For Emily Sachs Wong, “top producer” is more than a flattering tagline on a business card or email signature. It’s become almost a calling card, a facet of her business.

“There’s no question that there is name recognition that comes with it,” the @properties agent says. As Emily Sachs Wong Luxury Chicago Real Estate, she finished 2016 with nearly $186 million in sales volume, mostly homes sold in Lincoln Park. “People do call me because they see my signs on homes for sale and see my name. They know in general that I do a lot of business.”

But what value does the honor “top producer” offer beyond simply bolstering a real estate brand that is often already quite strong? Answering that question requires assessing what “top producer” really means – to agents, to consumers, to brokerages and to associations.

Who decides who is a top producer?

Not all associations recognize top producers, but those local associations that do each have their own standards for what constitutes a top producer in their markets. Using figures compiled from Midwest Real Estate Data, the Chicago Association of Realtors breaks its annual spring membership awards down into multiple categories, so that recognition as a top producer is given to agents based on residential volume, residential units, neighborhood volume and neighborhood amounts.

Other organizations track agent performance according to their own criteria. REAL Trends publishes “America’s Best Real Estate Agents,” which ranks individual agents and teams in each state by sales volume and sides. U.S. News & World Report has teamed up with Agent Explore, according to their website, to “match you [consumers] with a top agent who has past success with homes like the one you want to buy or sell.” And in fact Chicago Agent publishes our own quarterly and yearly rankings of Chicagoland top producers in our Real Data reports.

That’s a lot of information for consumers and agents to wade through. How does one know how well that data reflects a given agent’s ability to sell a home or represent a buyer? And do rankings and top-seller lists really offer the last word on who, and what, a top producer is?