Rankings › Methodology

How we decide which agent you meet

Two separate questions, and it is worth keeping them apart: who is allowed to be introduced to you at all, and in what order. The first is a hard gate. The second is a score, and right now most of that score has no data behind it — which this page says plainly rather than describing arithmetic that is running on zeros.

First: who can be introduced at all

Before any ranking happens, an agent has to clear all of this. It is not a scoring input — an agent who fails any part of it is not in the running, however good they are:

Their licence is on the state register and currently active
We re-check that against the state daily — not once when they signed up
They have claimed the profile and a third party has confirmed it is really them
The state shows them with a sponsoring broker, where the state records one
Where a state publishes no bulk register, a person checks the licence by hand and that check expires after 180 days

If nobody in your area clears that gate, we tell you so and offer to email you when someone does. We do not widen the gate to fill the page.

Then: the order

2 of 7 of these currently have data behind them. The rest are switched on automatically the moment they do — this page is generated from the same tables the matching runs against, so it cannot describe a signal we are not actually using.

How close they work to you
Agents who actually cover your area rank above agents who cover a nearby one. This is the biggest single input and it is the one that works on day one.
in use
up to 30 pts
Whether they do this kind of deal
What the agent says they focus on, matched against what you told us you need. This is the agent’s own description of their practice, not something we measured.
The agent’s own description of their practice — we have not verified it.
in use
up to 10 pts
Closings we can see
Sales closed through Common Realtor, plus past sales a client has confirmed. An agent typing a number does not move this on its own.
no data yet
up to 20 pts
Reviews tied to a real closing
Ratings from clients we can tie to a transaction. We do not accept open reviews.
no data yet
up to 15 pts
Whether they work at your price point
Measured from the prices they have actually transacted at — not from a range they typed. That is why it needs a track record before it does anything.
no data yet
up to 15 pts
How fast they reply
Median time to respond to a lead we sent them.
no data yet
up to 10 pts
CR Certified
A small tiebreak for agents who completed our certification.
no data yet
up to 5 pts

In practice that means closings we can see, reviews tied to a real closing, whether they work at your price point, how fast they reply and CR Certified contribute nothing to anyone’s position today, because we have no records to compute them from yet. Everybody scores zero on them, so they change no order. We would rather say that than let the length of a list imply a depth of evidence that is not there.

The second list: licensed, but not claimed

Most agents in your area have not claimed a profile here. We show them anyway, and they are ranked exactly the same way as everyone else — claiming a profile changes nothing about where an agent places. We can prove something real about them: the state's own register says their licence is active, and we re-check that every day. The one thing we cannot do is introduce you: state registers publish no agent contact details, so until an agent claims their profile we have no way to send them your details. That list says so and leaves the next move to you.

Those two things are different claims and we keep them apart. “Licence verified with the state” is not “vetted”, and it is not a judgement about how good they are.

That list is ordered on what the public record proves, and on nothing else — 5 of 6 of these currently have data behind them:

How specifically we can place them in your area
An area taken from their own licensed address is more specific than one inferred from where their brokerage is registered, and ranks above it. Either way we say which it was.
in use
Licence type
A broker licence requires years of practice as a salesperson before it can be issued, so it is a real experience signal rather than a self-description.
in use
Years licensed
From the original issue date on the state register.
in use
Whether the state names their brokerage
Some registers publish the firm and some do not. Where it is published we show it.
in use
Unbroken licence history
An unbroken licence says more than one that lapsed and was reinstated.
in use
Disciplinary record
Only where the state publishes it. Where it does not, we say so — an absent record is never shown as a clean one.
no data yet

This is not a quality score and we will not call it one. There are no verified transactions, no response times and no reviews for an agent who has never worked with us. It ranks licensed, active, experienced and plausibly local — which is worth showing, and is less than it would be worth if we pretended otherwise. Claimed agents always appear above this list.

One slot is reserved, on purpose

When we introduce you to more than one agent, one of those places is held for an agent we have no response history for yet — fewer than 5 measured replies.

The reason is circular in a way that does not fix itself: how fast an agent replies is measured from leads we sent them, and leads are sent by the ranking. Whoever answers the first few keeps ranking highest, and an agent who joined a month later stays unmeasured forever — which reads exactly like being bad at the job. So a seat is held. It goes to whoever has waited longest, never to whoever paid, and it stops being held for an agent once we have enough replies to judge them normally.

What never counts

Nothing an agent pays for affects who you are shown, or in what order — not a subscription, not a featured slot, not advertising, not a placement fee. There is no such product to buy. Agents pay us for tools; they cannot pay us for you.

What we would add, and what has to be true first

The signals marked “no data yet” above turn on by themselves once the records exist — closings once sales complete through the platform or a client confirms a past one, ratings once reviews are tied to a verified closing, price fit once there are real transaction prices to compare against, reply speed once agents have been sent leads. We are not going to approximate any of them in the meantime. An estimated track record is not a track record.

The CR Score is a different thing

The public leaderboard at /rankings ranks agents by a 0–100 CR Score. It is not what decides who you are introduced to, and it never feeds the matching above. It is built from 5 groups of signals — results, client trust, responsiveness, integrity and activity — over an agent’s verified record.

It has the same problem this page exists to be honest about, so: 0 of 0 published agents currently have enough verified record to be scored at all. Everyone else is shown as “Not yet rated” rather than given a low number, because a thin record and a bad one are not the same thing and we will not print a number that cannot tell them apart.

Signal availability measured 2026-09-15 against live data.

The public leaderboard

Separate from the above: a nationwide ranking of agents by verified results. It does not decide who you are introduced to.

View the rankings