There’s an interesting movement afoot these days to decompartmentalize your identity and move to a more universal form of recognition through technology. Right now, your business reputation is separate from your personal reputation, which is separate from your eBay buyer’s profile and so on. So, what if all of these forms of identity began to merge? Watch Dick Hardt’s excellent presentation on Identity 2.0 for more on this. (PowerPoint users take note, his presentation style is fantastic.)
Another perspective on this issue comes from Dave Chiu and Didier Hilhorst who propose a new tool called RentAThing that allows you to take your reputation with you wherever you go. [via]
I think this has a huge bearing on the real estate business. As an industry that relies on referrals for repeat business, in real estate, your reputation is your livelihood. It’s also an industry known sometimes for attracting less desirable characters to its ranks. As a consumer, who’s in the market to buy or sell a home, how do you begin to separate the wheat from the chaff – so to speak?
Measures like QSC begin to approximate this but have significant barriers because they a) are not universally implemented and b) don’t publish actual results from their rankings. In an age of ubiquitous access to information, I think there needs to be a broadly transparent way of rating real estate professionals. Any ideas on how to do this?
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