Zolve officially launches today, but Brian Wilson, gave me a sneak peak of his new social network for the housing industry last night.

I’ve been studying existing social networks for most of this year. I’m on LinkedIn, Facebook, Del.icio.us, and the RE focused Active Rain. The problem with each of these services is that they reward users for creating affinities without much regard for whether or not those affinities truly reflect how well each party performs in a business transaction. I have ~70 “friends” on Facebook, none of which have I ever done business with.

Zolve differs in that it concentrates more on the actual referral that it does on a “let’s be freinds” link fest. It’s a transaction platform that lets an RE Agent refer business to other agents (out of market for instance) or a loan originator, or many other service providers.

Throughout a referral, the referred agent is responsible for keeping the original agent, and the customer up to date through predefined progress reports. Once the transaction is complete, the original agent must grade the referred agent’s performance.

Brian compares his new network to eBay’s seller feedback tools. The more often an agent performs well, the better his profile looks. If an agent does a poor job, and then repeats that effort, they’re not going to last very long on the network.

Zolve’s back-end system doubles as a digital paper trail, and conduit for communicating between agents. Every bit of correspondence is recorded through the system. It also alerts the users to predefined communication commitments. Say the referring agent wants to be notified weekly on the progress of the transaction. Both sides agree to this ahead of time, and the system alerts the referred agent when these updates are due.

Looking at the system from a Mortgage Professional’s perspective, this is an excellent way for a quality originator to back up their promises with a network of referrals. Sure, any LO could ask an agent for a referral letter, but often they never have the chance to show that letter to new RE agents. Zolve could be extremely effective because the agents are not only giving a quality LO good ratings, but they are sharing that information with off of the RE agents that they are networking with to build their own sphere of influence.

There’s a $395 annual membership fee for Zolve, but you can also try out a free, 30 day trail. A subscription fee was established for two reasons.

1. Zolve wants to actually make some money! That also means that they will have the capital to improve the system, and avoid filling the network with advertising.

2. They don’t want dormant members. “We want to give everyone the chance to succeed”, says Brian. But he notes that not everyone will perform well enough to justify the subscription fee. It’s a Darwinistic approach to building a network.

Over all, I hope it succeeds. Being on the line for every referral you accept, and every review you make mitigates the good ole’ boy way of referring clients, and can only further contribute to transparency in the housing industry.

To find out more about Zolve, Drew Meyers has posted a detailed review over at Geek Estate. It will be fun to watch how this network evolves.

Update - Inman has a nice roundup of blogs who covered Zolve’s launch.