Real Estate Agent Review Sites – Top List
There are a number of places you can search for real estate agent and Realtor reviews. Below is a top list of places to check:
Zillow.com. This is the number one real estate website in terms of online traffic and so a lot of real estate agents post their reviews on there. What is unusual about Zillow’s list of agent reviews is that the first page is randomly generated. So you can’t filter the search results by “most reviewed” or “highest rated” agents. You can search their real estate agent directory by most listings and by the most sales. However, the most sales category is deceiving, because there are some agents, for instance, in Eugene, OR, posting all their sales under the Portland, OR real estate agent directory. (I even submitted a ticket to Zillow to ask them to correct this, but it was ignored.) In other words, it doesn’t matter where the sale takes place, if the Realtor lists themselves as a Portland agent it will show all their sales under the Portland, OR directory results. You can trust the reviews on Zillow.com because they actively verify the sales.
Trulia.com. This is generally considered to be the second largest real estate portal and a lot of real estate agents post their reviews here. The real estate agent directory is set to first display the most active Realtors on the site (here called “best match”) who are actively answering real estate questions on Trulia.com. After that you can change your search criteria in such a way that I find to be very helpful. You can filter by “most” reviews (here called recommendations). You can filter by “most” sales and it actually works (unlike Zillow). Trulia.com will accurately share with you the number of sales an agent has under any given city you’re search in. Keep in mind this record of sales only goes back so far, but it is still a useful criteria. You can also filter by “featured” which does the least amount of good, this only reveals agents who are paying Trulia.com money. You can trust the reviews on Trulia.com because they actively verify the sales.
Yelp.com. This is probably the most active review site out there in general. What you might not be able to see on Yelp.com is how successful the agent is (actual sales in an area) or reviews that are specifically real estate related (in other words, Trulia and Zillow’s reviews grade the agent based on important criteria pertinent to the industry). Yelp.com is a place to check to see how many people “like” that real estate agent, but it is hard to say if those people are friends or relatives, where as Trulia.com and Zillow.com work to show you that these are actual clients and sales records.
Realtor.com is considered to be the third most active real estate portal and is the worst place to find real estate agent reviews. Their agent directory is an alphabetical list and for an agent to be featured on it, it simply means the agent is paying them money. Since the platform for this isn’t very user friendly, even though there is a place for “recommendations” on each agent’s profile, very few agents bother to list their reviews here.
Real estate agent reviews are important. I place most of my reviews on Trulia.com and Zillow.com because I feel they are the most trustworthy and accurate options. Of course, I also list my many reviews on my site. If you are considering interviewing a Portland area real estate agent, give me a call.
