5-star Realtor ratings: A chance for NAR to tighten ethics code

Six weeks ago, I wrote about how the online agent ratings and review landscape is broken, to which Rob Hahn correctly pointed out that I did not provide any suggested solution. Since then, Zillow added some cool team review features to its Premier Agent toolkit, Placester gobbled up agent rating and testimonial firm RealSatisfied, and HomeLight, an agent-matching service that relies in part on agent ratings and reviews, announced a big raise of $11 million. Then, Inman editor Amber Taufen penned a piece about the implications of agents who post only good reviews. And if that weren’t enough, I had a little knee surgery -- or “tune-up,” as my doc called it. So now it’s time for a solution, or at least some work toward a solution. Reviews or honest feedback? When I visited my doc, he did the old knee-bend thingy and said I needed surgery. By the time I got home, there was an email in my box asking for feedback about my visit. I had an MRI and went back to the d...