Ima get ready to buy me a house, y'all.
As some of you know, I’ve recently moved from New Jersey to Texas, because my wife got one of them “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunities to join a fledgling company at the ground level. I’ve been thinking and writing about real estate for a few years now, but haven’t really had the chance to look at the experience of being a home buyer. I do not think I’m representative — in fact, far from it. I know too much. But at the same time, I thought it would be interesting to do a series of “diaries” on my experience as an average joe, regular home buyer in this market, with the technology that is available to me as a run-of-the-mill consumer.
This post is about the pre-game.
Judgment Day Cometh
Agent ratings are back in the conversation, thanks to this scintillating op/ed by Kris Berg (link is for Inman premium subscribers only) who is one of the best writers in real estate today. I have written about this topic before (here and here) and it continues to fascinate and puzzle me still.
Kris’s point essentially boils down to the fact that providing real estate brokerage service is one fraught with emotion, with unpredictable clients who don’t know what it is that a realtor actually does for them, who cannot make rational evaluations of how good or bad an agent really is. Quantitative metrics don’t provide accurate ratings, in Kris’s view, because those focus on production rather than service. Customer surveys are flawed because customers are ignorant on the one hand, and nuts on the other hand, and are too often influenced by how the transaction itself went down rather than how the realtor performed.
All of her points are, I think, valid and true.
Sadly, they are all irrelevant to some extent.
Fact is, agent ratings are already here in places like Yelp and Angie’s List. Consumers will talk, will evaluate, and will rate realtors (as they do every other service provider) on their FaceBook pages, on blogs, on websites, and with each other in person. It’s going to happen whatever the merits of such ratings.
The real issue, then, isn’t whether such rating systems are good or bad or inaccurate or legitimate, but who will do the rating and how they will do it.
