Is There Any Way to Make Brokerate.com Work?
The Real Deal has an article on Brokerate.com in its new June issue that a pretty fair critique of both our intentions in creating the site and the results in practice. (They run a pretty misleading picture of the Homethinking CEO given that he’s not mentioned until three-quarters of the way through the article. Just…
The Real Deal has an article on Brokerate.com in its new June issue that a pretty fair critique of both our intentions in creating the site and the results in practice. (They run a pretty misleading picture of the Homethinking CEO given that he’s not mentioned until three-quarters of the way through the article. Just to be clear: That ain’t the ‘Stoner!) Gary Malin, chief operating officer at Citi Habitats, summed up what we expect a lot of people’s reaction is: “In theory it sounds like a good thing, but in practice I don’t see how it can work.” As most of you know, we pulled the comments from the site within a few days of launch because they were just too nasty; more importantly, we had no way to verify if any of the things people were saying were true. Were brokers just writing raves of themselves? Were they making up negative reviews of their competitors? Ah, yeah. We had made a big effort to get a bunch of Brownstoner readers rating and commenting on the site pre-launch in an effort to set a constructive tone but things quickly slid. So now we have a few options: 1) Spend time and money trying to create a registration system; 2) Restore comments but only allow positive comments; 3) Allow all comments but just edit with a heavy hand and use our best judgment; 4) do not restore comments; 5) just bag the whole thing. Or maybe there’s something we haven’t considered that involves more of a community-based wikipedia-type approach. Frankly, we’re not sure what to do and are curious to hear everyone’s advice.
Broker Web Ratings Get Nasty [The Real Deal]
Actually Brownstoner, using propertyshark, you can verify purchaser/owner names. And then instead of just a “comment” about an agent – it is feedback about a specific sale/transaction that has taken place – you can hear both sides seller/buyer and agents sides. Maybe you can do some cross-pollenation with PShark and come up with an amazing system for the actual number of trnasactions procured by a broker and a level of satisfaction based on the actual transactions as opposed to sour buyers that did not get their offers in, and competing agents.
I also am one who thinks this format just doesn’t work. I’m a current buyer, and contributed to the beta testing. But I stopped reading it after a couple of days, it wasn’t useful and quickly became petty.
Would it work better to divide comments up by real estate company, rather than individual broker? Of course people would comment on the individual brokers, but perhaps the focus would be more on company policy than personalities….
Overall, I think that your valuable time is wasted trying to keep this one alive and fair.
Yeah bag it. ALways the same bloggers. DO they get paid?
Anyway they hardly have the money to buy so bag it because those who do don’t have time for this! 🙂
I like bkborn 10:34 idea. Interviews.
This way we know it’s real. The Amazon idea is good but not good for this website, as we are talking about Human beings and not products.
The worst “brokers” I dealt with were hands down FSBOs. Talk about unprofessional.
“But in practice that is not what happened”
I personally posted comments about five brokers I had dealt with as a seller, some of whom were professional and effective, and some of whom were not. Clearly all (100%) of the comments were not from sellers. A buyer who has a bad experience and alerts potential sellers away from a broker will likely have a better experience as a buyer if the brokers that not up to snuff get no business and have to find another line of work.
Besides, every buyer will eventually be a seller.
In the person who posted that sellers could benefit, but in practice that is not what happened. All the comments were from buyers not sellers. The site is useless for buyers since their is no MLS.
I hate to be negative, but I also say bag it.
As a buyer, I’m more interested in the house, not the broker. If they are nice, helpful, etc – that makes a traumatic process better, if not – well, you can’t like everyone. As long as I get the house.
As a seller, I’d be pickier, but I also know a lot of RE brokers, it seems to be the occupation de jour. I would just do some research, ask around, etc. The comments on a website would not persuade me very much, except that I would probably not choose one whom everyone complained about.
How would someone make money from an FSBO site when there is Craig’s List & The real estate section of the NY Times out there already? When you do a real estate search on the NY Times site, your property comes up exactly the same whether you are a broker or FSBO. How can one beat that?