It appears that Agent Reviews will be the avenue for buyers and sellers to shop for an agent in the near future. I learned at Convention last month that in 2007, 78% of consumers said they trusted peer recommendations. That number jumped to 90% in 2009, according to the speaker. He sited that Amazon and Ebay purchases are based on peer recommendations. If you go to google and type in the words "real estate agent" the top autopopulated word is "review". Wow,the number one search for real estate agents!
Zillow and Homes.com have both begun promoting agent review, inviting agents to solicit reviewas from past customers, and the zillow reviews can be shared on Facebook and Twitter, which also helps with self promotion. www.incredibleagents.com and www.compete.com are two websites that are dedicated to agent reviews. Google also has real estate agent reviews but I haven't checked it out yet.
One of the challenges to all of this is that our buyers and sellers are not going to want to be pestered to give us multiple reviews to the various sites, but this is a trend not to be ignored.
I videotaped my first review at the closing table last week. The sellers were so pleased and began thanking me; I stopped them, grabbed my flip camera out of my purse and they were gracious enough to repeat themselves.
Does anyone else in the real estate community have any experience with this new phenomona? Please share; I see this as a great thing.
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