Purplebricks Group plc (AIM:PURP) recently commissioned a national study to uncover which professions are deemed the most and least trustworthy today. Home builders were not considered, but real estate agents didn’t fare too well. Politicos and journos got dumped on.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, teachers and doctors lead the pack with 91 and 90% of Americans believing the respective professions to be the most trustworthy. Conversely, professions ranked at the bottom of Americans’ coffers of trust are bankers (14%), journalists (11%), real estate agents (11%), car salespeople (six%) and politicians (4%). Interestingly, two-thirds (67%) of Americans feel that bankers – in spite of recession activity within the past decade – are more trustworthy than journalists (54%) or lawyers (53%).

“Transparency is an increasingly valued attribute in today’s culture in light of public mistrust across a number of professions,” said Jonathan Adler, Chief Marketing Officer, Purplebricks. “The fact that the public places more trust in financial institutions than their local real estate experts is quite telling, and it’s a paradigm that we at Purplebricks strive to change. By providing a clearer way of doing business, even going so far as allowing buyers and sellers to communicate directly to aid in transparency with local real estate experts available every step of the way, we’re aiming to usher in a new era of openness and honesty in the industry.”

The study also uncovered how men and women as well as various age groups and those living in different geographic regions trust differently. Additional findings include:

• National (In)security. Almost half (43%) of Americans feel politicians are not trustworthy at all, while they are nearly twice as likely to distrust a politician (79%) than a journalist (46%).

• With Age, Comes Distrust. Millennials are more trusting than older generations across a variety of professions. When compared to Boomers, Millennials are more trusting of journalists (59% vs. 50%), insurance salespeople (58% vs. 44%) and politicians (29% vs. 13%).

• Gender Reveal. There’s a gender gap when it comes to trusting a variety of professions, as more men than women describe doctors (40% vs. 33%), bankers (17% vs. 12%) and journalists (13% vs. 8%) as completely trustworthy.

• Sales Not Created Equal. Two-thirds (68%) of Americans say they cannot trust car salespeople, while around half (49%) say the same about those who sell insurance.

• Location, location, location. Americans from the West are more than twice as likely as those from the Midwest to find real estate agents not trustworthy at all. Moreover, Americans from the South are 83% more likely than those from the West to say journalists simply cannot be trusted at all.