Brokers: Your customers may be giving you reasons to be nervous — make that very nervous — but then again, maybe you have nothing to fear.
To find out what sort of impression you’ve made with your Web-savviest clients, as well as other brokers, click on brokerate.com. It’s a New York City-based Web site that leaves your broker profile for all the wired world to see. Originally, Brokerate offered a combination scoring system and compilation of community comments. The blend of points — not unlike the user-generated scores of the Zagat food guide series — and more subjective postings could paint you as a lazy, fat and stupid know-nothing or a wonderfully charismatic and caring human being who goes the extra mile for his or her client.
The above are not remarks taken from the Web site, though the tone of actual postings prompted Jon Brownstoner, the site’s creator and administrator, to pull the community comments section four days after the Web site’s late April debut. He called the worst comments “cheap shots” and “pettiness.”
Brownstoner, the Brooklyn-based blogger behind the popular brownstoner.com, which dissects Brooklyn real estate in bite-sized post after bite-sized post, said the Web site’s intended purpose is to help consumers make better decisions. The site allows people to rate brokers in three different categories: knowledge, courtesy, and effectiveness, in addition to the now-nixed section allowing comments about brokers.
National Web-based agent-to-agent referral networks and Internet sites grant consumers a cursory review of broker qualifications, Brownstoner says, so why not a consumer-driven agent data sharing service? And if that means shining a light on the good while also uncovering the bad, so be it, say some observers.
Brownstoner wants to bring “transparency and accountability” to the industry, and while some are applauding the effort, critics say the site is wildly irresponsible and cannot accurately gauge performance in a marketplace lacking uniformity.
“I’m sure I’m going to be in the minority, but I think it’s great,” said Kevin Brown, chairman of Century 21 Kevin B. Brown & Associates. “We live in a world that can’t deny the consumer information, and for firms or individual agents to be skittish about a site like this is [foolish] because this is just going to be one of many.”
If the airline, restaurant and movie businesses are critiqued in such a manner, why should the real estate industry be any different, Brown asked.
“In theory it sounds like a good thing, but in practice I don’t see how it can work,” said Gary Malin, chief operating officer at Citi Habitats.
“Where’s the quality control and validation of this person’s side of the story?” asked Malin. “How do we know it’s not a disgruntled person who’s left the company?”
With so many variable factors entering into real estate transactions, the site may just end up prompting people to vent when they don’t know all the facts, said Malin, adding that consumers would be better off if they, for example, responded to customer service departments such as those offered at Citi Habitats.
Brownstoner said there were numerous comments posted by brokers posing as consumers that either heaped praise upon themselves and their buddies or lashed out against competitors. He wanted the community to self-police itself, a la Craigslist, and if such an approach now seems na ve — given the livelihoods and reputations at stake — that doesn’t mean that the system’s architecture is beyond repair, he said.
Going forward, Brownstoner said he’s going to create a registration process and a tool that enables brokers to upload additional background information on neighborhood specialization and sales history.
Still, other hurdles remain, including how to obtain critical mass amongst consumers.
Brokerate’s paltry listings — at last count 295 brokers and an undetermined number of reviews — hurt the site’s credibility, said Barry Hersh, academic director at the Steven L. Newman Real Estate Institute at Baruch College. “If there’s only one or two or three people rating the broker, it’s not worth a lot,” Hersh said.
On this count, Brownstoner may be well-advised to click on to homethinking.com, which also purports to assist consumers via a community comments section but which targets home owners and relies more heavily upon technology-driven data mining techniques.
The system authenticates home sales against county record data, for example, and if a red flag is raised, the company’s reps moderate the comment to determine if the author is a rogue broker, said CEO Nick Schevak, a former analyst with Internet consulting firm Jupiter Research.
Launched in December, homethinking.com already has 100,000 monthly visitors and is now monitoring approximately 200,000 agents. The site makes its revenue on generated phone calls to advertisers. So far, it has limited its focus to the California market, though it is based in New York City.
“California was our initial springboard, because of the ease of getting started there compared to Manhattan and because it’s a big market,” said Schevak. “In the next one or two months we’ll get started in New York.”
Unlike Brokerate, Homethinking first presented itself to consumers through its data mining service.
“It takes time to build a community,” said Schevak, “and if you have objective metrics, you have a useful site from day one.”
Like Brownstoner, Schevak wants to “weed out the incompetent majority,” citing statistics from the National Association of Realtors indicating seven in 10 Americans select the first agent contacted.
Schevak also cites as his manifesto the 1992 movie “Glengarry Glen Ross,” in which Al Pacino, Alec Baldwin, Jack Lemmon and Ed Harris portray “ruthless, sweet-talking and conniving real estate agents, with no regard for their customers.”
The depiction may be overly prejudicial and yet real estate brokers do operate with an amount of freedom unknown in other professions.
“At the firm level it’s very hard for sales managers to oversee such an independent, mobile and fluid workforce,” said Paul Purcell, a former president at Douglas Elliman who went on to become a partner at Braddock + Purcell, a residential real estate consulting firm.
It was this sense of consumer frustration that gave rise to the need for his consulting firm, which matches buyers and sellers with agents, Purcell said. Yet not every consumer can afford to hire an intermediary consultant to help find the right broker.
Purcell said while brokerate.com isn’t set up to invite vitriol, it may end up generating it and, worse still, it may make isolated comments look representative.
“I notice in their language they do not invite bashing,” said Purcell, “and there is this need for oversight. But I want the sample to be valid and not one person having a bad experience because of a personality clash.”
For his part, Brownstoner said he’s willing to roll up his sleeves and reintroduce a better product.
“If I do end up with a successful model that manages to thread the needle,” he said, “it will be because I’m not afraid to engage my critics and have a fairly open development process.”