My opinion of agent match.

Hello. Welcome to Todd Miller TV. Update today is about Agent Match. Agent Match is a new service Realtor.com has that you can go on there, put in a zip code or an address and it will show you the agents nearby who have a lot of sales in the neighborhood.

There has been a lot of controversy over it for a couple of reasons. There are a couple of different companies basically fighting over and saying it was their idea and they filed a patent and some other stuff.

But beyond that, there’s resistance from the agent community because I think real estate agents don’t like being judged or ranked or they want to have control over how they’re ranked and judged.

I will give you an example why. So if you go look at Agent Match at Realtor.com, what you will see is that you put in an address. It will pull up 16 agents and it’s interesting because like for example we pulled up the zip code that our office is in and you can sort by different ways.

Well, if you sort it by listings, active listings or sold listings in our zip code, then in our office, the other broker here Oana who’s on the videos, she’s number one. It’s not even close. She’s number one by like three or four times the number two person and then everybody else after that has like a couple of listings or had a couple of sales or something. They just happened to show up.

That’s how real estate is. You have a couple of agents dominating the area. They have all the business and everybody else has one or two. I think there’s a problem with this – this is a problem. First of all, it only looks back like a year. Well, you know who the number two agent in the zip code is for the past five years? Well, it’s me. That had more sales in the zip code than anybody probably except for Oana. But because they’re not all within the last year, most of them were 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, I don’t show up at all. Not even on the radar. Like I don’t exist.

So I think it’s a little deceiving. The other thing is the problem I see is I don’t think consumers search for agents this way. I think for the most part, if they’re going to do a review-based search for an agent, they’re going to go to Yelp.

Maybe they will go to Zillow reviews or Trulia or something like that, look for a knowledgeable agent. But our experience is the way people find their agent is they’re out looking around and they just run into somebody who has a listing or that they get a recommendation and that’s how they find it.

So I’m not threatened by it at all. As a matter of fact, we get zero leads from services like this that say they’re going to rank us and all this other stuff.

It’s not a true picture. I just don’t believe it’s a true picture and it’s skewed for sure. So yeah, I don’t see what the big deal is. Everyone is making a big deal about it. Anyway, I just thought I would share that with you that agent ranking is sometimes subjective and if somebody just got their real estate license a year ago and has a friend who has four listings in an area, that they want to list them all and put them on the market, they sell them all. All of a sudden, they’re going to be the market expert even though they only ever sold four houses in their life. They’re going to show up as top agent in the area.

So it’s like anything else. To get a true picture of what you really want in an agent, you have to get to know the agent more. So anyway, I just thought I would share that with you, Agent Match. It’s kind of controversial. Anyway, that’s my update for today and hope to see you on another video. Thanks.