Many folks already know someone or would just call the person they have done business with before but if you are not that lucky, just how does one find a real estate professional? I don’t mean choose a real estate professional with regards to experience and qualifications but the actual first step of searching for one (or three).

I will often Google myself or do a search on some the the real estate portals that contain my listings to keep up to date on how the consumer is being served and tweak the ways to serve my Buyer and Seller clients. Here’s what I stumbled upon on Zillow today. Under the Directory tab, I choose Town of Townsend, MA- Real Estate Agents.

The results were 23 and yes, I am glad Sodano Real Estate is one of them seeing that I am physically located in Townsend. One of the results doesn’t even have a real estate license. Two of the results are located at least 1.5 hours away I bet they don’t know where Townsend is. The rest are located 20-45 minutes away. Aside from the town(s) that an agent claims to be in their marketplace, Zillow uses a rating system by how many contributions one makes to online questions. Great concept, except some of these so called questions are absurdly made up junk by people that looking for a laugh and agents will actually attempt to answer to increase their ratings.

Here’s an example of a pretty good question that a homeowner asked in October of 2009: Should I paint the woodwork or leave natural……? Well, it got 40 plus answers from agents, but here’s the kicker; 16 of the responses were posted in October of 2010 to just yesterday. Are you kidding? Do you think the guy has made a decision by now?

Real Estate on the internet can get quite overwhelming, so if you are looking for a professional that knows their marketplace start with someone located in that area. Avoid the online lead generation traps and just find an online map search like Google and type in a specific town with state and “Real Estate Agencies” Your results may get you a little closer to home!