Discount real estate brokerage Redfin has pulled its agent stats tool, dubbed "Scouting Report," from its website and will no longer provide sales statistics for Boston-area agents.
"Data we used for Scouting Report had problems at the source that weren’t easy for us to fix," wrote Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman in a post on the brokerage’s website last night. "I’m sorry we didn’t get the data right; it was arrogance to think that we had."
The Scouting Report feature allowed consumers to see performance stats for approximately 1 million agents nationwide, including how many homes they had sold during the past three years, their average sale prices and whether or not their listings had gone through price drops.
The data came from the various multiple listing services to which the brokerage belonged, including MLS-PIN in Massachusetts. Many agents objected to personal sales data being displayed on a competitor’s website, and complaints about accuracy and violations of MLS policies forced Redfin to withdraw the report from several markets within hours of its launch, and last night, to pull it down altogether.
A major part of the difficulty stemmed from inaccuracies in MLS data, including the fact that all sales by members of real estate teams are often accredited solely to the team leader. Additionally, agents who are members of more than one MLS might not have all their sales represented if Redfin was not a member of one of the MLSs.
Such issues were less of a concern in Massachusetts, according to Alex Coon, manager of Redfin’s Boston office. Coon said he had not received complaints from local brokers over data accuracy in the time the Scouting Report was live.
"In general I find our MLS data to be pretty good compared to other markets and the people at [MLS-PIN] do a good job of policing and trying to maintain data integrity," Coon said in an email to Banker & Tradesman. "There is always the human error factor with any data that is manually entered and updated, but as we stated even a small amount of inaccuracy is too much for us."
Kelman defended the idea behind the Scouting Report and said the company would continue to attempt to work on ways to bring consumers more data on real estate transactions.
"I still think the folks most violently opposed to Scouting Report didn’t hate it because it was wrong but because it was right," he wrote on the company’s blog. "I know that consumers loved it and now they can’t get it anywhere else. And I still believe that brokers should be the ones to tell regular folks how agents have performed in different neighborhoods, because we’re the only ones with reliable data."
