Photo of Cardinals player by Pierre -Olivier Carles.
What is the Top 10 Pros list?
Zillow.com has launched “Top 10 Pros lists,” likening a Realtor’s circle of preferred servicers and people in the industry they’ve worked with to a baseball draft and encourages real estate pros to “give a virtual high-five to the people you trust and want on your team.”
Zillow says, “you can create your own fantasy real estate league by creating a Top 10 Pros list that will appear on your Zillow Profile page.”
This method of recommending adds a layer of accountability that is distinct from the standard professional recommendation. It is easy to thumbs up another agent or a lender, but by putting their face on your very profile, it is the ultimate endorsement.
“Zillow’s Top 10 Pros feature allows real estate professionals to give consumers an inside look at their top picks of other real estate professionals such as mortgage lenders, agents, stagers and more. It’s not a virtual Rolodex of everyone the professional has worked with, but a list of the people they would hire for themselves.”
How the Top 10 Pros lists will be used
It will be interesting to watch how the real estate community takes to this and whether the lists will be dominated by ancillary services like title, insurance, lenders and processors, or if agents will endorse other agents on their team or even competitors that have been pleasant to work with.
We also wonder how Zillow will present the data of “the top 10 who have been top 10’d” lists or if that will remain private, or if the company will add this information to their Realtor ratings (“this agent is on 15 Top 10 lists”).
There is great potential for this tool, but we reserve our final judgment until we see it in action and see what the company does with it in the long run.
Ruthmarie Hicks
August 3, 2011 at 12:01 am
I won't feed zillow any more than I have to. No one with their own web presence should feed their competition.