Where the portal misses the mark and competitors could catch up I had just finished writing a post about the lack of interesting consumer innovation this winter in real estate. Then, along came Zillow’s Agent Finder. It’s exactly what you’d expect: an attractive, easy-to-use interface that lets consumers see agents in a geographic location based on reviews, listings and past sales. Of course, there are also some spots up top for agents who are paid advertisers. Are there holes in the data? Absolutely. Will consumers care? Probably not. Agent Finder feels like Yelp for real estate; it allows for positive and negative reviews, without interpreting the company’s financial success. Yelp makes consumers feel comfortable that even though they might not have all of the available information, they have enough to make a good decision. That’s the feeling Agent Finder might give to real estate consumers — comfort that they’ve been able to make a good choice, even if all of the choices might not have been present. Agent Finder will still present an inaccurate profile of some agents because of the lack of comprehensive sales data, but it will do so with less antagonism than the stark ranking via production data that we saw in the past with Redfin’s Scouting Reports or NeighborCity’s scoring system. Much of the agents’ past sales data has to be manually input, ensuring that we’ll have a picture that’s skewed toward the Zillow-friendly agent. That will likely boost agent adoption of the platform. I could be wrong, but I don’t think Agent Finder will draw out the agent pitchforks in the way past ratings systems did. It will still have some agents justifiably upset at the way they’re portrayed. Having been on the advisory board for realtor.com’s AgentMatch, Find A Realtor and NAR’s Realtor Ratings Committee, there’s a simultaneous feeling of frustration and admiration watching Zillow build a tool like this. We have the membership and the data to make it happen through NAR, but we move cautiously for our membership. Most tech companies ask forgiveness instead of permission. There’s still an opportunity for NAR to build a more comprehensive, broker/agent-supported platform for Realtor reviews. A more robust database can win in the long run, but the consumer mind share for reviews is hard to get back after a certain threshold has been reached....