Brokers are not all the same. Some can pull a little extra cash out of a house and some are good at the fast sell. Some will try to force you to rent a room in a basement with barely enough room to stand up. That’s why StreetEasy, a real estate site popular with the New York apartmentatti, has added broker ratings to their paid property search platform.
This service allows you to see who is active in your own neighborhood and who tends to retain value vs. the initial asking price. This also helps you find out broker’s past sales and it shows all of their current apartment and house sales and rentals available, a fairly unique value-add for house-hunters.
The site is focusing on Manhattan and Brooklyn brokers right now but they’ll soon expand to Queens. “StreetEasy has brought a level of information and transparency to the real estate market that was previously only available to brokers (who still had somewhat limited access to other brokerage’s information.) By providing listing data from brokers, owners, and landlords, along with city data and public records, StreetEasy has changed NYC from being the most opaque real estate market to the most transparent, with more power to consumers than ever before,” says Jared Kleinstein, Manager at StreetEasy.
StreetEasy started in 2005 and costs $10 per month for access to their “insider’s data.” House hunters can use the site to assess the value of a property, plan open house visits, and measure the pulse of a particular real estate market.
The site competes with Trulia and other real estate sites but currently their broker rankings are novel in the apartment space.