Shorewest Realtors Review: Is it Worth It?

Overall rating | Customer experience | Agent quality | Brand visibility and reach | Service value | Locations | Methodology

Shorewest Realtors is an award-winning, family-owned real estate brokerage that's been operating for over 75 years. With 26 offices serving the Greater Milwaukee area and other parts of Wisconsin, Shorewest claims to be the state’s "largest home seller."

Shorewest has built a prestigious brand, but that doesn’t mean you should hire its agents without method. Below we’ll dive deeper into the company and help you decide if they’re right for you.

Bottom line: Do we recommend Shorewest Realtors?

If you’re looking to sell a home in southeastern Wisconsin, Shorewest Realtors is a good place to start.

The realty has a massive workforce — 900+ agents, according to its website. Its agents have around 13 years of experience each, and they complete roughly 12 transactions per year. Your listings will also benefit from their website’s monthly traffic (around 158,000 visitors).

Shorewest Realtors: Our in-depth breakdown

Reputation and customer experience

After looking at 92 reviews across 14 offices, we were left with the impression that Shorewest agents will get the job done, but they may not be as responsive or attentive to client’s needs as a smaller brokerage.

The aggregate customer rating across all sites is 3.9 — not bad, but fairly low compared with similar-sized brokerages. After running these same reviews through an AI program that picks up emotional language, here were some common word clusters we found:

It’s important to note that people use third-party review sites to voice circumstantial complaints that aren’t always characteristic of the company. So take what you read on Yelp or similar sites with a grain of salt.

Even with four negative reviews and two complaints on the Better Business Bureau, Shorewest still maintains an A+ rating.

Agent quality

Shorewest agents are reliable and hard-working. Even so, we still recommend you evaluate individual agents. Don’t let your guard down during the interviews because they come from a big brand: ask for sales numbers and references from past clients.

Brand reach and visibility

Shorewest Realtors has done an excellent job marketing its brand and increasing visibility on the web. More than 158,000 users visit the Shorewest Realtors page per month, which is very high compared with brokerages of similar size. This is even more impressive considering that only 12,000 people search for "Shorewest Realtors" and other branded terms on Google each month.

The company has 10,800 active listings, most of them found in Wisconsin. Its 26 offices are located in the southeastern corner of Wisconsin, with a heavy concentration in the Greater Milwaukee area.

Service value

All in all, Shorewest Realtors seems like a great deal. As a full-service brokerage, it offers sellers all the basics you should expect, such as:

• Listing and marketing (including a large, recognizable Shorewest yard sign that accounts for 60% of phone inquiries)
• Full-color photos
• Weekly open houses and showings

Shorewest will also share your listing with all of its sales associates (1,000+) and their respective buyers. In addition, clients have their homes listed on LeadingRE Home Search, which markets their properties nationally to reach out-of-state buyers and investors.

Likewise, buyers get special services, such as 3D home tours, mortgage calculators, and a myShorewest mobile app (for Apple and Android). You can also save your home preferences in your "myShorewest account," and the app notifies you when matching homes hit the market.

For all the glamor of these services, however, you should expect to pay a fixed commission (3% of the home’s sale price) if you hire an agent from Shorewest Realtors — regardless of the local competitive rates. For reference, here are the state averages for the markets Shorewest Realtors operates in:

» MORE: Average Commission Rates Across the U.S. 2022

Additional info about Shorewest Realtors

General contact info (corporate office)

Shorewest Realtors local offices and contact information

Shorewest provides a helpful search tool to filter through its offices. We've also listed the locations that get the most search on Google, indicating they're probably popular or in a highly populated area.

Other Shorewest Realtors services

This review focused on Shorewest Realtors's core real estate agent service. We’ve listed its other services (financing, title, insurance, etc.) and links to their respective websites below.

• Home financing
• Title and closing
• Relocation
• Insurance
• Home valuation

Make sure you shop around to get the best fit and value. Don’t go with a Shorewest service just for the convenience of a one-stop shop!

Next steps: Start interviewing agents!

Interview multiple agents (ideally two to three) to ensure you get the best fit and value. Remember: always hire the agent, not the brand. When you’re ready to start searching, check out our guide on how to choose the right real estate agent. Clever’s free agent-matching service makes agent shopping fast and easy, and it can save you money.

Rating methodology

We evaluate brokerages based on four core criteria we think will help readers make informed decisions. We broke those criteria down into discrete metrics so we could make the score as objective as possible. Here’s a quick breakdown of that criteria and methodology: