Yelp, Zillow, etc etc. There are now many places a consumer can go to review a real estate Agent. Many accept anonymous reviews, yet nearly all ask Agents to send their past clients to the portal where they must register to post a review about the Agent’s service.
Sounds like a good idea, right? Ask a past client to post a review about my service on a high traffic consumer portal. What’s wrong with that?? Let’s think for a second about what these portal sites gain (potentially) at an Agent’s expense.
What does the portal gain? Suppose a portal has 1 million registered consumers. They let an Agent solicit reviews from clients and post them to their site for free. That’s great, but nothing in life is free. Most of them require that the Agent’s past client register on their site which means the Agent drives the portal a new customer. As more Agents drive consumers to the portal, the portal could expand from 1 million registered customers to 2 million, all without marketing expense. Sounds great for the portal, I don’t blame them. More consumers means more traffic to their site and the ability to generate more advertising revenue.
What’s the Agent’s expense? The Agent’s clients are inevitably added to the portal’s mailing lists. Guess what, unless the Agent happens to advertise with the portal, their clients could be directed to use a different Agent the next time they have real estate needs. Does that sound fair?
Also, how many times can an Agent ask one homeowner to give them a review? Once? Twice maybe before they’ve alienated them? It would be a major inconvenience to ask each customer to go to every portal site and post a review. The Agent could cause lasting damage to the relationship between them and their customer. Would an Agent really want to be the extended marketing department for the portal and help them gain more traffic? Shouldn’t the portal consider Agent reviews great content for their existing traffic? Instead of requiring Agents to send customers to them, couldn’t they just provide every Agent a way to post their reviews directly into their own profile?
A review from a past customer is extremely influential, especially a review that has been manually verified legitimate. It carries a lot of clout. But unlike restaurants that can generate 100s of potential reviews per day, real estate Agents may have just a couple dozen transactions per year; Agent reviews are a scarce commodity. A scarce commodity inherently has a lot of value (think gold).
I’m not saying what portals are doing is bad. They provide a valuable service for consumers. Agent reviews are exactly the kind of information that today’s home buyers and sellers crave, and the portals must make money to survive. However, Agents should not be put in a position to lose control of their reviews, solicit new traffic for a portal, or help educate their clients about other Agents. Marketing the portal is the portal’s job, isn’t it?
When we started our company we thought through these very same issues. We decided that instead of launching another portal, the industry really needed an independent 3rd party that allowed Agents to solicit reviews from clients, have each review manually verified, and then let every Agent control how and where those reviews get syndicated (or not).
If an Agent prefers to print reviews to take into listing presentations and nothing more, that’s their business. If they prefer to post reviews in Facebook, or to drive traffic back to their own site or blog, that should be entirely up to them. If they want to turn on syndication one day and turn off syndication another that should also be their choice, shouldn’t it?
As an Agent, would you rather control your reviews or go ‘portal’?
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