Why are Realtors afraid of being ranked?

I can guess, it's because someone will say something bad about you, God forbid.  I'm like most of you, I don't want people bad-mouthing me online either!  However, that's part of the new-world out there, web 2.0 and we'd better get on board with this before someone else does in a much more organized way.

Granted, there's a lot of details I don't feel like covering right now, however, if we as Realtors do not build a ranking/rating system that our consumers can use, then someone else will.  In fact, a few have, here's a doozy of a review I read just today:

"[Agent's Name] of [Company] is a narcissistic sociopath that will say and do anything. Be careful of her an your money."

Want another?  Ohh boy, I've got more:

"How can I get information on how to pursue a LAW SUIT against [agent & company]. I have a lot of evidence on how this firm treats people. If anybody knows, please let me know. I would also like to report him. Anybody have his Realtor #"

Ouch.  What was interesting was that the site I pulled these reviews from had it's 50 most recent ratings posted, guess how many were negative?  Twelve, less than 1/4 total, most were positive!  So it would appear from this small sample that most people actually want to provide positive reviews online.

Lets dive further into the issue with negative feedback.  Yeah it sucks, especially when people say stuff that's way out there.  However this type of feedback has it's advantages; first of all reasonable negative remarks allow us to improve our business, that's a good thing.  Second, if an agent truly is that bad of a person, isn't it best for our association to weed out bad eggs anyways?

So fellow agents, lets please get on board with rankings and ratings.  Talk to your board leadership to get something underway, the nice thing about if your association has control over the ratings system is you can filter the incredibly crazy remarks.  Your board can filter the totally insane stuff or the remarks that don't have anything to actually do with your professionalism.