Books, hotels, restaurants, and now … real estate agents?

Earlier this month, consumer real estate website Zillow.com began a program allowing past clients to put a one- to five-star rating on their real estate agent, just as consumers might do with a hotel on popular sites like Tripadvisor.com.

Zillow is far from the first site to allow agents to be rated. Yelp.com may be best known as a place to find restaurants, but it also allows its users to rate any local business – real estate agents among them.

The 20,000 member Houston Association of Realtors began an agent-rating program on its own consumer-focused site last year. And online brokerages like Redfin and Zip Realty have long embraced ratings – Redfin even incorporates customer ratings into its agent’s compensation.

But Zillow’s recent move is the first by a national real estate site, and suggests that ratings may be becoming a permanent part of the landscape as real estate becomes an increasingly web-centric industry.

“Accountability is one of the biggest things about the web and [adding ratings was] a natural progression for us, and it’s a natural progression for the rest of the marketplace,” Alex Coon, manager of Redfin’s Boston office, told Banker & Tradesman.

‘Terrified/Upset’

As more potential homebuyers begin their home search by screening properties on the web, the web may soon become the first place to look for an agent, too. With so many agents to pick from, ratings can be a way to help gain consumer trust.

“If you’re going to work with somebody, you probably ought to know a little bit about them. Testimonials [on agents’ own sites] can be handpicked and not necessarily representative of every transaction. So we thought, let’s put them all up there,” said Coon. “I would contend that what people say about us on the houses they didn’t get means more than on the ones that they did.”

But many agents are concerned by the possibility that a sale that didn’t go through could lead a disappointed client or a malicious competitor to leave a venomous review – reviews that are often hard to combat and could dissuade future clients.

A poll taken earlier this year by the real estate agent website AgentGenius.com found 0 percent of agents welcomed the possibility of realtor ratings. More than half – 59 percent – of respondents said they were “terrified/upset” about the prospect of being rated on a one-to-five scale.

The sites are aware of such agent concerns. Under Zillow’s system, in order to post a review, the reviewer must have his or her own profile on the site and name the address of the property involved in the transaction (which is not made public). A customer service team from the company will review every rating before it is posted to ensure it meets the site’s guidelines about abusive language. Reviews which an agent feels are unfair or offensive may be flagged for the attention of a moderator and may be removed. Agents will also have a chance to respond publicly to a negative review.

Paying Attention

But that may not be enough to persuade agents, particularly as it’s Zillow making the move: One of the site’s premier attractions, its “Zestimates” of a home’s value, have long been controversial among agents, many of whom feel they are inaccurate. Zillow did not return calls seeking comment for this story.

For a long time, Zillow was “one of those sites that I really don’t care for. They’re geeks, they’re not real estate people, and they try to be sensational,” said Lisa Zemack, co-broker/owner of Zemack Real Estate in Framingham. “But then I realized, a lot of my younger – even some of my older – sellers and buyers would say, ‘I saw my property on Zillow, it is this and that value,’” and so she felt compelled to become more active on the site, submitting fresh photos for her listings and adding property tours.

But she still feels that the Zestimates are often well off the mark for the areas she works in, and therefore misleading to customers. It makes her worry about how the site will handle its new agent rating system.

“I have mixed feelings about it….[but] we have to engage with it, because it’s becoming big,” said Zemack.

That concern wasn’t shared by all local agents. Laurie Cadigan, president-elect of the Massachusetts Association of Realtors and broker-owner of Barrett & Co. in Concord, said that “most of our agents receive their business from personal referrals, people who already know and love us, whom we’ve already done a great job for. That has such a heavy weight in the selection process that I think these other rating systems are just going to be an additional item,” for clients to consider.

But in the end, real estate agents may just have to get used to paying a whole lot more attention to managing their online reputations.

“There’s very little that’s out on the internet where our company name gets mentioned that we don’t know about,” said Cadigan. “I’m sure there’s people out there that don’t, which is unfortunate, because everybody should have Google alerts on their stuff, on themselves at least. But you [tend to] find out one way or the other.”