Realtor...Did You Check your Client Score Today?

Things are about to get real interesting.  In a move that is going to take the term personal referral to a whole new level, consumers are gearing up to go-online with websites that offer rating systems for a number of different professions and services.  These include, doctors, professors, and yes...Realtors. 

I first heard about this trend from  TV program which broadcast the story of a young man who was being totally raked over by a website on which former girlfriends and dates where dogging him as a dating disaster.  The man was protesting about these indictments about his poor dating etiquette and his personal grooming habits or lack of them.  But the posts on the site clearly decried a different reality.  This dejected suitor was even considering suing to try to get his reputation back as his new found publicity was creating major hassles with new prospects!

Well, it's not just the dating scene which is experiencing this new version of Referral 2.0.  Just about every profession  now has a nascent, consumer driven, on-line ratings website being launched or in the process of being constructed.  RateMDs.com allows you to rate practitioners in the medical community.  For the first time, patients are taking the vital statistics and creating a diagnosis about the quality of care and competence of the physician.  Physicians are rated on the basis of punctuality, helpfulness and general knowledge and are given an overall grade complete with a smiley or frowny face to make the point!

In case you're wondering, yes rateyourrealtor.com, rateyourrealtor.net and rateyourrealtor.org are already taken as a registered domain names, although to date the web sites have not yet been launched.  This is not to be confused with approvedrealtor.com which promises to link consumers with the best Realtors, for a fee of course, of $250 - satisfaction guaranteed.

The proliferation of information through the Internet makes this an inevitable next step to the need to make sense of an overwhelming amount of data. In the case of professional services, people crave the ability to investigate behind the cloistered ranks of degrees, certifications, networks, and organizations which often seem to primarliy serve to benefit and enhance the reputation of the expert.  More importantly in the eyes of the public, this may provide the first opportunity for unvarnished evaluations of the actual skill with which a discipline is practiced.

But, I can also see the potential for abuse or misapplication of this type of ratings system.  As in the case of My Man, the guy seriously dissed by ex-girlfriends, it is probably not possible to know whether these evaluations are completely true.  What  if he is the victim of a malicious woman and her friends.  This forum has judged him, tried him and hanged him in the court of public opinion and then tagged him with a label which will follow his name on-line for a very long time.  I remember watching the piece and thinking "How will he get his reputation back?"  Even if he sued, the search engines have archived this incident in his life and thereby placed its status in the realm of infinity.

 I don't think most Realtors are aware that these rating services are being launched.  There is no regulation about who can post and as far as I can tell from the sites, there is no independent verification that the individual creating the entry is actually a client of the professional being profiled.  On the RateMDs.com website, there was no option for the physician to respond to allegations; some of which were quite troubling. There is something inherently unsettling about a forum which allows total anonymity to a potential reputation assassin and denies a platform to the accused.  In an on-line article entitled New Tech Trends Rock the Real Estate World , Les Christies of CNNMoney.com writes about how this type of "social networking" will overwhelm real estate in the next 12 months.

I'd like to know your thoughts about this trend.  Is this type of rating already occurring in your area?  How do you see the upsurge in Real Estate Blogging interacting with this new form of "social networking"? 

A final note...rateyourloanofficer.com did not match up with my search on google.  Hm....I wonder why???

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