Earlier today I saw Irina Netchaev tweet about how Mike Mueller, Jeff Turner,  Jay Thompson and I were some of her “favs”, so I couldn’t help but be curious what she was referring to… Her link sent me to the type of poll that everyone loves to hate:  A popularity contest where the “community” is able to vote on who are the most important in the real estate industry.

Considering that after at least one day of the poll being live, none of the people have over 16 votes, I think it’s pretty safe to say the results are statistically meaningless and likely to remain that way.

However, it did get me thinking about an update to the 50 most influential real estate people on twitter that caused quite the stir last fall…  After publishing the list, I got to talking with Garron Selliken and Chris Lynch about how M Agents might be able to use such a tool, and so we build a web version of the process and started testing it out with some of the agents.

A couple of agents found some great uses for it including one woman who focuses on Modern Homes in Portland.  She used the tool to quickly identify and begin connecting with people relevant to her niche (i.e. modern homes) by simply identifying a few relevant people interested in the subject and then plugging them into the tool.  And in only a few months of being active on twitter, Marisa has added hundreds of relevant people to her sphere on both a national and local level.

Update to the list!

Now for the real fun… Because it’s so easy, I decided to update the list of most influential real estate people on Twitter.  There’s more discussion on updates to the list below, but without further ado, here’s the update list of the top 100 most influential real estate people on twitter:

The way to think about this list is to read it something like this…  Out of the top 100 people in real estate (as determined by the number of people in real estate following them), 89 are following Rob Hahn.    In other words, instead of using a random sampling of people as most polls do, this list is created by the most influential twitter people in the industry!

One of the more interesting things about the list is that when you get down past the top 50 people, non real estate people like Tony from Zappos, Chris Brogen and Gary Vaynerchuk start showing up… It doesn’t surprise me one bit that a decent percent of the influential people in real estate are following these folks, so it makes good sense.

The weeds

In terms of the web process I developed last fall, we made one improvement when we turned it into a web app…  Instead of using the top 50 people, we made that a variable and I tend to use 100 people as the basis for relevance since the results are much more granular.   And if you missed the discussion on the algorithms used to create this list, check out this post for background.

By the way, if you work in an interesting niche and you’d like to see the most influential people in that niche, I’d happily consider running the web app and sending you the results.  Just to show you how super-simple it is, here’s what the interface looks like:

And I wish I could add a link to the URL so you could run it yourself, but it was built to only handle one process at a time, so it could get ugly if multiple people wanted to play at once.