Built by someone who knows what a great agent actually looks like.

James Blackwell has been in real estate since 2003, and in that time he has done nearly everything the industry has to offer. He became one of the top ten Prudential agents in the entire Washington Metropolitan area, served as an office manager where he doubled per-agent productivity in a single year and won Office of the Year for a 33-office brokerage, built what would become the number one team at Keller Williams in Annapolis starting in 2012, and in 2015 founded Blackwell Real Estate — which today has one of the highest percentages of producing agents of any brokerage in the Washington Metropolitan area. In 2023 he launched Ally Title, a Maryland settlement company serving Blackwell Real Estate clients and the broader Maryland market.

That career gave James something that no algorithm can replicate: a ground-level, two-decade understanding of what actually separates a great agent from one who simply holds a license. He has recruited agents, managed them, coached them, competed against them, and referred clients to them. He knows what consistent production looks like — and he knows what the warning signs look like too.

The idea for GreatAgents.Net was born in 2019 directly from the experience of running Blackwell Real Estate. Time and again, clients needed help finding an agent in a market Blackwell didn't serve — relocating to Nashville, buying in Charlotte, selling a family home in Phoenix. The team did their best to help, reaching out to their networks and making introductions. But there was no systematic way to know whether the agent on the other end was truly great or just available.

There was no service that did this the right way. The existing platforms either ran consumers through an algorithm that matched on data points alone, or threw names at a wall and called it a referral. Nobody was doing the actual work — interviewing agents, evaluating their track records, building real relationships market by market, and only then putting their name on an introduction.

So James built it. GreatAgents.Net exists because more than twenty years in this industry — as an agent, a team leader, an office manager, a broker-owner, and a title company president — taught him exactly what it takes to serve a client the way they deserve to be served.