At the Inman Real Estate Connect conference earlier this month in San Francisco, one of the coolest new sessions was something called Connect Create.
Developers were challenged to create something cool and useful within 48 hours and two teams — from real estate tech companies Diverse Solutions and Real Estate Webmasters — stepped up to the challenge.
Diverse Solutions came up with an online tool dubbed "Agent Scouting Report," and I believe it has some great potential (see related article).
The folks at Diverse Solutions wrote up a great post explaining what they did, why they did it, and what they think it means; I recommend reading it in full. I can’t imagine being a Realtor today without thinking through what a tool like this means for my business, and what I have to do to prepare for it.
What it is
In brief, Agent Scouting Report is an agent rating system that uses multiple listing service data rather than purely subjective opinions and client surveys. Diverse Solutions used 10 years’ worth of MLS data to compute things like "Salesmanship" (average days on market), "Experience" (tenure in the MLS), "Knowledge of Market" (how many times did the price drop from the initial listing date), and the terribly misnamed "Popularity" (how many homes sold in last 180 days, the past year, and the past two years).
The team took all of the data, weighted it, and came up with a star-based ratings system similar to Yelp and other rating Web sites: click here to view a screenshot.
There is an element of subjectivity involved in the algorithm, but it’s hard to argue with black-and-white data. Either you sold 10 homes in the last 180 days or you did not; either the listing you represented did drop the price from initial listing or it did not. There just isn’t much of a gray area there.
This is the equivalent to the baseball trading cards that have obsessed boys — whether athletically or intellectually inclined — for decades. In one tiny piece of paper, you get a player’s career up to that point summarized in a neat chart that looks something like the one pictured here.
You can see at a glance that this ballplayer was a monster. Look at 1927: .373 batting average; 47 home runs; 175 runs batted in (RBIs); an on-base percentage of .474, which means he got on base roughly half the time he came up to bat. And you also see that this was not an aberration — a freakish one-year anomaly. From 1927 to 1934, this guy had at least 126 RBIs every year and averaged 157 RBIs. That’s a model of consistency.
Numbers aren’t everything, but they are something
These stats do not tell the whole story of one Lou "Iron Horse" Gehrig. They do not tell us what kind of a teammate he was in the locker room. They don’t tell us whether he liked to party after games, or went home for a scene of domestic bliss with his wife.
The numbers don’t tell us that one possible reason for such godly stats may be that he played with Babe Ruth and the "Murderers’ Row," and that 1927 was one of the greatest seasons of any baseball team in history. …CONTINUED
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