<p>how is the job? what schooling is required?</p>
<p>would you suggest becoming a lawyer over going into real estate or vice versa? thanks</p>
<p>what about a real estate attorney actually? i just looked up the salary for a real estate broker/agent and it was like low 30k =/.. what do real estate attorneys do? what schooling is required? hows the outlook? etc..</p>
<p>Last year 75% of residential real estate agents did not sell a single home, so they made zero.</p>
<p>There is such a wide range of what agents make it's impossible to give a meaningful answer. If you are a top agent in residential or commercial real estate in NYC or LA, you would make many, many millions each year in a good economy. An average agent in an average town might make $30K in a good year.</p>
<p>For RE attorneys, again, the range is huge. If you an attorney dealing with major organizations like Trump, again, you're a multi millionaire. If you rubber stamp small residential transactions the money is not great.</p>
<p>What it would take to be highly successful as an attorney would be a good law degree and getting hired by a good firm to get high level experience.</p>
<p>For top commercial agents many have MBAs and go to work for developers.</p>
<p>The outlook? Read the papers. There will be major trouble for years to come. Residential died and commercial has just started to. Yet, real estate will come out of this down cycle like everything else.</p>
<p>Becoming a real estate agent requires no formal education and the pay can range anywhere from dirty poor to six figures.</p>
<p>There are a lot of other jobs in commercial real estate though. Many are likely to require an MBA at some time. With an MBA starting salaries are around 95k, but like other MBA jobs your upside is much much higher than that.</p>
<p>I would actively dissuade anyone I cared about from going into residential real estate right now. I'm about two weeks short of having 18 years in the business and it's as grim as I've ever seen it.</p>
<p>Otoh, if you start now and manage to survive, you'll pick up skills that will serve you well for the rest of your life. But the odds are against, unless you have a financially adequate sphere of influence (friends, associates, co-workers, relatives) that you can prospect for business within. There are just too many questions, too many situations that come up where you have to come up with a response and you won't have the experience to draw upon...even if you give a "B" response, it will be weighed against "A" responses from more experienced agents.</p>
<p>The path of real estate attorney might be lucrative in the long run but I think I'd take my purgatory by excruciating boredom straight.</p>
<p>In terms of production, I'm in the top 10-25 percent of the company I'm with, not a "Top Producer" but very solid, very experienced. I'm more of a "hands on" "boutique" style of agent, versus the "machine" agents with a flock of assistants.</p>