Top Agent Network (TAN), the San Francisco-based private online community for top real estate agents, continues to grow at a double-digit rate, announcing that it recently signed up its 6,000th member.
TAN claims to be growing, since 2012, at a better than 70 percent annual rate.
It works on a regional model, with a membership structure that restricts membership to only the most successful producers in each chapter area. Membership in Top Agent Network is by invitation only.
TAN verifies that applicants are in the top 10 percent of real estate agents in their local market based on their sales in the 24 months prior to application. Once in, members benefit from a community that exchanges valuable non-MLS information.
Through the members-only website, TAN agents can connect throughout the cycle of the home sale, starting before a listing is posted on the local MLS and continuing to closing and beyond. Members post information traditionally exchanged within local brokerages and networking groups, such as announcements of pre- and non-MLS listings, buyer needs, service provider recommendations and in industry discussions.
Members are permitted to use the TAN logo on their marketing materials, and can describe the extra edge that TAN membership provides to agents in sales presentations. TAN claims that that tactic works: In surveys, 67 percent of its members report that they received a new client or impressed a client by mentioning their TAN membership. In TAN’s most active chapters, the group adds, 85 percent of members reported making additional home sales due to TAN.
And sell they do. In any given area, TAN members are responsible for 90 percent of the homes sold. Its total membership produces an annual sales volume exceeding $78 billion, and a client base of 1.2 million homebuyers, homesellers and homeowners. Those clients have enormous purchasing power, spending more than $9 billion annually on real estate-related services.
“I love the community aspect,” said Amanda Jones, a TAN charter member and top-producing real estate agent at Sotheby’s International Realty in San Francisco in a statement. “I love that I can access 200-plus local and verified top agents for real-time answers, non-MLS properties and buyers in an open yet discreet way. No other meeting or website gives me that.”
Top Agent Network was founded by CEO David Faudman. Beginning in 1991, Faudman spent more than a decade as a top 1 percent agent in Marin County, California. To address the need he saw for more and better communications beyond the MLS, he started TAN in 1995 as a private email list for premier agents. He relaunched TAN as a private online application in June 2009.
