Best Alternatives to Melanie & John Willy

Ben Ganje

9.5/10

$800K+ · 181 reviews

Ben Ganje leads one of Minnesota's top-producing teams — the Ben Ganje Group at Lakes Sotheby's International Realty in Edina — with more than $1.5B in career sales, 1,500-plus homes closed, and 181 reviews at a perfect 5.0. Across roughly 24 years he's ranked among the top three agents in the state by volume. He's the choice for luxury and new-construction buyers and sellers who want a proven, high-powered team.

Graham Smith

9.1/10

$150K–$2.8M · 100 reviews

Graham Smith has run The Graham Smith Team at Keller Williams Integrity Lakes since 2002, building $125M+ in career volume and 100 Zillow reviews at 5.0 (172 across platforms). He's the deeply-reviewed choice for Minneapolis city neighborhoods — from first-time buyers to investment — backed by a full team and two decades in the market.

Jim Dropps

9.1/10

$240K–$1.2M · 33 reviews

Jim Dropps has lived in the Sheridan neighborhood of Northeast Minneapolis since the mid-2000s and founded Northeast Real Estate Group, an independent two-agent brokerage, in 2012. His recorded sales cluster almost entirely in Northeast and North Minneapolis neighborhoods — Audubon Park, Waite Park, Windom Park, Holland, Sheridan, and Near North — and his firm markets itself specifically around neighborhood duplexes and starter homes. Public reviews are limited in number but uniformly five-star, and a construction-and-building background in the family gives him a practical angle on the area's older housing stock.

Brian Scates

9.0/10

$300K–$1.2M · 155 reviews

Brian Scates runs his own brokerage, Scates Real Estate, out of the Plymouth / northwest-metro area — a GRI-designated broker with 20-plus years, 800-plus career transactions, and 155 Redfin reviews at 4.9. He's the high-volume, independent-brokerage choice across the west and northwest metro, comfortable from first-time buyers to the upper-mid market.

Beth Nordaune

9.0/10

$200K–$900K · 1134 reviews

Beth Nordaune has led Rochester's Enclave Team, formerly the Nordaune Team, for roughly two decades, and recently moved the operation's brokerage affiliation from RE/MAX Results to Real Brokerage. Aggregator data citing Zillow attributes about 1,134 reviews at a 5.0 average to her and the team combined, the largest reviewed footprint found for any Rochester-based real estate operation in this research. The team now runs close to two dozen people out of offices in Rochester and Eagan, so a client who calls Beth Nordaune may end up working mainly with a teammate rather than her personally. That tradeoff between scale and personal attention is the central thing to weigh here.

Kim Ziton

9.0/10

$600K–$3.9M

Kim Ziton has worked the Woodbury and east-metro market since the mid-1990s and has been credited by Keller Williams as its top-producing agent in Woodbury every year from 2012 through 2025. She operates as a solo licensed agent supported by an assistant and a staging consultant rather than a multi-agent team, and her publicly listed transactions skew toward move-up and luxury price points above $600,000. Independently verifiable third-party review counts were not accessible at research time, so her public reputation rests more on brokerage production rankings and self-published testimonials than on an outside audit.