We sat down with Niki Scevak, CEO & Founder of HomeThinking.com at Inman Real Estate Connect. HomeThinking is in the very controversial business of rating and reviewing real estate agents, but how they do it is pure genius.
HomeThinking doesn’t count on consumers to review agents on the site. Instead, it trolls county records to monitor millions of home transactions to get the job done right.
From these records they can:
- Determine which agents are closing deals in any given city, neighborhood, zip code, etc.
- Calculate an agent’s average days on market. Basically, how long it takes an agent to sell a house, on average - 30 days, 90 days, 6 months?
- Calculate an agent’s average discount price -> the difference between for how much they listed the property and for how much they sold it. This gives a pretty good indication of how well the agent knows the market and priced the home.
- Show an agent’s failure rate -> the number of homes they listed that went unsold.
So should agents be afraid of HomeThinking? Only the bad and/or underperforming one’s says Niki. Now the consumers will have the numbers, and the numbers speak for themselves.
HomeThinking does allow consumers to rate and review agents as well. But there’s a catch, HomeThinking only lets the buyer, seller, attorney or anyone else involved in the transaction write a review about the agent. How do they know? Those very same county records of course. As a result, 80% of the agent reviews written by consumers on HomeThinking are positive.
What does this mean for the consumer? Transparency of course! Something like 80% of real estate transactions are brokered by 20% of the country’s real estate agents. Now consumers know who’s really doing the deals: i.e. who’s really the expert!
As an aside, we have known Niki for a while and he is a good guy. This is important because if consumers and agents are to trust HomeThinking’s review process it needs to be objective and it needs to come from the right place. Niki is not out to get the real estate agent. In fact, he wants to recognize truly great agents and help make consumers’ home buying experience better in the process. Check out their blog here.
Let’s watch (the video) and see what happens.
Popularity: 9% [?]
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April 17th, 2007 at 10:31 am
I stumbled across Homethinking.com by accident and found every significant piece of data about me and my business to be incorrect, out of date, and or just plain wrong. I had gotten a gracious and prompt reply from Niki about how I CAN correct the data about me. Well, that’s nice but isn’t it the responsibility of that web site, which purports to offer an objective picture of an agent based on data to actually have correct data?
Further, here is some of my follow-up email which I wrote to Niki:
I am just starting to research your site and came across the blog entry on Trulia.
This seems to clearly outline the purpose of your web site. And I think, if executed flawlessly, your site can be helpful to the real estate market. Not to beat this to death, and I appreciate your accountability in replying to me, but the delta between your intention summarized in excerpts like this — “So should agents be afraid of HomeThinking? Only the bad and/or underperforming one’s says Niki. Now the consumers will have the numbers, and the numbers speak for themselves” — and the utterly and harmfully inaccurate information you have on agents listed on your site starkly illustrates the troublesome failure to live up to the responsibility you have taken on, not too mention the underlying hubris of that statement. You seem to indicate that it is as simple as allowing the records speak for themselves. Well, clealry this is not working for you.
I have not heard of your site before and so am not too worried that potential clients are researching me on your site and passing me by due to the inaccuracy of your data. Nevertheless, I do not feel it is an overreaction on my part to offer my opinion that you should have one big old disclaimer regarding the unreliable nature of your information. Otherwise, you seem to be playing fast and loose with other people’s careers. Please feel free to tell me where I am wrong.”
September 5th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
My wife just googled my name and the Homethinking website shows up at the top of the list. I was aghast at the completely out of date, inaccurate, and therefore completely misleading information noted about me. I then googled Homethinking to find out who these people are and why they are try to ruin my business and find them claiming to be totally accurate and providing a useful service to the consumer. This could hardly be farther from the truth.
It is hard enough to make a living in real estate these days with some unsolicited website managing to appear at the top of a google search giving totally inaccurate information about me. Obviously I am not the only one. I am however, surprised the only other comment was posted over a year ago.