Are you using real estate agent reviews for your marketing? If not, you might consider it.

Online reviews are big business for companies investing in major efforts to create positive reviews about their company on popular review sites. Not too long ago, the New York Times published the article For $2 a Star, an Online Retailer Gets 5-Star Product Reviews. Retailers, the article explains, have been offering major discounts to customers who write positive 5-star reviews on Amazon and other retail sites, in some cases offering a rebate that results in a free product. Say what you will about the ethics of such practices, what they demonstrate is that client reviews play a major role in a product decision or the choice of one real estate agent over another.

Since the World Wide Web transformed from being somewhat editorially regulated to more participatory and user-generated (a.k.a. web 2.0), merchants and professionals have slowly opened up to product (or client) reviews on their websites as a way to market their goods and reputations. Yet, everyone involved still has concerns. Customers may worry that the reviews are canned (written by people hired by manufacturers) and professionals may worry that competitors will find a way to publish bad reviews on their sites. This is why merchants like Amazon and sites like ReachFactor have safeguards in place to verify the testimonials so that a customer can simply concentrate on what's being said about the product or professional. In the matter of real estate testimonials, it's stressful enough trying to find the right real estate agent for a home transaction than to have to worry about whether the agent's testimonials are legit and not reviews spam.

But the article brings up a larger point about the "value" of client testimonials. If a company is essentially offering free products for positive reviews, it's a sign that more and more customers, prospects and clients are consulting user-generated reviews and making major decisions based upon them.

Where your real estate business might have relied on word-of-mouth and print ads and home-sale figures to promote itself, now it's important to focus on engaging past, current and future clients with social media and making testimonial-gathering part of your closing process. Capture the voice of your best customers and turn them into new referrals with a solution like ReachFactor. We'll bring forward the voice of your best customers, we'll spread those reviews online to generate positive sentiment about you, and you can even be rewarded with an enhanced Google display.

[To learn more about ReachFactor's review verification process, click here.]

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