Screen shot of the home page for realtor.com's AgentMatch.
Realtor.com says all interested parties are welcome to sign on as its AgentMatch advisory board meets for the first time today in an online session to provide feedback on the portal’s agent-rating platform, which ranks agents based on multiple listing service stats, client recommendations, and other info by city, ZIP code or neighborhood.
The platform, introduced at the National Association of Realtors’ annual meeting in early November and currently in pilot form in Las Vegas and Boulder, Colo., has received a chilly welcome from some real estate professionals. Many have expressed concerns that agent rankings based on MLS stats are inaccurate, and that they should not be displayed on realtor.com, the NAR-sanctioned search portal.
Realtor.com has created a 16-member advisory board to provide feedback that will be used to help steer future development of AgentMatch. The AgentMatch advisory board holds its first meeting at 4 p.m. Eastern/1 p.m. Pacific today.
All interested parties can follow the meeting live on the Web or by telephone through the Web meeting service GoToMeeting. A recording of the meeting will be made available for those who can’t make it.
Realtor.com has said AgentMatch is a response to consumer demand. With agents’ productivity statistics becoming more accessible to the public, the Web will increasingly be the place where consumers find an agent, the thinking goes.
“AgentMatch leverages statistics and data from the MLS, realtor.com and SocialBios, and uses this data, not word of mouth or other sellers’ perceptions, to assist interested sellers find the right agent for them,” realtor.com said in a statement.
Also, by focusing on consumers with a tool like AgentMatch, realtor.com hopes to regain some of the Web market share it has lost to its competitors Zillow and Trulia, which have continued to pull away in the last year.
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