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:

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

6 of 8 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.

In practice that means reviews tied to a real closing and Homegrity Badge 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 license 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. “License 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 — 6 of 6 of these currently have data behind them:

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 recorded 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 Homegrity Score is a different thing

The public leaderboard at /rankings ranks agents by a 0–100 Homegrity 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 record.

It has the same problem this page exists to be honest about, so: 15 of 79 published agents currently have a score. A score starts with the first thing an agent has done that we can measure — a closing, a client review, a reply to a lead, follow-through, ratings from other agents or a published article. Anything not measured yet counts as neutral — half its points — never as zero, and the score is marked Provisional until there is more behind it. An agent with nothing measured 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.

What the Homegrity Score is made of

100 points, read from the scoring code itself. No plan, payment or promotion adds a point.

Signal availability measured 2026-11-04 against live data.