Baron Briefs

Today, we’re expanding our patent-pending auction platform to include business referrals among Realtors®. The new product, ReferralAuction™, allows real estate brokers and agents to efficiently find and qualify out-of-town agents to handle their referrals.

As a Realtor®, you likely already swap referrals both on-line and off. However, when referring your client to an agent whom you’ve never met, two questions remain:

1. Is the agent qualified to handle the referral?
2. Will the agent pay my referral fee if a deal is done?

A ReferralAuction™ uses the AgentRank™ algorithm to ensure a referral is awarded to an agent who has a proven track record to make a sale.

Both the referral source and recipient have the opportunity to review the performance of each to discourage deceitful behavior.

….is coming soon and it’s going to be BIG!

I’m recruiting volunteers from the RE.net to sit on the inaugural board of governors. A summary of the AgentRank™ Board of Governors:

1. Responsible for maintaining the data point composition and weighting of the AgentRank™ algorithm.
2. Eighteen (18) high-profile real estate professionals located in the United States actively serve on the board of governors at any time.
3. Six (6) high-profile real estate professionals located in the United States sit as alternates in the event any sitting governor cannot perform duties, i.e. leaves real estate business, conflict of interest, etc.
4. Governors are granted an undetermined amount of quasi-currency each quarter of active duty which can be redeemed for stock options equity in RealtyBaron, Inc. in the future.
5. Initially, governors are appointed by RealtyBaron, Inc. but will be elected by the community in the long-term.

If you’re interested in volunteering, please contact me for more information: mdugger (at) gmail (dot) com

For several months, I’ve been working on a new listing product for Realtors. An important component is listing distribution. RealtyBaron already syndicates listings to Vast and allows agents to publish to Craigslist. But our listing product launching in early 2008 will require syndication to each and every listing destination site that accepts bulk feeds. And while RealtyBaron was early early-ish to the distribution game, we’re certainly not alone.

Listing distribution has become ridiculously easy. In just a few hours, I added feeds for CityCribs, Citylist, CLR Search, Oodle, Propbot, Propsmart, Trulia, Zillow, and Google Base. Once the feed format is known, it takes less than a few minutes to start churning out an XML file to feed a destination site.

All of which has me thinking about a future where listings seamlessly flow around the web. Can any one destination site gain a competitive advantage and win the listings race once real estate listings are ubiquitous? Probably not, me thinks. Instead, big destination sites will likely continue squeezing more search, more filtering, more analysis, and more data (sales data, demographics, etc.) into the same 1024 by 768 pixel space in an attempt to make sense of it all. Additionally, make room for more banner advertising to pay for the development of aforementioned features. Which brings me to…

Many Realtors continue to fear losing control of their listings. However, I can imagine an ironic outcome in which losing control of listings produces an explosion of information which eventually overwhelms and/or confuses the consumer. As a result, buyers and sellers who once went to Realtors for access to information increasingly use Realtors to slog through and interrupt the overly abundant data.

- The first MyAgentRank™ badge appears.

- MyAgentRank™ first day in the Widgetbox gallery.

- MyAgentRank™ receives its first kudos from RealtyThoughts:

…kudos go out to AgentRank for their brilliant widget! What an outstanding way to spread the word about their product by helping their agents show how good they are.

…not bad for day two.

In the spirit of “2007: year of the widget“, I released MyAgentRank™ over the weekend, a product that will take AgentRank™ to a new level. MyAgentRank™ is a “snippet” of HTML code that displays an agent’s AgentRank™ when inserted into their website or weblog. Visitors see the agent’s AgentRank™ in real-time plus a snapshot of the agent’s experience, sales, and endorsements. The visitor can click through to AgentRank.com for a detailed report of the agent’s track record. I’ll add the newest AgentRank™ components–Market Forecasts and Weblogs–to badges soon.

Ultimately, MyAgentRank™ is a lead generation tool for agents…albeit for their own website or weblog…by making a stronger case for visitors to complete a form or pick up the phone. Best of all, MyAgentRank™ allows the best agents to differentiate themselves from the competition because only a select group can display a “9″ or “10″ regardless of MyAgentRank™’s popularity.

To prevent gaming the system, MyAgentRank™ allows rankings to be flagged for review by staff. Community review is a new dimension for AgentRank™ which has been totally data-driven until now.

If you’re an agent, you can get your free MyAgentRank™ badge by completing the AgentRank™ setup.