How we rank real estate agents
Porchlight Agents ranks agents with a published formula, recomputed every day. Agents cannot pay for placement. There is no paid factor, no “featured” slot, and no referral fee that feeds back into the ranking.
The factors and their weights
| Factor | Weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Local closed sales | 35% | Closed sales in that city over the last 36 months. This is the largest factor, because local volume is the best signal that an agent knows the market. |
| Recent activity | 15% | Closed sales anywhere in the last 12 months, so a ranking reflects who is active now. |
| Sales volume | 10% | Dollar volume in the last 12 months, on a log scale so luxury agents do not automatically dominate. |
| Review score | 20% | Average rating from transaction-verified reviews, adjusted toward 4.0 when an agent has only a few reviews (a Bayesian average), so one 5-star review does not beat 80 reviews at 4.9. |
| Review count | 10% | How many verified clients have reviewed the agent. |
| Experience | 5% | Years licensed, capped at 20. |
| Verification | 5% | The share of the agent’s sales we matched to MLS records. |
Each factor is scaled from 0 to 1 within the city being ranked, then combined with the weights above into a score from 0 to 100.
Verified versus agent-reported sales
Sales we match to an MLS record count in full. Sales an agent enters themselves count at 70% until they are matched (same city, price within 1%, closing date within 7 days). Every profile shows how many of the agent's sales are verified.
Who is eligible
- A licensed real estate agent or broker. No one else can be listed: not lenders, not lead sellers, not unlicensed assistants. Every license is verified against state licensing records (or by our team) before the profile goes live, and re-checked on every import.
- At least one closed sale in the city in the last 36 months.
- A city page appears only when at least 5 agents qualify, so we don't publish thin lists. Each page shows the top 25.
What we deliberately ignore
- Whether the agent is a paying customer of ours or of any partner. (See how we make money.)
- Leads, clicks or referrals that we generate. Some directories rank agents higher when they close the directory's own paid referrals; we don't.
- Profile completeness. A great agent with a short bio is still a great agent.
Awards
Each January we issue the year's awards from the rankings: Top Agent for the top 10 in each city, Top 25 per state, and Five Star Agent for a 4.8+ average across at least five verified reviews. Agents keep an award for the calendar year. See award badges.
Corrections
If a sale or license detail is wrong, the agent can fix it from their dashboard, and anyone can report a problem to our moderation team. Corrections show up in the next daily recompute.