Sham Rating Site? Oregon Agents Raise the Alert

Agents at RE/MAX Equity Group in Portland, Ore., were suspicious.

A site called agent-ratings.com was giving F grades to agents as a result of what appeared to be faked customer ratings. They consulted with the company's general counsel Jeffrey S. Davis.

Agent-ratings purports to protect consumers from "lazy, irresponsible" real estate practitioners. But its ratings are highly suspect, Davis says.

At the site, agents are given a grade in five categories: knowledge, professionalism, reliability, experience, and communication, as well as an overall grade.

The site offers an A ratings for life to agents who pay $99. If you look at the ratings of agents who haven't paid for the A rating, you'll see some obvious patterns, Davis says. First, it appears that every agent who hasn't paid has an overall F rating, he says. In addition:

• No agent has an F ratings in every category.
• Every agent has two or three—not one or four or five—different grades.
• No agent has any individual category rating of B or A.

"These factors suggest a limited attempt to make the ratings appear to be genuine," he says. "There would be much more diversity in the ratings if the ratings were real."

I did my own search of the site. When I searched for agents from Oak Park, Ill., where I live, the site returned results from Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., and Thousand Oaks, Calif. So I tried using the "Find Agents by State" function and clicked on Illinois. Lo and behold, every name I clicked on had D and F ratings in the individual categories and an overall grade of F.

Davis investigated the provenance of agent-ratings.com, and, again, what he turned up was suspicious. "The WHOIS record indicates it was created on Jan. 25, 2013," he says. But when he scanned the site, the customer ratings supposedly predated creation of the site. "I just took a quick look at about 100 of the ratings, and all of the agents' ratings are dated 2011 and 2012," he says.