The Power of Positivity
The level of trust survey respondents had in a business, however, depended in part on the number of positive reviews available. Thirty-two percent said they were willing to trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations if there were multiple reviews. The growing number of consumers who are not satisfied until they have read multiple reviews highlights the importance of convincing clients to make the effort to give an agent an online rating. The need for positive reviews, in turn, is reinforced by the high number of respondents who are more trusting of businesses with higher ratings. The need to believe that reviews are genuine indicates that consumers are savvy to the possibility of fake reviews versus genuine consumer feedback, and that they are alert to the possibility that some businesses might attempt to plant positive reviews.
This growth of trust in online reviews has led to many agents increasing their activity on review sites. The T3 study showed that nearly 39 percent of agents now consider online reviews a “very important” component of their digital strategy, and about 33 percent are approaching them as “relatively important.” Only about 3 percent dismiss online reviews as “not important.”
“You want people to know that your reviews are genuine, but you need those good reviews,” said Matt Laricy of the Matt Laricy Group, who has a five-star rating across 258 reviews on Zillow. “Every person I close with, I ask them to give me a review. When I first started with Yelp I had already been in business for a few years before these sites even existed. I went back to some of the people I had worked with before and asked them to write up a review.”
The number of agents surveyed by T3 who did not manage to pick up any leads from their online reviews could reflect the fact that simply having a presence online is not enough, and that agents have to work to convert their reviews – even overwhelmingly positive ones – into fresh leads. T3 posits that this “performance gap” exists either because agents don’t know how to turn their solid reviews into leads, or because it sometimes takes time to build momentum. For example, an agent may need to have more of his or her clients put up reviews before new potential clients start paying attention.
“We don’t advertise at all, so the client base does that for us,” Liss said. “It’s been organic. We’re prominent on Trulia and Yelp, so those are our two main review points.”
Yelp is not necessarily real estate-oriented, but its flexible platform and local focus make it a useful tool for Realtors seeking feedback from their clients. Using Yelp does not come without some hitches. The site’s algorithms are set up in such a way that reviews from users – “Yelpers” – with only one or two reviews often don’t show up on a business’ profile. An agent may think he or she has a few dozen reviews, but upon checking might find that they are invisible to most casual viewers.
Yelp’s software classifies certain reviews as “not recommended” and does not count them toward the site’s star rating feature, according to a study by David Kamerer posted on the peer-reviewed journal website First Monday. The software is designed to protect the integrity of the site and to filter out fake reviews. Business owners can find themselves in situations where low star ratings are prominently displayed, while more positive reviews are filtered out.
Yelp does hold advantages for agents looking to expand their reach. Anyone can create a profile and write a review, and while businesses do have to keep up with some site maintenance – updating listing information, for example – the site is easy to use. Businesses can also move their profiles higher in the search results by buying advertising.
Amy Duong Kim, an agent with Jameson Sotheby’s, has maintained a presence on Yelp since 2009, when an acquaintance reviewed her. She has a stellar five-star rating across 19 reviews, dating back to that first review. For years, she was one of the few Realtors in the Chicago area to use the site. In those early days, she received a lot of support from Yelp because offering business reviews was new to them, as well. She pays for ads on the site, which helps keep her near the top of the search results. Otherwise, the site is low maintenance.
“I stop in once a week to handle the logistics of things,” she said. “Most of my clients who find me on Yelp just call, which is what I prefer. Sometimes they send an e-mail, but usually they call and we can start having a conversation. Because it has all these great reviews and because it has my profile set up it doesn’t change that much. It’s not like a blog that I have to stay active on, or I have to post on like I do on Facebook or Twitter.”
Sites with a more concentrated focus on real estate draw attention to specific aspects of an agent’s business, while providing space for in-depth commentary about the client’s experience. Yelp’s five-star review model carries over with Trulia, which eliminated its “Thumbs Up” recommendation system in 2014. Instead, the site now lets users rate agents on a scale of one to five stars based on five categories: honesty and integrity, local knowledge, responsiveness, negotiation and process expertise. Zillow, which purchased Trulia last July, has used a similar star rating system since 2010. Realtor.com does not currently offer rankings, even though they have tested them in the past.
Ryan Parks, an agent with Related Realty, gets more business from his Zillow profile than from his presence on Yelp and Trulia. He has five stars on Zillow, and 44 reviews.
“When Zillow first started rolling, people weren’t going there to find properties,” Parks said. “They were still using realtor.com and just getting listings from the agents themselves. Early in my career, mentors and other people I looked up to had always stressed the importance of testimonials. The game changer is with a Zillow or Trulia page, because it allows you to get those testimonials out into the mainstream much more easily than if it’s just on your company website.”