The ranking data is based on seller agent sales, not buyer representation, and most of the reviews are from sellers. Agents who mostly work with buyers aren’t going to get much billing in the site’s ranking system so visitors looking for a buyer agent aren’t going to find the information they need.

Written reviews are usually short, 1-2 sentences, and coupled with a “star” rating in five categories: Understanding of Property Strengths and Weaknesses, Effectiveness of Realtor Web Site, Ability to Answer Questions from Prospective Buyers, Expectation Setting and Ability to answer questions and address concerns of home seller.

Reviewers also enter a quick description of the impact they feel the realtor had on the sale price. The review is compiled into an Overall Satisfaction rating between 1 to 5 stars with 5 being the best. This information, combined with listing history and current listing data, determines the placement the agent gets in Homethinking.com’s search listing.

The reviews are Homethinking.com’s strong point relaying customer satisfaction and recommendations for or against a particular agent. The reviews are authenticated with the selling property’s address and price which are compared to county sales records. The problem, reviews don’t make up the bulk of the website information and are in fact scarce. On average, for every ten agents listed I found that maybe 1-2 of them had reviews.

A chunk of the website is dedicated to current property listings for sale by the agents. These are used to rank agents but the information is minimal - address, number of bedrooms and price. The listings are not always up to date, meaning they could have sold or expired since posted on Homethinking.com. As part of the agent ranking system, the information produces false results.

The site has a link to the Multiple Listing Service (MLS). However, this link redirects users to Home Gain and then to the MLS portal of a sponsor agent, some of whom require contact information before beginning a property search. By this time, most users will have forgotten the agent and property listing that set them on this path. When they do reach an MLS search window they are basically starting their search over.

There is a lot of redirecting within the site itself. For instance, a realtor from Memphis, TN, had two stellar reviews on the website’s homepage. A click on the “read the full review” brings up the same excerpt along with the “star” ratings by category. For more information about the realtor, Homethinking.com has a link “’Read more about so and so’ – what they have done and what consumers have said about the job they did” which brings up the agent’s listings for sale and then it’s time for more jumping through hoops via Home Gain.

The website’s manifesto proclaims a desire to help consumers make the best decision when hiring an agent. It taps into the fear that you don’t want the wrong agent handling the transaction of your most important financial asset. One of the glaring contradictions with this intent is that realtors can buy a spot at the top of the ranking list as a “sponsored result”. It’s pretty clear why those names appear at the top of the list but overall it’s unclear how the ranking actually works.

In one instance, Agent B sold who 2 homes last year, is selling 14 homes now and averages $329,000 per sale was ranked lower than Agent A who sold 2 homes last year, is selling 5 homes now at an average sale price of $243,000. Neither agent had any reviews so based on the sales criteria Agent B should have a higher ranking, but they were ranked lower.

The site claims to answer the big questions about a realtor’s performance but without more data on transactions visitors have to rely on consumer reviews. These usually don’t give enough detail about how long a property was on the market or asking price vs. sales price, and once again the reviews are too few and far between to fulfill consumer needs.

There is an advice section on Homethinking.com where visitors can either email a question or peruse previously answered questions. Once again, this interactive feature has a limited amount of information and it’s unclear who is answering the questions. It seems to be registered agents but most “’Read more about so and so’ – what they have done and what consumers have said” are either dead ends or redirects to external property listing sites.

The site is useful if the realtor you’re thinking of hiring has been reviewed. However, a search of east coast agents and brokers I know produced little information, if any. Homethinking.com started with a focus on California so agents in this region have more reviews.

Consumer reviews of agents nationwide are likely to grow in number and the site has the potential to offer this as a valuable service. However, a considerable amount of missing information needs to be included in the site in order to reach this potential. Right now, users are too limited in their search options and the site needs to expand its data base as well as clarify its ranking system.

The reviews make for some interesting reading like one of an agent in Dallas which described some intriguing part time work as a stripper - not exactly useful information for homeowners but certainly an interesting perspective from which to review a real estate agent. Overall, the reviews can be helpful but Homethinking.com needs to focus on these and present them in a more consolidated interface. Until this aspect of the site improves the service is falling short of its intention.

*Note: The information in this article is general advice and not meant as a substitute for personal guidance from a financial advisor, real estate professional, home improvement contractor or legal counsel. Although the author is a licensed realtor, the advice given in this article does not constitute any client contract or agreement between the author and the user. The author is not responsible for any losses, damages or claims that may result from your decisions.