[Via this week’s carnival of real estate] Silicon Valley Blogger posts on the number of agents in Silicon Valley. And specifically his dry cleaning guy getting into the real estate game.

The statistic: 16,000 homes sold this year so far in Silicon Valley, 26,000 agents.

The math to get to $21k is a little wrong: he assumes half are active but not that there are two agents involved in a single transaction (i.e. one representing buyer, one representing seller), that is they are more likely grossing $42,000. But his point around the splits to the brokerage and associated fees are spot on.

Half the agents being active might be generous. We took a look at the market activity in Hawaii recently and found that 87% of agents were not representing a home owner on the sell side in September. If we generously assume there is another 13% out there helping the buy side (usually agents help home owners buy and sell so we’d assume the ones representing home sellers are doing most of the buy side representation as well but being generous), then roughly three out of four people would be inactive, not one in two.

In the stock market, the saying goes ‘when your shoe shine boy is offering stock tips, it’s time to get out’. Perhaps the same is true in real estate when you dry cleaner is entering the game?

One feature that quite a number of our users have asked for is to review a real estate agent through the lens of a home buyer, given that our first review template was heavily skewed toward the perspective of the home seller.

We listened and wait no more! Now when you go to fill out a review you nominate whether you bought or sold a house with that particular Real Estate Agent:

Then when you go to fill out the review we have specific questions related to your experience as a home buyer.

Enjoy and do let us know if there is anything we can do to improve!

When we redesigned our home page, we took the valuable feedback people had on board. One comment was that there shouldn’t be two search boxes on the front page because it was too confusing.

We agreed and went about redesigning the page into a more flexible and user friendly way. The result is an experience we derived from Google’s local search that incorporates two search boxes - the left as your search criteria and the right as the location.

Now if you want to search for an agent, simply click on the agent sub tab and enter the name of the agent in the left box and the location in the right. Like this:

The location part is also optional. If you leave it blank the query will still work.

If you are looking to search via a map, enter in an address in the left search box, marked address and then the city and state into the right. Like this:

That will take you to the map based search.

And if you just want to browse a location, enter it in to the second search box like so:

And away you go. If you’d like to help us improve even further, leave any comments you might have on this post.