June 28, 2007
When you’re ready to take your real estate search to the next step: Estately Agent Match
Today we’re launching Estately Agent Match, a program to help Washington State home buyers and sellers find the best real estate agent for them. In a nutshell, you tell us what you need in an agent and we match you with 3 real estate agents who are a good match. Each agent will send you a personal introduction and you’ll be able to see reviews and ratings from their past clients. You interview your favorites and you’re ready to pair the power of Estately real estate search with expert advice from a great agent.
Why Agent Match? Ever since we launched the best Seattle-area real estate search site in December, we’ve had users emailing us asking how they can visit properties on the site and wondering if we could recommend any great agents. We had a great search, but at some point our users wanted to bridge over into the real world and get some professional advice. Since then, we’ve produced some happy beta testers and selectively recruited some of the best agents in Western Washington to partner with us. They come from big-name brokerages and small, intimate brokerages and have a variety of approaches to buying and selling properties, but they have some things in common: a commitment to their clients, businesses built on referrals from previous clients, and passionate clients who have nothing but good things to say about their agents.
Why do we match people with three agents? We’re confident that we matching each client with great agents, but personality is important in buying or selling a home. You should be really be able to trust your agent, so we want to be sure that you really get the right agent for you.
We’re excited to be the first site to really focus on helping people find the best agent for them. We’ve recruited a rock-star team of agents, many of whom do so much business from past clients and personal recommendations that we’re the first site they’ve worked with.
June 28th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
Interesting model… I think homegain was doing this 9 years ago. 12% for a lead, ouch!
June 28th, 2007 at 9:05 pm
Hi Agent Scoreboard. You are right: there are some similarities between our new service and other services available on the internet.
There are also some important differences though: we don’t sell consumer’s personal information to the highest bidder or to the agent who “owns” a zip code. Instead, we match people with agents who are the best for them. We are hyper-focussed on matching people with great agents, to the extent that we will remove any agent who doesn’t get top marks from clients we refer to them.
I could list a few more differences, but really we are responding to our user’s requests: once they narrowed down their search on Estately, they wanted to see homes and get expert advice. We put together Agent Match to help them find those great agents.
June 30th, 2007 at 7:07 am
I would have to say it is a way better model than most of the other…especially House Values who charges obscene amounts of money for what could be had for a few dollars. It appears Estately at least tries to match principals with interviewed agents as opposed to distributing consumer info to any old agent with a license.
October 25th, 2007 at 5:26 am
Yes, it’s look really interesting. but what do you think about our website? Would be interesting to hear some opinion about it…