Let the Real Estate Buyer Prepare: Internet Tools to Assist in Your Search for a Real Estate Agent

Martin Winer
filed under "Internet-and-Businesses-Online"

Let the Real Estate Buyer Prepare: Internet Tools to Assist in Your Search for a Real Estate Agent Real Estate transactions evoke the most sense of trepidation amongst consumers. After all, these are the transactions where the largest amounts of money exchange hands. Who is there to guide you through the process? Most of us turn to a seasoned real estate agent to help. With an average commission of 5% coupled with the fact that you are often 'married' to an agent for some period, it's essential to check their reputation before sign the nuptials. Word of mouth recommendations are one way to put your mind to ease, but failing that, the Internet, until recently, didn't have much to offer. The Internet featured hundreds of referral sites yet all of them lack prominent ratings provided by the actual consumers that have interacted with them. Many referral sites feature pages of sponsored ads which cloud any useful data. Others offer extensive information about a given agent, such as, the agent's pets and number of children the agent has. While that's nice to know, it's useless in answering four important questions about your perspective agent: 1) Integrity: Was the agent honest and loyal to past customers' interests? 2) Quality of the Deal: Did the agent strike a good deal for his/her past customers? 3) Recommendation: Would past customers recommend this agent to their friends? 4) Availability: Did the agent expeditiously respond to past customers' requests? RankYourAgent.com seeks to level the field in real estate by providing answers to these crucial questions about perspective agents. RankYourAgent.com (http://www.rankyouragent.com) collects the answers to these questions provided by web users. These statistics are made available free of charge to anyone who'd like to view a real estate agents ranking. RankYourAgent.com derives its income from unobtrusive Google(tm) Adsense(tm) ads. A quick visit to RankYourAgent.com will allow the user to rank an agent that isn't already ranked, or view agents by name or region. Visit http://www.rankyouragent.com today and see if your agent is listed. At the end of your real estate transaction, don't forget to come back and provide rankings so that others can benefit from your experiences. About the author: Martin Winer is the President of RankYourAgent.com (http://www.rankyouragent.com)