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 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]